Works Applications Alumni Sasaki on Vision-Strategy-Task Alignment at Goals

Goals CEO Sasaki Suguru explains how Works Applications’ 1990s SaaS-before-SaaS model and ruthless vision alignment shaped how he built his food-industry supply chain startup.

• Works Applications, founded mid-1990s, operated a no-customize, free-upgrade ERP on-prem — functionally SaaS a decade before the term existed.
• At IPO, VCs held over 50% of Works — likely the first Japanese startup to reach that VC concentration, per Globis.
• Works ran internship cohorts of hundreds of students with 20 engineers each spending a full month evaluating candidates — recruitment was an explicit job duty for all staff.
• Works CEO personally spoke for 1+ hour at every hiring event even after headcount exceeded 1,000, and held all-hands monthly for 1,000–2,000 employees to repeat the company vision.
• Sasaki’s own failure managing 200+ people at Works taught him that vision–strategy–task consistency breaks down at scale; Goals now runs a three-step quarterly planning cycle: CEO sets roadmap, managers break it into feasible task plans, CEO reconciles and adjusts top-line targets.
• Goals targets Japan’s food-service industry because restaurant chains are disproportionately founder-led, enabling top-down ERP decisions that stall in other verticals.
• Food and beverage represents roughly 10% of Japan’s GDP; Sasaki sees restaurant operators as the entry point to solving the broader food supply chain.
• Sasaki’s market research method: top-down (National Diet Library, industry IT-spend data, US and China benchmark services) followed by a hard switch to bottom-up (dozens of customer interviews plus 4–5 hours personally doing shelf inventory at store sites).

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube