I think start-ups should be recognised as SMEs now. This is more natural from the outside and from the inside.
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First, I'm talking about impressions from the outside. Start-ups have a very strange ring to them. 'They've raised hundreds of millions of yen in funding', 'they're a bunch of brilliant people'. I think that's why it's so hard to get a good impression of start-ups from the outside. It's like, "They're on a roll" or "They're the only ones who are getting excited".
But in reality, raising hundreds of millions or billions of yen, I think it is Small and Medium Enterprise level in terms of business scale.
This may seem unusual in the IT world, In the world of factories and real estate, for example, That amount of money is a single project unit. In the real estate fund where I worked, it was normal to raise billions of yen, The team that handled it was only a few people in size.
So when I hear how much start-ups have raised, I think, "Well, that's not that unusual." From the outside, you might feel like a 'special success', But in reality, it's not that big a deal.
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Second, the inside story. Inside a start-up, 'We've raised hundreds of millions of dollars', 'We need to grow', There's always pressure. How much T2, G3 and other overseas start-ups are growing, We get information all the time. When we look at that, we feel like we're a loser.
But there's no need to be so paranoid. Start-ups are SMEs too. If you're an SME, just go at the pace of an SME. You don't have to have a big self-awareness.
Of course, we are not talking about stopping start-ups. It's just that "you can't compare yourself with others". It's not like the world expects so much from you, I think you should take it a bit easy.
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Some talk about so-called "dreams", In reality, most start-ups end up as SMEs. That's fine. If they go under, they can move on to the next thing, Or build something else.
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Because they treat start-ups as a myth, Everyone suffers. It's better to just say, "It's a small business." It probably works out better in practical terms. That's the kind of temperature we should be working at.