Greetings from Beatrust: an IT startup in Tokyo
Hello! We are Atsushi Tsukada and Yudai Watanabe from Beatrust. Whether you are a regular reader of “Beatrust on note” or a newcomer, thank you for finding this article.
This “Beatrust on note” is an official platform of Beatrust that is mainly focused on having people understand our company, and be interested in joining us. If you are interested in Beatrust, we have interview articles that highlight our employees’ unique personalities. For those who are not so interested in Beatrust but are interested in the workstyle of an employee at a startup/company that aims for the global market in Japan, we have articles introducing our unique corporate culture and company system.
As we are starting another year, we would like to introduce ourselves and give you a brief update on our company. Please take a look!
IT startup company co-founded by two ex-Googler in March 2020
Beatrust is a startup IT company developing cloud-based software called SaaS (Software as a Service) and was founded in March 2020. When the company was first founded, we moved into an incubation office called SPROUND, which is directly connected to Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, together with other seed-round startups. About two years later, as the company grew in size, we graduated from SPROUND and finally opened our first independent office in Nihonbashi, Tokyo (nearest station: Kanda) in January 2022.
Beatrust was co-founded by two former Google employees, Kunio Hara (current CEO) and Masato Kume, who worked on the same team in charge of supporting startups and conducting accelerator programs while at Google. Having seen the impact of free and autonomous collaboration among employees at Google leading to numerous innovations, they decided to start Beatrust to put their idea into a product and provide it to numerous corporations that have many talented employees but face challenges in effectively utilizing their human capital.
An environment where innovation is born has a “culture of challenge” in which each individual actively takes risks and challenges themselves, and a "culture of psychological safety" in which the organization tolerates and supports this behavior. The two founders realized that such a corporate culture is supported by experienced and motivated employees and the existence of an ideal digital infrastructure that allows employees to freely collaborate in a spirit of praise. They then became determined to help companies turn into more innovative organizations by developing and offering a SaaS product that is thoroughly focused on facilitating collaboration.
By working in such a company, employees will be able to live more independent and energetic lives. A society in which each individual can realize his or her "best self" will be created, leading to a productive and autonomous organization in which the individual takes the lead and more innovations than ever before will be born. This is the founding philosophy of Beatrust, and the product we develop and provide, Beatrust, is positioned as a means to achieve this.
A solution that directly tackles enterprise-specific organizational issues and culture reform
Beatrust's vision is to “Create a world where everyone can realize their best potential”. To achieve this, we develop and provide a platform where people can freely connect, collaborate, and co-create.
Our mission is to "Optimize Every Encounter". As we are heading to the age of individualism, we believe that we should assist the process of visualizing the experiences and knowledge of all people, and maximizing ideas through their chemistry, leading to innovation. To achieve this, we set the key product features as follows:
A "visualization system" that is not just an excerpt from a resume or a CV, but a 360-degree visualization of the person that includes their personality and a "communication path" to smoothly connect this to problem-solving and business co-creation.
The client companies that are making the most effective use of our products are those that are well aware of the challenges of "creating a framework for innovation," "developing cross-border human resources that transcend divisions," "breaking down silos of communication," "providing opportunities for autonomous collaboration," and "creating new value that will lead to the next generation," and are looking for specific measures to achieve these goals. Our major clients are some of the largest and most established companies in Japan. They are truly future-oriented companies that view the effective utilization of human capital as a management issue itself (rather than a transient trend or a theme focused on a specific department) and are working to develop infrastructure and systems as an investment for the next generation. We are grateful that they have adopted Beatrust not merely as "a tool" but because they deeply understand and sympathize with the future we aspire for. These companies are thus implementing our product faster and at a larger scale. We are very grateful to these companies.
Beyond Talent Management: Accelerating "talent collaboration" in the age of individualism
There are many SaaS products for management purposes in the world, both horizontal SaaS and vertical SaaS. In particular, it should be noted that they have done a great job of implementing a data-based decision-making mechanism into the HR domain, where Japanese companies have traditionally been struggling. However, the common assumption of all of these systems is that "employees are/should be managed by the company," and that as long as the company provides appropriate staffing and a highly convincing evaluation system, individual employees will perform better in the environment that is “given”.
This is certainly one of the advantages of Japanese companies, which excel at managing monolithic and highly loyal organizations. However, as human resources are increasingly becoming mobile and organizations are expected to become more like *DAOs, it is increasingly necessary to shift to a system that places more emphasis on individual autonomy and discretion.
Here at Beatrust, we are sincerely looking at the ideal organizational structure and culture that:
enables each individual to realize their "best self"
provides a system that enables individuals to recognize "the very value of working within the organization"
finds partners within the same organization in the easiest way possible to achieve what they truly want to do
In such an ideal digital environment, spontaneous "initiatives" will be born, which will grow and eventually lead to innovations that will support the company in the future. Beyond management, we believe that the value Beatrust provides is the creation of a system that generates "collaboration" among talents.
*DAO: “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” is a term that refers to an organization that can promote businesses and projects without a specific owner or manager. It is fundamentally different from conventional organizations such as joint-stock companies and is attracting attention as an organizational form that will flourish in the era of Web 3.0.
Encouraging our diverse and talented members to work with discretion
As of January 2023, we have grown to 27 full-time employees). The number has doubled in the last six months. Half of them are engineers, and the other half are sales, PR, marketing, and corporate staff. We have 8 foreign nationals (non-native Japanese speakers) and we are gradually building a strong foundation as a global startup.
This is a result of the emphasis that our company has placed on global expansion since our inception as a company. We are committed not only to nationality, but also to diversity and inclusion, and finally to designing flexible work arrangements that emphasize individual work-life balance, to attract truly talented people from all over the world.
Our company has had a "hybrid-working style as a basic principle for employment" from the beginning. All employees, not only engineers but also sales and PR staff who often contact our customers, work either in the office or remotely of their own choice. During weeks when they have many meetings or social events, they mainly come to the office, and on days when they want to focus on tasks or prioritize family obligations, they work remotely. Everything depends on your choice, and the company respects that.
Some of you may wonder "It's a startup, so it must be made up of mainly young employees and they must be working endlessly". However, this is not true. We believe that our company is unique in that we have many senior and experienced employees. Some have served as executive officers of major global IT companies, while others are veterans who have worked at several startups. We have employees who are raising little children, and others who have moved to the countryside and work mainly remotely.
High performers are also very good at taking appropriate breaks. They know how important it is to take proper breaks and keep their personal lives well-ordered to maintain high work productivity. Beatrust's way of working (the embodiment of "Trust") is to maintain an appropriate on-off balance and a good sense of psychological safety.
Everything we can do to increase communication quality and density
It takes a great deal of ingenuity to maintain the frequency of information sharing and the density of communication. Beatrust makes this possible through regular offline events (a.k.a. "off-sites") and through the maximum use of digital tools to facilitate daily operations. Of course, we also focus on increasing the acceptance of each employee who uses these tools.
We usually work remotely, communicating via Slack and Google Meet / Teams, etc. However, employees who can come to the TGIF event every Friday gather in the office, and once a month, we hold a company-wide meeting called "All Hands ": a company-wide meeting where teams share their efforts and individuals are praised for their work. Recently, we enjoyed a barbecue as an off-site team-building event.
We have also recently decided to conduct (almost) all company meetings in English, and with many non-Japanese native speakers at Beatrust, we have heard that this has improved the accuracy of communication. Of course, not all of our employees have extensive overseas experience, so we quickly created a system to support individual learning. We offer special English-learning programs with outside schools, and we also provide partial financial support for work-related re-skilling.
The human capital market is expected to become more fluid in the near future, and we must prepare ourselves for the changing environment. As a company, Beatrust will continue to update its capabilities while supporting the growth and self-realization of each and every member.
Our business plan for 2023
Three years have passed since Beatrust was founded. Thanks to your support, Beatrust has grown into an even stronger company over the years. The number of clients has also increased, and as of the end of last year, the number of end users of our services surpassed the 20,000 mark.
In 2023, our goal is to further evolve our product with a better understanding of our customers and users. On the business side, we will not only focus on promoting the vertical and horizontal use of our products by Japanese companies but also conduct preliminary research and create test cases to expand into overseas markets, which has been our goal since the company's establishment.
We will continue to provide you with information about Beatrust's people, products, and services, and we would appreciate it if you could follow us on this “Beatrust on note”.
We look forward to working with you closely in the future.
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