The largest customer

The largest customer any startup can become is a nation—and its military.

A few years ago, I never doubted the fantasy that the SaaS I was building would change the world for the better. Good technology. Good AI, shipped. Venture capital, deployed by engineers like us, producing a net positive for humanity. That was the story I told myself.

Then we entered talks with a certain country’s military apparatus, and the fantasy curdled. Our product could be repurposed for arms trade—indirectly, but not implausibly. People could die because of what I had built. The sales team was buzzing about “future upside.” I felt none of it.

Other factors piled on—insomnia, burnout, organizational friction—and I left the startup I had helped build from zero. I still think it was the right call. The military deal apparently fell through. But the company I left behind will live under a permanent cloud of unease. Priority goes to market cap and shareholder value. Human ethics and conviction do not appear on that spreadsheet.

I am Japanese, so I have a lived sense of how labor ethics here have shifted. Once upon a time, a company was a family. You were encouraged to give it forty years of your life. When performance dipped, everyone took a small pay cut together. A narrow gap between CEO and employee compensation was praised in the media as good management. The apex was okyakusama wa kamisama—“the customer is god.” First hearing that, you might think: capitalism worship. It isn’t. The phrase comes from a Japanese entertainer asked about the audience: you must perform with a heart as clear as before a shrine.

Eighty-odd years of post-1945 money worship and technology racing to colonize the brain have eroded that older ethic. Today, Japanese work culture is shaped by numbers and cash. What I want to build now—having quit the startup—is something like a religion of a different kind: media, person-to-person networks, culture.

I suspect ideas like these will not spread easily among people whose inner lives have already been colonized by doomscrolling and TikTok dopamine. Do you know Geert Lovink and the Institute of Network Cultures? Since leaving my startup I read his blog often. The English is sometimes impenetrable—interpretation left as an exercise for the reader—but I would like to quote one interview:

After 22 years, it’s leaving the Amsterdam Polytech to become an NGO. Looking back, what lessons have you learned about sustaining independent intellectual and cultural networks in a platform-dominated era?

GL: That’s a moving question. One cannot presume to be rewarded for criticism. In NL, only positive contributions are valued. On top of that, I am not a manager and have not been able to grow the centre with grants. From early on, I should have employed a grant writer.

Beyond the Platform – Interview with Geert Lovink

I agree completely. In Japan too, money does not follow the critical. State and VC alike respond with a shrug: and so what?

And yet I also think: counter-culture can be built inside capitalism’s rules. I have twice built companies and products from zero to roughly $1.5M ARR. The common thread, in Drucker’s terms, was create customer. If you can create a customer, you can build a critical counter-culture too.

When I imagine who that customer is—within present-day capitalism—they are relatively comfortable: engineers, VC types. They suspect what they do may be meaningless. They fill spare hours with gym sessions and wellness rituals. They buy Patagonia vests with leftover guilt-money and call it partial absolution.

The old rich wore hats and bespoke suits—Churchill at the dispatch box. The new rich carry MacBooks, stay lean, wear Patagonia. (I may have been unkind here. No malice intended. I own the laptop, the physique, and several vests. I am one of you. Please do not hate me.)

Recruit them as supporters. Build products they can actually buy. Grow the business. Spread the counter-culture the present moment needs. I am genuinely curious how far business logic can carry us.