"Glad I Trusted You" as a Source of Pride — Taking on "Manufacturing Sales" with Zero Knowledge at Ace Co., Ltd.

Ace Co., Ltd.'s challenge: manufacturing sales from zero experience.

Ace, a manufacturing company in Ota Ward, is known for its distinctive sales approach called "manufacturing sales" — connecting clients and partner companies and collaborating to produce a single product. It's a high-level role that can require the dexterity of a trading company. We spoke with Shinta Negishi, who is taking on this sales role with no prior experience, about why he joined Ace and what drives him.

Drawn In by a Homey Atmosphere — A Career Change from a Different Industry

Originally I was about as far from manufacturing and sales as you could get — I spent about five years in the care industry from my very first job. While working as a care worker, I realized how much I enjoyed talking with people, and started thinking I'd like to try my hand at sales. From there I spent about a year in insurance sales before joining Ace. I've now been at Ace for about three and a half years, starting around age twenty-six.

I found out about Ace through an introduction from my family's manufacturing business back home. I haven't decided yet whether I'll eventually take it over, but I made the decision to switch jobs at this point with an eye on the future. Growing up watching my father run the business, I always had the feeling that "someday I'd like to do sales in the manufacturing industry."

That said, any company doing manufacturing and machining sales wouldn't have done. The deciding factor was the warm, father-figure-like atmosphere I sensed from President Nishimura during the interview — similar to what I feel from my father at home. The scale of the company is also similar to my family's business, which I felt would make it easier to understand how things flow and to ask questions without hesitation.

Now, as a sales team member at Ace, I visit customers who manufacture machinery for trains, cars, robots, and more to do consultative selling. The basic flow is receiving drawings and being asked "can you make this?" — but the customer isn't always right. Sometimes I visit a customer's factory and actively suggest things like "this approach might work better" or "this would help keep costs down."

During my insurance sales days, almost everything was new customers and one-time interactions, so this feels refreshingly different. At Ace, eighty percent of customers are existing relationships, so the sales style involves regular communication with familiar faces and walking alongside them over time.

Trial and Error Every Day — The Most Important Things Are "Thank You" and "I'm Sorry"

When I first started sales at Ace, there was so much I didn't understand. I hadn't graduated from a technical school or anything like that — when I thought of "manufacturing," my mental image was something like DIY.

Starting from zero like that, I naturally began with lower-difficulty drawings and progressed with the support and accompaniment of senior salespeople. But at first I didn't even know where to pay attention or how. It was a constant cycle of making mistakes, getting guidance, learning which points I needed to be careful about, and absorbing from there.

Ace is an environment that accepts that kind of trial and error. Even my direct supervisor tells me "try it first, and if it goes wrong I'll figure something out" — a very reassuring presence.

Also, being a small company means more frequent and more time-intensive communication. What I keep in mind to make that communication feel right is "thank you" and "I'm sorry." No matter how small the thing, I always make a point of expressing gratitude — and when mistakes happen, I bow my head properly. Ace's work involves many companies and people — the sales team, the floor, partner companies, and more. When mistakes happen, the attitude of following up for each other, helping each other, and staying coordinated is what matters most.

Chasing the Drive That Comes from "Glad I Relied on You"

My knowledge still lags behind the veterans, but when I can meet a customer's needs to the best of my current ability, I feel genuinely motivated.

For example, there was a rush job once where I ran all over Ota Ward consulting everyone I could think of, and somehow made the deadline — the sense of accomplishment was huge. I was so thrilled I carried the goods over with a bit of a smug look on my face (laughs). The customer told me, "So glad it made it! This is exactly what I needed!" — that was a real high.

Right now, if I'm being honest, I don't have a detailed vision of when exactly I'll take over my family's company, or what position I'll hold at Ace in a few years. But wherever I'm working, I strongly want to become someone where people say "if it's Negishi, it'll definitely work out." To get there, I want to keep accumulating experience, build the knowledge and capability to stand on my own, and deepen my connections with customers and partner companies. Someday, when someone says "I want to ask you specifically because it's you, Negishi" — that would be the ultimate satisfaction in sales.

No Prior Knowledge? Don't Be Afraid

Of course it's better to have knowledge of technical drawings and machining from the start if you can — but even someone like me with zero knowledge can find a way to make it work. More important than knowledge, I think, is being able to give a proper greeting, and having the honesty to ask for help quickly. The basics of being a working adult, plus the spirit and stamina to keep going without giving up — that's enough.

Also, Ace's work centers on "dialogue with people." I think someone who enjoys conversation will fit in better here than someone who prefers to work quietly on their own. The communication style here has a warm, old-fashioned small-factory feeling to it, so you'll have attentive seniors who genuinely engage with you.

I arrived here completely unable to do the job, and with everyone's help I've made it three and a half years. If there are job seekers out there who are hesitating — don't be scared off by the thought that it's a highly specialized field. Just apply and see. If you're someone who can learn honestly and straightforwardly, you'll be fine.

Now hiring. If you're interested in Ace, please reach out here!

This interview article was produced by online assistant service "TIMEWELL."

Writer in charge: Azumi Yasumitsu

Who Is Cathie Wood — the World's Most Watched Investor? Healthcare and Genomics Edition!

Hello. This is Ryu from ONE X. Today I'd like to continue our series peeking into the mind of Cathie Wood, CEO and CIO of ARK Investment Management — the world's most-watched active fund. ARK became famous overnight last year for delivering over 100% performance. She's also recently been called the female Warren Buffett. Let's get into it!

Who Is Cathie Wood?

Cathie Wood — full name Catherine Wood — runs ARK's suite of ETFs as CEO and CIO. Last year she was named Bloomberg's best stock picker of 2020 by editor-in-chief Matthew A. Winkler. Before ARK, she served as Chief Investment Officer of Global Theme Strategies at AllianceBernstein (an asset management firm serving institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals), managing approximately $5 billion for twelve years. Looking back further, she earned a BS in Finance and Economics from the University of Southern California in 1981. Cathie's mentoring figure was economist Arthur Laffer — an economic advisor to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. In 2019, President Trump awarded Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the field of economics. It seems her mentor is someone who helped shape the American economy.

What Makes ARK Special?

There are three key characteristics of ARK, broadly speaking:

Focused exclusively on disruptive innovation
Publishes performance and trading results daily
Recruits specialists in each field for investment decisions

Point 1 speaks for itself — ARK continues to invest in areas with the potential to drive disruptive innovation that transforms industries. For those who haven't heard the term before, a quick explanation: disruptive innovation refers to an innovation model that destroys the rules of existing businesses and dramatically alters industry structures. The concept was proposed by the late Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma." The most famous example of disruptive innovation in the world is probably the iPhone. The iPhone destroyed countless products — flip phones, BlackBerrys, PCs, calculators, alarm clocks, iPods — and simultaneously opened up an entire application market on iOS.

Cathie's theme is always investing in companies capable of realizing disruptive innovation at the iPhone-level in each domain. ARK's three conditions for disruptive innovation are:

A. Dramatically improving productivity B. Driving steep cost reductions C. Serving as a platform that creates further innovation

Source: Nikko Asset Management

ARK's funds publish their performance and trading records every day — something that conventional active funds had never done before. Recently, people have started writing articles analyzing ARK's trading history and even developing apps that let you easily check their track record. A phenomenon has even emerged where stocks newly added to ARK's portfolio tend to rise in price the following day. It's fascinating. Conventional active funds had made it standard practice to keep trading records private to avoid criticism and prevent their methods from leaking — ARK broke that convention and surprised the world.

Point 3 may be ARK's most distinctive feature. They assemble teams of specialists with deep knowledge in each domain, paired with traders. By clearly separating these roles, a loop is formed where specialist insight is rapidly reflected in investment decisions. The reports from individual specialists are often rich with insight and well worth reading.

What World Does ARK's Genomic Revolution Bring?

So far I've covered the characteristics of ARK and Cathie. From here I want to move into a session where I extrapolate Cathie's thinking in the "healthcare and genomics" domain featured in the title. (Laugh.)

First — the most revolutionary progress in healthcare is said to be happening in the "genomics" field. The cost of genome sequencing in 2000 was reportedly $95 million. (The ARK-produced graph below uses a logarithmic scale, by the way.) Today it's said to cost under $900 — meaning precise genomic analysis has become achievable. Previously, the costs were too high for genomics-based treatments to be established. But in recent years, this dramatic cost reduction — said to be by a factor of 100,000 — has caused genomics-based treatments to advance rapidly.

In simple terms, three innovations are underway to overcome disease: (Ryu's independent research)

A. Genome analysis B. Genome editing C. Genome drug discovery

A. Genome Analysis

As described above: the ability to analyze your genome (DNA, etc.) in extraordinary detail is coming. What does that enable? Things like:

Understanding what diseases you're vulnerable to
Knowing which diseases you may develop in the future
Learning which medications are likely to be most effective for your body

In short, these kinds of answers become available. The term "customized treatment" has come in and out of fashion over the years — but the field is now reaching the stage where truly customized treatment can be realized.

B. Genome Editing

This refers to the ability to edit the genome — specifically, to manipulate people's DNA sequences. That's a little unsettling! (Laugh.) Previously, there was no established technology for cutting genes like scissors — but something called CRISPR-Cas9, essentially gene scissors, was developed and has rapidly become widespread.

Two women scientists won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of CRISPR-Cas9: Emmanuelle Charpentier (Director, Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Germany) and Jennifer Doudna (Professor, University of California, Berkeley). The technology, described in a paper the two co-published in 2012, spread to researchers around the world almost instantly, and since then genome editing has advanced rapidly. Nobel Prize recognition just eight years after publication — a remarkable achievement.

https://answers.ten-navi.com/pharmanews/19918/

Genome editing is expected to make it possible to overcome a class of illnesses called monogenic diseases. "Monogenic diseases" are diseases caused by a mutation in a single gene. There are many types, and many rare and refractory diseases are included among them. For these, because costs made drug development impractical, treatment had historically been unavailable — but hopes are rising that genomic approaches may change this. It's groundbreaking.

C. Genome Drug Discovery

Innovation is also happening dramatically in genomic drug discovery. Historically, the pharmaceutical and drug discovery space was characterized by the rule that:

"Companies that can pour money into R&D win."

Including clinical trials, drug development reportedly takes an average of twenty years from start to commercialization — something said to be impossible without substantial cash reserves. That's why pharmaceutical M&A has been rampant, and Japanese companies in particular have repeatedly merged and consolidated, with many becoming subsidiaries of global corporations.

But this conventional wisdom appears to be in the process of being overturned by genomic drug discovery. Using genome editing technology to make disease cause identification more efficient — and improving the precision of drug selection through genomics — is enabling the development of drug discovery technologies that impact:

Development timelines
Cost

Cathie often notes that the genomics field is dominated by mid-size companies, with few major corporations having entered the space. So this is a domain where innovation could enable a company to establish a dominant position rapidly. The CRISPR-Cas9 in healthcare may be the equivalent of the iPhone or the automobile. This feels like a field that's going to keep growing — and I look forward to exploring it further. Thank you!

A roundup article on business and investment is available below — please take a look.

https://onexblog.onexxxx.com/entry/2021/01/20/202812

This AI column is produced by online assistant service "TIMEWELL."

Who Are the NEO Institutional Investors WallStreetBets?

Hello. This is Ryu from ONE X. Today I want to share my personal take on the phenomenon making massive waves — "WallStreetBets" (r/wallstreetbets), the radical faction of Robinhooders, wreaking havoc on the markets. Some of you may be wondering what this is all about, so let me explain as I go.

What Is Robinhood?

First, a quick note on Robinhood. Robinhood is currently an enormously popular "zero-commission" investing app in the United States. Details are in a previous article — please check it out.

https://onexblog.onexxxx.com/entry/2021/01/22/042323

People who use Robinhood are called Robinhooders. They're generally described as millennial young people who haven't yet built up assets. They hadn't had much influence in the past — but as user numbers surpassed ten million, they began to carry real weight. They exchange information through social-style communication apps like Reddit and Discord.

Who Are WallStreetBets?!

Yesterday, a group called "r/wallstreetbets" on the communication app Reddit drove the stock of GameStop (ticker symbol GME) to its limit-up price. What did they do? Here's the playbook:

Target a company with a low market cap and low trading volume (a penny stock)
Check the short-selling ratio by hedge funds and others
Select companies with a high short ratio
Launch a coordinated mass buying assault to trigger a short squeeze

*A short squeeze is when a large amount of buying is introduced to a market that is heavy with short (sell) positions, pushing prices higher. It's a short-term trading style that involves deliberately buying aggressively to force short sellers to cut losses, aiming to profit from the squeeze.

"You should never go against institutional investors — their capital is in a completely different league."

That had been the conventional wisdom. The idea that Robinhooders with their small capital could influence the market was what most people believed. Many still believe it. But in the case of $GME, they actually pulled off the short squeeze — driving the stock to a 70% limit-up at one point. Institutional investors with short positions must have lost enormous sums. It's almost the level of a pump-and-dump operation.

If you download the Reddit app and look at this community's conversation, you'll understand — it's honestly wild. (Laugh.) I'd be too scared to invest alongside them, worried I'd end up taking a massive loss. But watching the movement of these communities as one piece of material for understanding market trends is valuable. Even the famous influencer Jim Cramer has said he's never seen anything like the GME situation, which tells you how extraordinary this phenomenon is.

https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1352683263001812992

Has Social Changed the World?

Similar phenomena have happened before — in politics. Barack Obama's election as president is said to have had an SNS strategy behind it. Previously in American politics, the power lay with party-supporting organizations, and the key elements were financial strength and established supporter networks through political groups. But as social media spread, information exchange in online communities flourished, and those communities themselves began to carry extraordinary influence. Recently I think similar phenomena are appearing in product marketing as well.

As illustrated in the diagram above, marketing methods through online salons, YouTube, and other channels have spread in the marketing field, and the approach of "community marketing" — designing products together with users — has taken real shape. Innovation is also occurring in the stock investing domain as we speak. Since there was no name for it, let's call it the Robinhooder Short Squeeze Phenomenon.

Innovation in Local Governance Through Social Networks

Going forward, I expect innovation in local governance as well. As online-based communication becomes common:

Being Japanese while also being Korean and Chinese
Being a Tokyo resident while also being a resident of Shiojiri and Okayama

— this kind of gradual involvement across multiple countries and regions will emerge. I also expect the phenomenon of virtual nations (something like "virtual countries") in virtual space to arrive before long. How to build up this virtual population will become an important competitive question going forward. Facebook Groups already hold 5.6 billion people, which is overwhelming — but I believe more decentralized communities will emerge. For now, through my activities at ONE X, I want to redefine the population structure of regions and contribute to expanding related populations. Details are in the article below.

https://onexblog.onexxxx.com/entry/2021/01/10/012135

In Closing

The world always follows the pattern of "the mighty must fall."

If the essence of the internet = the flattening of all domains — then going forward, the domains of established privilege — politics, investment, local governance — will be increasingly flattened by the rise of the internet and social networking. That's because young people carry frustrations (pain) about politics, investment, and governance. There are many ways to read the era. But I believe opportunities for challenge should be equal for everyone. Providing everyone with the opportunity to make something happen — that's where ONE X began, and I want to see more services in the world that can make that real. Thank you!

Business and investment roundup articles are below — please take a look.

This AI column is produced by online assistant service "TIMEWELL."

Creating More Happy People from "A Place Where You Can Be Yourself" — Vanwaves, Inc.

Providing spaces and time where you can truly be yourself — From camping car rental to sauna business

In March 2020 I launched the company, starting first with a camping car lease and rental business based on the concept of a "moving hotel." At that time I also began offering tent sauna rentals as an option — and that connected to the sauna business I'm now focused on. Through both the camping car and sauna businesses, I want to provide the value of spending space and time where you can be truly yourself — where you can look inward and shine.

In the sauna business, we're operating around the theme of "a life with sauna," for both individual and corporate customers.

For individual customers, we sell a tent sauna called "IESAUNA." IESAUNA is a smokeless tent sauna designed with a small footprint so that people living in urban apartments can use it on their balcony.

For corporate customers, we collaborate with housing manufacturers and custom builders who use sauna as one of the exterior options they propose — for balconies and terraces — when making new construction proposals. We also propose sauna in softer terms, including how to use it, as a new added value for accommodation facilities and glamping hotels.

In December this year we plan to release an electric sauna heater called "IESAUNA IRORI," with the vision of making a world where every home has its own sauna.

Building "good saunas" together with customers

Having your own home sauna frees busy business professionals from the constraints of time and creates what I'd call a "safety net" — a place you can always come back to.

For example: jumping in the sauna before heading to work in the morning, or having a quick sauna before bed. IESAUNA uses bioethanol — a liquid fuel — and heats the sauna room quickly, so you can just jump in whenever the mood strikes.

I've also received comments like "when I got home and got into the IESAUNA, I could finally breathe at the end of the day" — I think it's becoming a kind of emotional anchor for people.

IESAUNA is also notable for letting customers customize their own sauna space. By deliberately leaving room for personalization in the product, some people DIY their own aromas, lighting, and more. The way a community naturally formed around people sharing their sauna lifestyles on social media feels very IESAUNA. We've also organized get-togethers and events to support the sauna-loving community.

There have also been times when we've turned customer feedback directly into products. We worked with a builder to create a dedicated chair for IESAUNA so their sauna life could be even more fulfilling. There's a real sense that we're building a great sauna together with our customers.

Making each person — and Japan as a whole — more energized through sauna

"IESAUNA IRORI," going on sale this December, is the product packed with our wish to continue contributing to greater happiness and wellbeing across Japan through sauna.

Currently, housing manufacturers and custom builders across the country are building saunas using local wood — but the heater at the heart of it inevitably has to be imported from overseas. Now that sauna has become a tourism resource, I want to build a "Made in Japan" sauna including the heater, and do something that has real social value together with our partners.

IESAUNA IRORI is manufactured in collaboration with a small factory in Ota Ward, and by cutting logistics costs, we've achieved high-quality performance. We've also heard from facilities that already have saunas that they struggle when their imported heaters break down. We want to address that with a robust maintenance system and especially attentive after-sales support.

We've met so many people who say sauna saved them — and that's why we believe sauna can create happiness for others. So we want to become a leading company in the sauna space, offering a total solution covering everything from the equipment to the softer side of how to use it. And through the fully domestic "IESAUNA IRORI" electric heater and the Japanese sauna culture of "ototou" — the feeling of being perfectly attuned — we want to bring that to the world and make Japan's economy and industry more vibrant.

This interview article is produced by online assistant service "TIMEWELL."

Writer in charge: Miho Kawabe

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"Glad I Trusted You" as a Source of Pride — Taking on 'Manufacturing Sales' with Zero Knowledge at Ace Co., Ltd.

"Glad I Trusted You" as a Source of Pride — Taking on "Manufacturing Sales" with Zero Knowledge at Ace Co., Ltd.