Japan HR Industry's Failure to Create New Industries: For Startups Founder

Yuichiro Shimizu, founder of For Startups, argues Japan’s massive HR sector actively suppresses entrepreneurial potential and outlines his firm’s pivot into startup M&A and carve-outs.

• Japan has the world’s highest ratio of HR workers per labor population, yet living standards have fallen to Lithuania/Poland levels — HR growth did not create new industries.
• Shimizu’s core critique: career counselors optimize talented people into salaried roles rather than founding companies, citing a hypothetical Softbank-scale founder steered into a consulting job.
• For Startups was founded nine years ago after Shimizu helped launch job site Doda; he concluded the HR industry was fighting over a shrinking pie instead of expanding it.
• The marker of a fundable founder is a life-level reason to solve a specific problem; Shimizu cites a portfolio company that became Japan’s largest demolition-matching platform despite an opaque, pre-digital industry.
• For Startups is expanding from startup HR into carve-out advisory and M&A roll-ups, with investors already calling it a future “Innovation M&A brand.”
• The 100-billion-yen problem: hundreds of SaaS startups that spent four to five years targeting small IPOs are losing their market to AI, creating forced M&A conditions.
• Shimizu’s prescription: product roadmap, people roadmap, and finance roadmap must be designed as a single unit for swing-buy and carve-out deals to succeed.

2025-11-10 · Watch on YouTube