Founders Summit: Building Through the Breakdown
Event Overview
Following the success of our CEO Summits, The Delphi Network proudly introduces the Founders’ Summit—a closed, founder-only series offering unfiltered insight into the realities of building a business in Japan. The first session, led by Markus Winter, explored how founders manage and invest retained earnings. This next gathering shifts the focus to resilience: the art of surviving what can’t be planned for.
Our featured Founder, who remains anonymous to encourage candour, will share a brutally honest account of his entrepreneurial journey - but one in which he learned the hard way how to emerge stronger from the crucible.
His story covers the rise, fall, and recovery of a Japan-based business that faced it all—COVID disruption, partner fallout, shareholder pressure, collapsing sales, and the crushing weight of inflation and currency swings. Through perseverance and a refusal to give up, he rebuilt from the brink, turning hardship into experience worth sharing.
Here are the key details:
His company launched successfully in 2021, targeting a clear market gap. It navigated COVID by focusing on digital growth, building a community, and establishing a solid B2B division.
But the "easy" part is over. Now he’s facing the “founder-killer” challenges:
Solo Leadership: His co-founder departed. He's now solely responsible for strategy, operations, and team management—a daunting shift from partner to solo director.
Economic Headwinds: The business is being hammered by over a year of yen volatility and supply chain disruptions. This has crushed margins, forced price increases, and halted online sales growth.
Market & Team Fatigue: He’s secured new loans to inject new talent and products. But performance and team management remain persistent issues, exacerbated by an "overall fatigue" in the wine industry.
He's not asking "What do I do with my profits?" (like our last Founders’ Summit). He's asking:
How do you find the resilience to keep going when the grind is this tough?
What specific strategies (pricing, product, B2B focus) actually work when external market forces are trying to kill your business?
How do you lead a team, manage performance, and maintain your own morale when growth flatlines and your partner is gone?
How do you adopt your Western reflexes to the special circumstances of the Japanese market, such as the extreme difficulty of getting new clients, and the importance of hanging on to old ones?
This isn't a "unicorn" story; it's a real-world dispatch from the entrepreneurial trenches. He wants to talk to other people who have navigated the "middle years"—the part after the launch but before the exit—and found a way to thrive.
As always this will be a tight and confidential (The Chatham House rule applies!) group of successful founders, happy to share their own war stories in an atmosphere of camaraderie and appreciation of the desperate risks—as well as opportunities—of "going it alone"! Non-founders with an interest in the entrepreneurial journey, including VC and coaches are also welcome!