Ties of Possibility: Selecting Future Founders in Tokyo’s Start-up Ecosystem

Abstract

This article focuses on seed-stage start-up fundraising in the ‘village’ (mura), an assemblage of actors in Tokyo’s start-up scene characterised by first-time founders in their 20s or early 30s and their supporters. I analyse how efforts to secure funding unfold between founders and venture capitalists (VCs). Anthropological explorations of start-ups are rare, and my research is based on one of the first long-term fieldwork-based studies in a Japanese context. The material used in this article stems from 12 months of multi-sited fieldwork and 39 further semi-structured para-ethnographic interviews. Both founders and VCs stress the importance of embodied and affective pitch performances. Interlocutors invoke and describe such practices in-depth and separate them from ‘rational’ analysis. The overall focus on convincing performance seems to enforce particular founder role ideals that stress confident top–down communication styles rather than the negotiation of shortcomings or critical open discourse. This preference for confident top–down communication appears partly informed by the uncertainty within which start-ups and VCs act. The findings of this article suggest that seed-stage fundraising conventions in Tokyo reflect a preference for particular affective performance ideals, which extend beyond the economic analysis of the business case itself.