Thanks for visiting. I am Taiga Sawamura, a repeat founder and Co-Founder/CEO at Acheul, living in the Bay Area.
This blog serves as a mean to address questions around what my life has been before founding Acheul. Because sadly you and I may not have time to go for a day-long hike to talk about it. This is a page for those who want to know me at a deeper level through a casual memoir fashion. I hope it entertains those who took the time to read this. For people who need only a quick snapshot of me or my random posts, please visit my LinkedIn.
And feel free to reach out to taiga [dot] sawamura [at] gmail [dot] com if you want to know more.
The very first memory in my life is the sunset and the humid air that embraced me during the summer when I was four years old. I was in the backyard of the small apartment we a family of five was living in in Raleigh, North Carolina. I ran toward the orange sky shouting excitedly. Then a small beetle flew into my mouth until I spit it out a few seconds later. “Salty”. That was the first taste I remember.
I was born in Japan but soon after my family moved to Raleigh for my father’s new job at IBM. He worked hard until late at night but he managed to take long vacations for us to visit almost all states across the US. We have experienced heavy snows in the mountains yellow rocks and red sands in the deserts. If I have to point to one life event that represents the word “colorful”, then it would be the sequence of the whole journey. My foundation of visual imagination was established through this experience. We also moved to New York. I built some great connections there outside of my family in both cities too. I enjoyed a sense of safety to express myself freely.
However, when I moved back to Japan, I was not so welcomed at the beginning. I did not face discrimination as one of the few Asians at school in the US, but I was treated as a "foreigner" at the beginning in Japan even though I looked similar to everyone else. That was a little tough. I think I had a mild symptom of some kind of neurodiversity and it didn't help either. So I naturally shifted inwards.
By the time we went back, Japan had been producing the greatest hardware products in the world and experienced an economic miracle for decades. The 1990s was the time for its culture to bloom and project its uniqueness. Japanese artists, especially in the field of evolving mediums like video gaming and digital animation, challenged the status quo and proposed how technological advancement could evolve and change human psychology. I was deeply influenced by sci-fi video games like Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII as well as anime like Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
My aunt married a man from Norio Ohga's family who was Sony's Chairman and CEO from 1982 to 1999. Norio was convinced to join Sony by the legendary founder Akio Morita while he was still a college student. Receiving the torch from Akio, Norio took the initiative to streamline industrial design across all products Sony was making, supported the team that brought PlayStation to the world, and acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment. For our family, there was nothing dramatic or privileged because of this. But my father naturally started his career working at Sony. I learned from many firsthand stories that ordinary diligent people behind the scenes were making the consumer electronics that everyone knew back then.
The social norms in Japan and the US operate fundamentally differently. It’s not about which is good or wrong, but they are almost on the opposite side of the spectrum. Growing up, I was not able to find a single role model who went through the same experience as me and found the consistency of the two conflicting values. As a consequence, questions like "Do you have a mentor?" are very tough for me to answer because I never had one. Yes, I learned from others as much as from my own mistakes on particular subjects at given times, but I have never actively sought advice on broad subjects across many years to a specific figure. Such an act feels not right or even embarrassing to me to this day. From that perspective, my life might be shitty and it is contrary to how you would be advised to behave to grow as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. However, the lack of guidance and lack of the urge to seek one allowed me to do massive iteration and establish my unique way of viewing personal growth and the world.
Today, my neural system runs on an operating system rooted in endless artistic curiosity, an intense focus that often comes with sacrifice outside of the focus, and a desire for self-expression to the world through craftsmanship rather than a superficial image of myself. My genetic preconditions were reinforced by the encounters in North Carolina and constructs acquired from Japanese science fiction works.
At the same time, I believe I occasionally suffered from a mild paranoia of some sort due to the trauma caused by passive rejection from society. When I feel I am going to lose something, the fear kicks in, and there is a strong urge to control situations around me. As I matured, I learned how to harness the urge for control to navigate hardships in business settings, while letting things go elsewhere.
While my sister and brother went to prestigious private schools, I went to a public school for my junior high and went to a high school without putting my efforts into academic achievements. I was never a model student and I always caused trouble. I practiced Judo in junior high instead and won third place from tens of thousands of competitors practicing judo in the same weight class. Judo helped me compose myself in any situation and stay humble. Coaches and friends tirelessly recommended that I continue practicing Judo, but I didn’t.
While I was in high school, I indulged and happily wasted my time in “Good Will Hunting” style friendship. Some of my friends back then didn't go to college and proudly became a sushi chef, a carpenter, a law enforcement officer, and a firefighter. Looking back, this experience of being exposed to a broad range of people was extremely valuable. It gave me a perspective that everyone is smart in their way and there is beauty and honor in every single life, which is justified and pursued. As a result, I tend to feel difficulty in believing that one opinion is better than others. I see things through tradeoffs and numerous possibilities to be right (whether it's politics or something else).
Meanwhile, when I turned 17, I felt I needed a strong purpose in my life. I can't drift any longer. I must look forward. So I spent one year preparing for the entrance exam and somehow managed to get into Keio University, which is the college that produces the largest number of CEOs in public companies and four prime ministers. I studied political science and international relations there because I knew the world was changing when I first visited China that was mightily growing. I was also elected as the Japan delegation for The Harvard College Project for Asian and International Relations ("HPAIR") which is a not-for-profit organization associated with the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
When I was in college, I did an internship for three years at one of the fastest-growing online brokerage startups in Japan. I had the fortune to interact many times with the founder/CEO who was also the youngest to become a General Partner at Goldman Sachs globally. I was never the brightest or the best-performing intern there. But he asked me if I wanted to join the company for some reason. But, since I already had an offer from Nomura, the largest investment bank in Japan, I declined the offer.
I joined the investment banking group at Nomura the following year. During my first year there, the global financial crisis occurred. Lehman Brothers went under, and Nomura acquired Lehman’s European and Asian businesses. While I was deeply engaged with Japanese corporate culture, I saw how two different cultures integrated and how they remained disintegrated.
I then joined the investment banking group at Goldman Sachs. The quality of people there was phenomenal. Many of the people I know were truly the best executors. They went on to start their startups/investment funds or become the CFO of high-rising startups. On a personal level, I felt stuck. I wasn’t performing as much as the best players there. Even though I was spending brutal hours. This was the height of my alcohol consumption and I saw myself regularly lose consciousness and lured into the depths of midnight Tokyo. This experience led to one of the most important life lessons — you can never be better than people who are gifted for it regardless of the effort you put in, you must find a place where you are gifted to be truly exceptional.
After communication and the recommendation from my mentor, I left the firm. By that time, I had already spent one year preparing for my next journey by talking to friends and engineers to build a new type of financial platform.
Looking back, declining the offer to join the technology company before entering the job market may have not been the best decision. I carelessly chose the prestige of working at best-in-class investment banks instead of listening to who I truly am. And sometimes, experienced people around you know what is best for you than what you think. This reflection sharpened my mind on choosing what to do in life.
Throughout my career in finance, I was concerned about the status of the world economy. Whether it’s Japan or elsewhere, at the government, corporate, or personal levels, people are borrowing too much money. It was clear to me that the level of debt we have is not repayable. Everyone especially those led by the governments is drinking Kool-Aid (it's not only the US debt). Nobody is willing to resize the debt outstanding through a painful process. People are just escaping by rolling over the same debt again and again, without a clear prospect of cash flow generation for full repayment.
If the system and people inside are not willing to change, it has to be addressed outside of the system. By introducing an open shared database of financial transactions and recommending right-sized loan decisions by super-human intelligence, I thought humans today could be saved and transition towards sustainable growth.
As a JRPG lover, my first startup Emerada was named after an artificial human girl created as a hope for humanity by a scientist. The scientist himself didn’t have reproduction capacity himself and it was a time when humanity was facing a shortening lifespan problem due to widespread genetic degradation. To me, this story and the current state of the world with debt issues and a shrinking population looked like a parallel world.
Emerada is one of the fintech startups that are deeply embedded in the banking sector in Japan today. It is Plaid and Palantir dedicated to the banking industry. It provides API-based financial data aggregation from all banks across the country. And its software and AI predictive analytics run some of the bank’s operations. Although our business is not capital-intensive, we have raised $15M+ from investors. Emerada was named “Top 50 Startups” by Forbes and “Top 100 Startups” by Toyokeizai, the leading business media in Japan. Now, the company is run by an amazing leadership that I have known since our early days of the company. And they are vertically expanding the offers to bank customers. I am proud of them and my judgment to find the right people.
To get there, it wasn’t easy. We pivoted almost four times within two years (we knew PayPal pivoted four times too). We did painful organizational restructurings. We had to be patient with a long and unpredictable sales cycle in the banking industry. We built many features and abandoned them in many cases. We needed to convince investors in a not-so-hot investment area. Although, in the end, everything became much easier as we figured out an idea that was wanted by customers.
To find product market fit, the first thing I did was visit hundreds of banks in person nationwide every day for three years by airplanes, bullet trains, and local buses. I slept on the train and also always stayed at the cheapest hotels. I visited any positive bank multiple times. Building trust was most important. I was mostly not present in the office due to this, but I was available and tightly synced with the product team 24/7. What we learned by visiting our potential customers was that they wanted to find new customers and provide loans to them without relying on traditional financial statements. So I managed to convince leading regional banks and raise a debt fund by having them as our LPs within three months even though we did not have any track record of fund management. The debt fund was used to operate our online lending system and it was successfully proven to work.
However, we faced rejection by the majority of banks throughout this process because they wanted to lend themselves and not through a third party like us. Japan is a thoroughly banked market and there is not much unbanked market so serving banks is very important. What the majority of banks wanted was a technology platform that they couldn’t build by themselves but where they could be the protagonists of lending activities. Another key was enabling banks to collect the daily cash flow movement of a certain borrower that is stored in other banks' systems beyond themselves. I still clearly remember when one executive at a bank said to me, "It is scary to realize that our competitor banks can see our proprietary cashflow data of a certain customer via API. You guys just opened Pandora's box that forces all of us to sign up to your platform and collect competitor bank's data". It was an aha moment. So we decided not to raise the second debt fund when all the fund was successfully lent out to borrowers. Instead, then we scoped out the core technology — cross-bank financial data aggregation platform and AI analytics — from our online lending system and opened them up to the banks.
The product idea was never completed by me. It was born and formed through a dynamic interaction between the company vision to bring transparency and super-human intelligence to a healthier economy, the immediate demand from the banking industry, and the team that delivered every single iteration of the product. And, as I spent enough time working in the Bay Area as a founder, I realized that the basic rules of making products people want are similar across different countries and cultures.
When we are part of a culture or a community, we are subject to the agenda they collectively warship. It may not be all bad, but unless we are careful, the agenda will relentlessly consume our minds and time without leaving much behind. To me, being a founder/CEO means embracing solitude. Solitude brings free time to explore our thoughts and visit the abyss of self. That allows us to revisit who we truly are. The child that has always been there inside us will open up and tell us what we are good at and what we enjoy. And only then, can you start to see the crack in the wall of this world and see what's outside.
The first thing I discovered through the solitude is that I love and am good at being an entrepreneur (or at least I can't find anything better to do). After I started my startup, all the struggles and rejections I had been experiencing inside predetermined organizational structures suddenly disappeared. The stress that comes with the endless uncertainty and challenges of building something new is real and always there. But it never became a source of a long-term decline in my mental health but rather became a source of rediscovering the meaning of life for me. It was revealing to me that some of the smartest people I know were consumed by the stress and left the scene early on.
The next thing was to carefully think about how uniquely valuable I can be to the world. Finance, where I am expected to belong, is a huge market with lots of opportunities to improve. But enough talents and capital are chasing those opportunities. I don’t need to be there. One enlightenment for me was the fact that the success of technological entrepreneurship does not evolve around the skills or the knowledge you have already accumulated at the embarkment. At Emerada, I was just a guy from Goldman Sachs who knew nothing about small business lending or the technology or methodology to make things happen. What mattered was something that can be applied more universally, such as clear vision, strong leadership, power of storytelling, customer obsession, eagerness to learn and adapt, and a wide range of coverage that goes from short range (e.g. fixing product features) to long range (e.g. convincing and aligning stakeholders) every minute, risk tolerance, and perseverance. As long as you maintain those qualities, you can envision and make anything happen. There are many examples where entrepreneurs in the software space went on to the hardware world and successfully pulled off the business with grit and the power of software. This realization opened up a new horizon in front of me.
What mission then? When I was working at Goldman Sachs, the only place that helped me escape from the depressing reality was the club in Roppongi, the number one city in Japan that embraces the best of the best EDM and nightlife scenes. It was a 5-minute walk from the office I was working at and another 5-minute walk to the apartment that I lived in. The midnight retreat was the only reason I was able to barely hang on to the world I belonged to. EDM has been part of my life since I was around 10 years old when I was introduced to it by my sister. To this day, EDM has been my beloved companion. Naturally, I started gravitating towards thinking about how I could help reshape audio/visual entertainment technology for everyone like me.
Meanwhile, my first encounter with artificial intelligence was when Emerada successfully built and rolled out the first deep-neural network-based predictive models that run on transaction data tracked daily from the bank systems nationwide to produce reliable credit scores. Such experience taught me how powerful AI can be. Meanwhile, image generative models since the mid-2010s and critically after the emergence of diffusion models convinced me that AI models will transform the audio/visual entertainment technology as we know it today.
I also believe in the power of vertical integration. AI and hardware are inseparable to have its true impact. Spending my childhood surrounded by Sony's consumer electronics like Walkman and PlayStation while indulging heavily in the Japanese sci-fi world, shaping the next human-computer interface felt deeply rooted in a sense of mission for me. If you think about it, not many people are pushing the boundary of the frontier of human-computer interface where cutting-edge software and hardware technologies collide. Yet it is the largest market where everyone on the planet becomes a user like smartphones. In addition to that, having hardware is going to be the primary way to differentiate the power to harness AI and differentiate yourself when pure software play becomes more and more commoditized. Yes, there are tons of reasons why there are not many people here. But no one was able to convince me that it was not possible.
All of these thought processes led me to shape what Acheul eventually became.
Lastly, I remained a reserved historian observing and predicting the world that is constantly changing. I remember, when I came back to Japan, I felt immense pride and a sense of surprise that Japan was the second-largest economy behind the US with still a huge gap between Germany. People in Japan were treating the flattening economy as the “lost 10 years” as if the economy was just going through a temporary recession that would eventually come back up. Over time, people realized that was not the case and then there was another consensus that built up in Japan, which is to say that a flat but peaceful life is better than painful growth through competition and never-ending self-improvement.
Under such circumstances, you have to be an independent thinker to break out and escape velocity. And I was one of them. On top of that, I was a misfit since I came back to Japan after all. I was never able to be 100% in sync with society nor will be able to fit in in the future. It meant that I would move back to the US sooner or later. This is not to criticize Japan by any means. Japan is a beautiful country that has a special place in me. I will always be proud of my origin.
And I know the truth is that no country will welcome you 100% for who you are. Misfits are misfits anywhere they go. The eternity of forced struggle will haunt us. However, the United States of America remains the only country that embraces individual freedom, the reward for hard work, continuous technological evolution, and an open platform that could influence the world for the better.
Once we knew that Emerada was on a steady growth stage, I prepared the transition with the most trusted to-be future leadership for quite some time and communicated with the stakeholders. Not everyone was completely happy initially, but in the end, we agreed on the direction. We've put a proper incentive mechanism in place and I sold some of my shares to institutional investors. This allowed me to deploy capital to my new journey. The latest fundraising in August 2024 was led by JAFCO. JAFCO is described as Japan's Sequoia by many for its unparalleled amount of distribution to paid-in capital as a multi-stage generalist fund for over 50 years, with 25% of its portfolio going public. The partner who joined the board has been ranked third and fourth in the Midas List of Japan during the past five years.
We knew in our situation long-term bigger outcome by taking care of steadily increasing customers and revenues makes more sense than selling the company in the short run. There were moments when we could have given up. But we didn't while many others did (I cannot stress enough about the importance of current leadership). Meanwhile, seeing the company grow and attract talents, customers, and investors without my involvement anymore was honestly a confusing experience for me. On one side, there is a tremendous sense of guilt for not engaging in the daily operation anymore. On the other hand, I am proud of my child standing on its own and finding its place in society.
Everything about this chapter of my life feels discontinuous and random. The timing of my transition from Emerada to Acheul, decoupling from Japan, re-integrating into the US, moving away from finance, and diving into entertainment, AI, and hardware all at once... If you think success in life only comes from the continuation of accumulating knowledge, experience, and social wealth by staying in the same dimension, then mine is perhaps a disastrous move. You are halting the compounding effect from all you have worked on. But I have a different thesis. Rather you can harness the power of discontinuation, randomness, impulsiveness, and radical pivots in life into something unique and powerful. It takes more grinding to build bridges from the past to the future, but it has been always done.
I see myself as Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon — a half-Japanese and half-Hungarian mercenary who woke up after 250 years of sleep. Takeshi struggled to adapt to the new environment that had changed so much from the original world that he knew. But soon, he manages to navigate the harsh society and solve unsolved cases, with his instincts and combat muscle memory.
I’ve been slowly establishing my life in the Bay Area and immigrated to the US through a national interest waiver with my achievements in Japan. I am a permanent resident and plan to become a US citizen as time passes. This is my home for more than three years and many more years to come.
While spending five years of exclusive dedication to Emerada and two years of remote transition support for the new leadership, I founded Acheul in 2022. I gradually solidified the idea, met my cofounders Hardik Shah (ex-Fitbit, Google, Saildrone) and Matt Seegmiller (MIT grad, ex-Google Technical Lead), and have been building a product that works. I am wiser this time with all the lessons learned. Thus, the intense derisking process under constrained capital for the market, the technology, and the team has been a fun déjà vu and intellectually rewarding. I am proud of what we have achieved and can’t wait to see the company grow from here.
People who have known me since I was little up until now say, “You are always changing”. I reflected on what that means below the surface. There is a Japanese word "大器晩成" (Taiki-Bansei). It means that making a beautiful plate requires a long time to complete. I was not born into a family that has all the privileges in America's society. I was not the smartest person who knew where he/she truly belonged at a younger age. I did not drop out of college and start a business (which is almost non-existent in Japan today). However, I have a steep learning curve and a high accuracy rate for successful decision-making that are accelerating not decelerating as I become older. I am confident that this trajectory will lead me to a better force in society and I can't wait to see how my life unfolds from here on.
(Last Updated: August 2024)
Get future updates from Taiga.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.