What Nobody Tells You About Running a Tech Company in Japan as a Foreigner
I didn’t plan to start a company in Japan. BenStay began as a side project — a guesthouse, then two, then a handful of properties managed with spreadsheets and late-night WhatsApp messages. At some point the side project became a registered LLC, and somewhere after that I realised I was actually running a technology company in a country where the business infrastructure operates mostly in a language I had to study at a kitchen table.
Five years in, here’s what I actually wish someone had told me.