ALL STAR SAAS FUND on SaaS Career Pitfalls and What Top Hires Share

Kusuda Tsukasa and Kamisaki Tatsuya of ALL STAR SAAS FUND lay out why the SaaS job market is surging, what kills most career transitions, and what separates candidates who thrive from those who stall.

• SaaS listings now represent roughly 20% of all sales and bizdev postings on Wantedly; ~20 SaaS companies IPO’d in just two years (2019–2020).
• System integrator (SI) backgrounds are the most in-demand pipeline: IT literacy plus disciplined client follow-through fits the B2B SaaS customer-success model precisely.
• 30 employees is the key inflection point where people-management skills become non-negotiable and team 1-on-1 quality becomes the highest-leverage HR tool.
• Salary typically drops ¥500K–¥1M when moving from a large company to a startup; candidates who accept that tradeoff consciously outperform those who don’t.
• Companies under 50 employees need generalists; over 50 they need specialists — misreading this is the most common mismatch Kusuda sees.
• The four-step job-change framework: (1) why now specifically, (2) unconstrained 3–5 year goal, (3) current skills audit, (4) gap identification — skipping step 1 leads to mismatches rooted in unresolved interpersonal issues.
• “Unlearn” is the single keyword for startup success: willingness to discard past mental models and absorb new ones at the pace the company changes, which can be every quarter at revenue jumps like ¥100M → ¥300M → ¥900M.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube