listen to Mogic's thoughts

mountain root

Since we registered as a joint stock company, we decided that we would work together with others somewhere. But if you start a company with a few people from the beginning, the fixed costs become heavy. These are things like labor and rent. In order to get the company off the ground while covering those expenses, we had to work hard to prepare a lot of funds at the beginning. I wanted to do it in a more relaxed and thoughtful way, so I started on my own.
Fortunately, I got some work from friends and acquaintances, and within a few months it looked like I could make it work, so I put together a team. Let's grow! I wanted to do more than that.

mountain root

After all, it's hard to create and expand a service all by ourselves (laughs). (laughs). We choose a field that looks like it could become a business, develop a plan, gather people, manage funds, and manage the schedule before finally releasing the service.
Then comes the real work. There are running costs for servers, and we have to do development, promotion, and marketing, but we can't devote that much time or resources.
So I was always searching for ways to get things off the ground with the least amount of man-hours. It was very different from creating a service in a company, so we had to carefully manage our resources and gradually got better at it.

mountain root

As mentioned in other interviews, I have no idea. This is really one of the worst case scenarios I could have envisioned. I haven't heard a peep, not a peep, not a peep. But, well, if you don't think about it or don't act, there is nothing you can do about it. So I asked myself why it wasn't working, made a hypothesis, and narrowed down my options by doing charity work.
If you search for a BtoB business trying to sell cloud services, you will find more than 50 things to do on the web. But if we were to take all of them seriously, people would get tired, so we wondered how we could narrow the 50 down to five, or if there were more than 50. In a cool way, think it all through before you do anything hands-on. The truth is, we don't have the money, the time, or the people (laughs).

mountain root

The number of inquiries, the number of contracts, and those kinds of numbers showed no sign of improving at all. Just before the release of the LearnO e-learning system, two of the current executive officers and the chief designer joined the company, and the combination of the two gradually came together. The combination with them gradually came together. So, I think that growth cannot be measured by numbers alone. I think the feeling that things are going well comes before the numbers.

mountain root

When we launch a service, for some reason, the number of people increases. When you launch a service, for some reason, you need more people, because you want to increase the number of things you have to do. It was around this time that interns and part-timers started joining the company. I was the most experienced and led the way until we released the service, but as the number of people increased, someone else had to organize the interns and part-timers.
That is how the first two executive officers got involved in management. At first, I wasn't able to do that at all. The interns' output was unstable, and I wanted to manage them, so I made a schedule by the minute. That was reckless. I couldn't entrust them with work, so I took on too much myself. It's a common experience for beginners in management.

mountain root

Looking back, our services are not going well, and we are not managing well when we gather people together. If you look at it objectively, we have not grown at all. But strangely enough, I felt like I was building up. An adventurer from the Age of Exploration once said, "The hardest part is when you are not sure if there is an island or not. Well, we used to talk until midnight. We would leave work at six in the evening and talk about how we wanted to live as human beings and what happiness was, like we were in the midst of our youth. We probably talked for three hours a day for about two years.

mountain root

My memory is a little fuzzy, but back then, when I asked members to do a job, it was not what I expected. I felt that my intentions were not being conveyed properly. I wondered why, but it seemed to me that there was a fundamental discrepancy in their approach to business and life. So I thought that unless I could fill that gap, things would not go smoothly.
For example, if I ask a client to "research this field because I think there is a market for it," I don't want to spend two hours and come up with an exhaustive Excel sheet. The point is that we just want to know if there is or is not a market, so there are ways to find out in five minutes instead of two hours.
In other words, I want you to think of your own way to reach the goal in the shortest distance and come up with it quickly. We did this at the beginning to try to eliminate that kind of discrepancy in the reception.

mountain root

We talked, and before we knew it, we were no longer misaligned. Once that happened, I was able to convey my intentions without having to give detailed instructions, and I became better at managing and educating them. I don't know why this happened, but I feel that the stance of "discussing" rather than "teaching" became the foundation of Mogic's education. I think everyone still remembers that kind of growth feeling in their bodies.

mountain root

In the past, I used to talk not only with employees but also with part-timers and interns, so I could feel the growth. But in the last few years, I have had very little contact with them, and I wondered if it would be all right, but even so, the team has grown tremendously, so I guess the level of nurturing people as an organization has risen, or so I think, in advance (laughs).
(Laughs.) You wouldn't normally think that talking with others would lead to personal growth. In Japan, it is likely that there are workplaces where private conversations are strictly prohibited. I think it is important to have the quality of talking to each other face to face.

mountain root

Shed light on what they are not aware of. If you feel it's ambiguous, fill them in with words. If you've heard it somewhere, ask them why they thought that. If it's a superficial analysis, ask about depth. There are many ways to do this, but it is a habit to be neat when you feel uncomfortable.

mountain root

It is from about 2015. It was about 2 to 3 years after we released the service, when the number of monthly users reached 50,000 to 100,000. We had just moved our office to our current location, added even more people, and finally reached a number that we could announce externally. Our team became more proficient and we released a new class support system, Pholly. Since then, we have been able to regularly check our growth in numbers as well.

mountain root

I'm awake 15 hours a day, and I'm at the office for 8 hours. So it is important to me how I can grow in the company. Of course, I want them to grow so that they can contribute to the company, but I also want them to grow in a way that satisfies them as individuals. The company has to be sustainable in order for everyone to be able to eat, so it would be best if the time spent there becomes a valuable part of your life.
I don't teach easy-to-understand skills. I don't teach how to make a proposal, how to use software, how to give a presentation, how to coach, or how to draw up a schedule. I'll just answer if you show me what you've done and researched on your own. I look more closely at their characteristics and quirks as a person.
I look for things like: expressive and talkative, few words but a tongue in cheek, carefully organized agenda, particular about layout and color schemes, good at following up with others, and a soothing nature with blurted out remarks. It is important to be able to do things without someone teaching you. If you find something that you can do without being aware of it, that is the best zone for your foothold. We decide on the work to be done there and organize the team members in such a way that they are involved.
This way, it is easy to proceed well because the work is in the area that is already done. Because it is easy to do, it is easy to get results. Once you get it done, you want to do it better the next time. I feel like I am gently supporting that upward momentum. It is a follow-up to personal growth, and I think it is easy to become a useful growth in life as well.
I think this is not only true for me, but also for the management who are called chiefs. Understand how the people you work with feel and act. Understand their feelings, watch their work process, and check for changes. I don't just look at the chiefs in the same department, but also the chiefs in other departments, and that's how I feel one person's growth in total.

mountain root

That is one answer. In other words, it suggests the possibility that the same department can appreciate the work, but from a different department, communication is weak. We all gather different opinions and try to understand them. Of course, it's not perfect because we are looking at people as people, but we try to understand them as best we can.

mountain root

Team growth is different from individual growth. To begin with, a team is several people supporting each other. In a project, the manager does not do the actual work, but controls the overall flow. Designers and engineers program, but don't see that much of the overall movement. In other words, the interlocking of the members is most important because they fill in the missing parts in various situations. Therefore, the growth of a team is seen in the level of interlocking.

mountain root

First, how well do we know each other's strengths and weaknesses, how we have lived our lives, and what our habits are? Next, how much experience do we have in the work we are doing? Finally, how well do they control the distance between people?
Linkage is related to output. So, you can tell just by looking at them. For example, what kind of minutes were written at the project kickoff? The clarity of the goal image, the way risks are assessed, the accuracy of the schedule, the speed of the work, and so on.
The other thing is the atmosphere of the team. Teams help each other. If everyone is giving and taking well, the atmosphere should be light and fun. If the atmosphere is fun but loose, then speed and accuracy will suffer, and I can understand that.
If they are weak, you can help them, and if you want them to grow, you can push them away and see what happens. It would be nice if we could intentionally keep a good distance between each other on the team.

mountain root

Of course, the numbers are easy to understand. Sales, expenses, profits, profit margins, capital turnover, number of clients, cost per product, and retention rates are easy to grasp. However, I don't trust them very much. As I said earlier, I feel that we need to have a real sense of what we are doing rather than numbers.
The company's figures are similar to a medical checkup. You are told that your height has increased, your weight has increased, or your blood pressure is high, but you don't immediately know why. Why did I grow taller, why did I gain weight, and why is my blood pressure higher? I don't know if there is a correlation or a causal relationship. It's another job to understand what the story is.
So I often check growth before it becomes a number. What I often do is compare last year to this year and make a "list of new things we can do. And I evaluate how well they worked together, because if the three teams can work together to create a new log analysis tool, it might become a new product the following year.

mountain root

External things are not a priority. As you can see if you remember recessions and pandemics, evaluations change quickly when the world changes, even if services don't change. So, if we use that as an indicator, we will not be able to get a good sense of what we are building up.
Rather, we confirm what we have newly become able to do. If we focus on the process, even if we fail, we can calculate that it is OK because we have moved forward. I think that building up is more likely to maintain everyone's mentality in the long run.

mountain root

In the third year after the company was founded, we created divisions, in the fifth year we started a management committee, and in the tenth year we created an executive officer system. It was not so much that we created them systematically, but rather that we moved on to the next one when we had built one up. First, we created divisions. But we didn't have a clear idea of what the new divisions should be, so we kept talking about it. Then, somewhere along the line, it would start to work autonomously, so we settled down.
The next department, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next. Once everyone was comfortable with the discussions at the management meeting, we would add more layers of management. When the task is completed, we move on to the next. That's all there is to it.

mountain root

There are personal circumstances, so there are some retirements. However, there have not been any factions or stagnation of the organization due to dissatisfaction. Most of the people who joined the company in the early days are still with us. There used to be some conflict between one person and another, but it was only partial. You can eat delicious sweets, have your own discretion, take time off whenever you want with flex or paid vacations, and are not pressed by work deadlines. I don't think the atmosphere would be that bad if it were.

mountain root

The more failures you have, the more you get scared and no one will raise their hand. If failures lead to evaluations or if they make you angry, you will hate it, but since there are no organizational or personal goals to begin with, there is nothing you can do if you fail. No one thinks about what to do if they fail, and there is an atmosphere in which you can just say what you think as you like.
This is similar to raising children. Children don't want to be told that they are failures because they didn't get 100 points on a test. It is hard for me to be told, "Your drawing is not good, so you should add a little more," or "Your writing is weird, so you should rewrite it. I don't want to do it again.
So, rather than subtracting, I just add to the pile. I only make comments that will lead to the next step, like "70 on the test, that's good," "50 on the test, wow," "30 on the test, there are days like that. Don't get pulled backwards by negativity. Keep looking forward, even if it's trial and error. I guess I do that in a lot of ways.

mountain root

Suppose you are in a workplace where failure is not tolerated. If you fail, people around you will say, "Oh no. If that is the case, no matter how many instructions the president or boss gives you, you will only do the bare minimum. If you fail, you will be stung by those around you. They will converge to "do only what they're told," "dodge what they're told," and "don't speak up because it would be a loss if they gave their opinion. If this is the case, it will be difficult to grow and take on new challenges.
On the other hand, how about a workplace where failure is not considered a failure? You can say what you think and try it out. Because your opinions will be heard, you will gradually start to enjoy yourself and your priorities will rise. It is necessary to reconcile the conviction of the person making the request with the conviction of the person receiving the request. I believe that communication through trial and error leads to growth as an organization.

mountain root

Even if only one person grows very fast, it does not necessarily mean that the company will grow. In team sports, one superstar alone cannot keep winning. Any one person will get tired, and being too dependent on others will one day become a bottleneck. It doesn't matter how many contracts one sales rep gets, if the capacity of the designers and engineers is exceeded, they won't be able to deliver, so it's meaningless.
Furthermore, even if the sales department grows and the skills of the director and designer departments all increase, if there is no good coordination between departments, it may wear out quickly, like a gear that is spinning at high speed but has no lubricating oil. Therefore, it is important to slowly raise the level of all individuals while also raising the level of linkage from side to side. It is good to have a high level of overall communication and interlocking and grow as a company.

mountain root

Recently, a technology called generative AI has been released. Is this relevant to the growth of the company? Let's say the question is "What does this have to do with the growth of the company? Generative AI can create beautiful sentences and images when you give it a prompt. But at this stage, it is only compressing partial work. It can create press releases, blogs, and emails, and it can correct your writing, but it does not have a decisive impact on the overall flow.
But it is like the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution, which eventually led to the construction of railroads, the development of the transportation industry, and the flourishing of the retail industry. Therefore, technology is first tested, thought about this and that, and then integrated into a department, and worked on slowly until it has an impact on the overall flow of society.

mountain root

If you can do that, anyone can make the leap, so in the end there is no difference. Even if you jump on a technology, you won't see immediate results, and many people drop out after a while. The most important thing is to work steadily and carefully without giving up. There are many things that I have researched but have not come to fruition.

mountain root

I don't think I myself contribute much directly (laughs). I don't act as a player, so I just look at the overall balance and correct or add to any oddities. I am like a general manager in baseball; I prepare what is needed in the medium to long term and maintain a field where everyone can fly and jump.
If you stand in the distant future and think about it, you can see it. I think, "Things are going well now, but if things continue as they are, the linkage between departments will break down," or "It's time to come up with a new service from a different angle that will come into effect three years from now. Is this a role that will affect us slowly and gradually?

mountain root

I want to continue to create an environment where everyone wants to do something. It has just been 15 years since the company was established, and although the number of people and operations has increased, everyone is still able to take on new challenges. When you set goals such as rapid expansion of market share or several-fold growth rate, it is very difficult for members to achieve them. I think it would be best if we can maintain that in our 20th and 30th years.
But yes, I have to say this because it is easy to be misunderstood.
Just because we create an environment where people can try new things doesn't mean we give them too much leeway. I have to emphasize this because it is the most easily misunderstood part of an interview. In the case of tomato seedlings, if you over-water and over-fertilize them, they will grow long and thin. Because there is always water and fertilizer at the base of the plant, there is no need for the roots to spread far out. So make the environment appropriately hard by not watering or fertilizing enough. Then it will root firmly and grow its leaves to their fullest to chase the sunlight.

mountain root

I want the company to be the same, and I want to continue to be exquisite for the spacious hardness of the company. I want to emphasize that because it seems that people don't get that hardness before they join the company. I've read interviews with people who work at Mogic, and they seem to convey an atmosphere of fun.
In fact, Mogic is quite hard. The quality required is extraordinary, you have to do a wide range of things, and you are constantly asked what your opinion is.
I want to tell them that they can grow not because there are no goals or quotas and they seem to be relaxed and happy, but because they look at people carefully and keep seeking a high level with a perfect balance.

mountain root

Thank you very much for all your hard work so far!