Fifteen years opening markets that don't open easily.

I'm Yohei Nishiyama. I build go-to-market for technology companies in Japan and Southeast Asia. I held the Japan country-lead seat three times as the permanent hire — at TradingView, Standard Cognition and Mashgin — and advised the Chairman of VNPAY in Vietnam. I now take that on as a fractional or interim engagement for companies that need the seat filled before the permanent hire is in place.

A career in three places

My career has moved through Tokyo, New York, and Hanoi, but not evenly. New York was the base for my early career. Hanoi was where the Vietnam payments work happened, inside a market where the banks are the distribution layer and the commercial product has to be built with the incumbent financial system rather than around it. Tokyo is home and the centre of my practice: the place where I have repeatedly arrived first, before there was an entity, a team, a partner, or a customer.

Along the way I've worked at Mashgin and a computer-vision autonomous-checkout company in retail automation, at TradingView in global markets, and at VNPAY in Vietnamese digital payments — alongside work with Japanese enterprises expanding outbound and Southeast Asian companies scaling regionally.

The pattern in my work

Looking back, every role has been a version of the same assignment: selling frontier technology to conservative operational and regulated buyers. A retail operations director deciding whether to change the shape of a store. A brokerage deciding whether to expose its client base to a new platform. A bank or a state utility whose approval process was designed to slow things down on purpose.

These buyers are not slow because they are unsophisticated. They are slow because they carry the risk of being wrong. Selling to them well is a distinct discipline, and it does not resemble selling to an early-adopter software team.

First on the ground

The through-line in my career is narrower than "cross-border go-to-market." Three times now I have been the first person a company put into a market: the first employee in the region, or the first person on the ground in Japan, arriving before there was an entity, a team, a partner, or a customer. That is a specific job, and it is not the same job as running an established country organisation. It means deciding what to build first, what to defer, and which of the ten plausible partners is the one worth committing to — usually with a headquarters that has never operated here watching the burn rate.

What I got wrong, and what I believe now

At one computer-vision company we over-extended. We went after a very large use case before we had proved the thing worked in a controlled environment — and the controlled version was available to us. We could have done it first. I have thought about that sequencing error more than any other decision in my career, because it happened at a company that was doing well by every external measure. We had capital, momentum, and a real market. Scope discipline turned out to be independent of how well things are going.

That is a particularly expensive mistake in Japan, because of how references work here. A narrow success inside a large enterprise compounds — it earns you the next division, the next use case, and eventually the name itself as a reference. A large failure inside the same enterprise does not merely stall. It closes the account, and it travels. The industry is small enough that other buyers hear about it before you do.

So the instinct people arrive with — that you must choose between chasing the big logo and finding a small early adopter — is a false choice. The right answer is both, in a specific order. Get inside the large name. Prove one narrow thing completely. Then expand from a position where the customer is defending the decision internally on your behalf.

What I now think matters most

Alignment before ambition. The plan has to be defensible in headquarters' language and correct for this market at the same time. Those two requirements pull against each other, and level-setting early is how you find out whether they can coexist before you have spent a year discovering that they cannot. Full alignment gives you a copied playbook that does not fit. Full local autonomy gives you a business headquarters will not fund and will eventually close.

A thesis, not a target list. Broad pursuit of anyone who shows interest produces activity and no reference. A specific thesis — this buyer, this use case, this problem — is what makes everything downstream possible, including the routes below.

Enter through capital where you can. In most markets corporate venture and accelerators are a financing decision. In Japan they are frequently the cheapest route into the enterprise. A CVC investment or an accelerator cohort can give you sponsored access to operating divisions, internal legitimacy, and a champion with a reason to make you succeed — all before you have earned a procurement conversation on your own merits. It is a distribution channel that arrives labelled as capital. You cannot use it without a specific thesis, because the entire pitch is one narrow use case, in one division, at one company.

Keep customisation to a minimum. Japan will ask for more customisation than any market you have sold into, and every individual request will be reasonable. The aggregate is a product headquarters will not maintain and a roadmap nobody else benefits from. Holding that line while still closing is most of the craft.

Scale runs through partners. Direct selling gets you the first references. It does not get you the country. Systems integrators and distributors hold the enterprise relationships, the installation and service capability, and the procurement legitimacy that a foreign vendor cannot build alone at speed. Understanding which of them will genuinely commit, rather than simply adding you to a catalogue, is a judgement that takes time to develop and is worth developing.

Improvise the tactics, never the core. Everyone says iterate. Very few people define what stays fixed while they do. If the thesis survives and the product stays uncustomised, almost everything else — pricing, packaging, channel mix, sequencing — can and should change repeatedly in the first year.

An unusual foundation

I studied film scoring at Berklee, then financial management at Cornell.

Film scoring is not performance. It is composition and analysis carried out inside somebody else's constraint. You are handed a story that already exists and a director who describes what they want in language that is not musical, and your job is to find the structure underneath it and build something that serves it — to the second, at the exact beat, without drawing attention to itself. Good scoring is invisible. If the audience notices the music, something has gone wrong.

I have not found a better description of running a country operation. Headquarters has the story. Your job is to render it in a market that reads differently, on a timeline you did not set, against constraints you did not choose, and to do it well enough that nobody upstream has to think about how it was done.

The other thing that carried over was the tooling. I spent those years working with the most advanced DTM and sequencing software available, which meant learning what new technology could actually do before there was a manual, a community, or anyone to ask. That is the same reflex I have used since — sitting with frontier technology long enough to work out what it genuinely does, which is what you need before you can explain it to a buyer who has every reason to be sceptical.

Cornell came later and taught the unsentimental part: whether the numbers work, regardless of how much you want them to. Cross-border work asks for both — the structural reading, and the discipline to tell a board the market is not worth their capital when it is not.

How I think

The hard part of cross-border go-to-market is almost never the product. It's the translation layer: how a US-designed motion — pricing, packaging, sales process, partner model — has to be re-fit for a market that buys, decides, and trusts differently. Most failures I've watched were not strategic failures. They were a correct strategy executed in a grammar the market does not read.

I am fully bilingual in Japanese and English, with commercial experience across 22 countries.