What I learned building customer success in Japan from scratch
I joined Vercel in 2021 as its first Japanese-speaking customer success hire. This is what I had to unlearn from the global playbook, and what I'd tell the next person doing it.
Writing on Japan, AI, languages and mahjong.
Notes from building customer success and go-to-market in Japan, bringing AI tools into large companies, learning languages as an adult, and playing mahjong professionally.
Getting generative-AI dev tools adopted in large Japanese companies
Engineers understand v0 or Claude Code in five minutes. Getting a Japanese enterprise to approve and actually use them takes much longer. Notes from the rollouts I've worked on.
How I learned languages, and what I'd skip
Spanish is my first language. I taught myself English as a kid, studied translation, and now work in Japanese every day. What worked, what didn't, and where AI fits in.
Localization is not translation
I studied translation, then spent years marketing a Japanese e-commerce platform to a dozen countries. Most of the localization problems I ran into had nothing to do with words.
What professional mahjong taught me about decisions
Riichi mahjong is a game of hidden information, bad luck and long seasons. After almost ten years as a certified pro, it shapes how I make calls at work.