A Chat with Terrie Lloyd about the Japan Journey

An Introduction

It’s highly unlikely that any foreign professional in Japan or any bilingual native Japanese professional do not know Daijob.com. Similarly, it is highly unlikely that any professional who has spent a few years would not know Terrie Lloyd – the founder of Daijob.com.

Terrie Lloyd is one of the most highly influential Gaijin entrepreneurs in Japan. He has lived in Japan for over 40 years and established 18 companies. Seven of these are successful earn-outs, and four are currently in operation, one of which is Japan Travel K.K.

He often tries to conduct seminars and give interviews to inspire young entrepreneurs to excel and thrive. Here is one inspiring one affirming his story – An open-hearted conversation of Terrie with Ankita of ReachExt K.K., the parent company of EJable.com, about the Japan journey & experiences and the career journey.

Video Interview

Transcript of The Video

Ankita: Good morning. Hi Terrie, thank you so much for joining us for the interview at Employment Japan.

We would like to know a lot of things about you and your career, and your journey in Japan, starting with a bit of introduction about you, please.

Terrie: Hi Ankita, yeah, it’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me.

Yeah, OK, I was born in New Zealand. I immigrated to Australia when I was 19. I came to Japan on an Australian passport when I was 24.

And I’ve been here ever since, so I’ve been here about 40 years.

And during those 40 years, I must have had probably five or six different careers. Uh, all those entrepreneurs, but you know, in different sectors. So let’s see what else I can add.

I am uneducated. I left school when I was 16. Uh, I went and worked in a factory for a little while and then realized that that wasn’t for me. And then I taught myself about computers.

And so, I was around when the first PC came out, and at that time, I was doing assembler, hardware, and even some primitive networking. That was in 1979-80, so I’ve been in tech. Basically, the whole time there have been PCs.

Ankita: That’s interesting. So, what was your first encounter with Japan, and how did you feel about that? Let us know about your initial reactions to being here.

Terrie: Yeah, actually, it’s a stupid story, but it kind of speaks to the fact that I’m not somebody who plans carefully at the beginning. I just followed my passion or my intuition. But it’s a different matter once I get into a project. So, I was in Australia. I was 24, and actually, I had just broken up with my girlfriend. I was feeling depressed. I wanted to travel somewhere. I was thinking of going to India.

I’ve always had a strong attraction toward India, but one of my friends came back quite sick, and I could see that it would be me. So I decided on somewhere else. I attended a party one evening. My friend had just returned from Japan, and at that time, Australia and Japan had a working holiday visa.

And that they were the only two countries that had that system. It had just been introduced the year before, in 1982.

So anyway, I was at this party, and I’m back. I was a strict vegetarian at that time, and there was nothing on the table I could eat except rice. So, I had a rice bowl and walked down to the table. Kind of disappointed, and then they had some Pickles right at the end. So anyway, I had Pickles and rice, and there was this particular pickle that I thought, wow, this is great after I ate it. Maybe I should go to Japan. I’ve never considered going to Japan.

And so, I packed up my bags, got a working holiday visa, and traveled to Japan. It wasn’t until about six months after I arrived that I discovered that the pickle, called kimchi, is not Japanese.

Ankita: Oh, that’s Korean.

Terrie: So, I actually came to Japan mistaken. It was a mistake that I arrived here. But I must say, once I arrived in Japan, an amazing country with amazing people. And you know, I don’t want to go home. So it doesn’t matter why you come, you know what matters more is why you stay.

Ankita: Oh, that’s brilliant. Yes, I agree. So, do you speak Japanese?

Terrie: And so the answer is yes and no.

I tell people I’m at an advanced-intermediate level, so I can understand about 90% of conversations. I am OK with casual conversations, but if it’s business or formal, there is some vocabulary I haven’t learned and some sentence structure I’m not very good with, like the passive sentence structure.

And by no means absolutely fluent, but I will say that it also depends on who I’m talking to.

So, if there are older men, they generally don’t get to the subject very quickly, leaving the most important verbs to the end. And it’s all nouns. Until then, as they go through their preamble, I find it difficult to follow them.

But if it’s a younger female or a younger guy, especially someone who has been in an international setting and knows how to speak clearly for those people, I have no problem.

Ankita: How did you learn Japanese?

Terrie: Well, actually, I’m not a natural language learner. I’m not that interested in learning the language other than communicating. So once I got to a level of communication where I could connect with people, I didn’t put much more effort into it. And besides, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m busy with my entrepreneurial stuff. But how I learned was simple: I depended on others for the first three years.

And then, my first wife got pregnant, which took her out of the equation, and I started going to Japanese classes. And I found that the first six months that I went five hours a day, three days a week for six months made a huge difference in terms of my ability to become mobile and speak some Japanese. Of course, I was by no means fluent, but it gave me that first step and confidence. I think people need that, so I always tell people if they can afford to go and do full-on lessons, they should do it right from the start.

But if you can’t do that, then at least do part-time lessons for at least six months, and six months will get you into intermediate-level Japanese, and that’s enough to start being able to communicate. From there, it’s basically osmosis. So you know, I hear a word. I write it down, and then I check it.

And you know, I get sentence patterns, and I get used to saying I practice some new ones every now and again. I practice new words that don’t necessarily stand in my head. But you know, they pop up again when I need them.

So, my method is not recommended. The recommended method is to go out and learn straight away. I had a very good friend who learned Japanese hardcore from zero to expert in two years.

In my experience, it is the fastest way to learn Japanese. As somebody who has no connection with Kanji, that is, not Chinese, I would say it takes about 18 months.

And that’s about the fastest I’ve seen. I think the CIA used to have an 18-month program for diplomats some years ago, and they thought 18 months was right. And they really grilled those people.

So you know, if you’ve been here for five years and still don’t speak great Japanese, don’t think you should feel too bad.

Let’s face it. Recently, many of the available jobs have been technical, so you don’t need great Japanese. You just need to be able to survive and make friends, and I think that’s good enough for most people.

Ankita: Yes, that is true. That is true.

So then, we should not shift to the career aspect. Would you like to talk about your life motto and why you chose it?

Terrie: OK, that is my motto in life. Part of my life has been molded around circumstances beyond my control.

I left home because I didn’t get along with my stepfather, and I couldn’t get a job because jobs were hard to come by in the 1970s. So I worked in a factory. I wouldn’t say that as a model, but when I emigrated to Australia, I made a conscious effort to try and get into a computer company.

Actually, when I did the interview, the salary at that time was $15,000 a year, and I had a competitor who had a degree in computer science. And so I offered to cut my salary by 50% so they would take me on.

And they took me on.

From there, I just studied hard. My girlfriend was going to the local university. Actually, I was supporting her, so I would use her library card on the weekends and go into the university library to study Boolean algebra and discrete logic and that kind of thing so that I could do my job better. So, over four years, I went from being an absolute know-nothing trainee to the second-highest-paid person in the company. 

So much of that was through overtime, studying, and pushing myself as hard as possible. But I realized that, you know, this is a great chance. Computers were a great chance to establish a career.

Once I came to Japan, I learned about computers, which was very helpful.

But I also have a very good imagination. So I started thinking about all these businesses you could do in Japan because back in the 80s, Japan was a very conformist society. There weren’t many foreigners, and many things were available in Australia and New Zealand that were not available in Japan, so I went into the import-export business. At one point, I was selling semiconductors from Akihabara to a military electronics company in Australia for submarine detectors. 

And the joke is that I would hop on my bicycle with a pocketful of cash, cycle down to Akihabara, buy the semiconductors, put them in the post, and when they reached the other end (Australia), then they were put into a top-secret facility and then turned into these Barra sonobuoys.

So that was a kind of adventure!

And my motto in life, if there is one, is that you accept all opportunities. And then take the opportunities that resonate the most.  

And some opportunities don’t seem to have any reason why they come to you; they just come, but if you ignore them, you may, you know, ignore your future career.

And I’ll give you one more example of that.

In 1989, I hired an Indian fellow in Hong Kong just before the Internet. So all I could do was talk to him on the phone. He seemed like a very nice guy, and he knew about the latest thing called local area networks.

And I had just installed Japan’s first local area network, which was actually called Novell version 1.0.

And the very first server for Novell was with the Australian Trade Commission.

And I was the one who installed it, so I needed an engineer who knew about LANs, and he came over. I hired him without seeing him. He came over. He turned out to be a super nice guy.

And Rajeev Prabhakar Prabhakaran. And he was so good that I asked him if there were more guys like you in India.

And he said, why? Yes, there are.

And so he introduced me to his dad, who was a trader. I went and stayed with his dad, and his dad set me up with a visit to NIIT, and back then, there were no Japanese in India doing tech. So I met the Dean, and the Dean gave me a personal, you know, tour of the campus, and then one thing led to another, and I started hiring Indian engineers, and in the end, I brought about 70 engineers into Japan.

And I traveled to India about 30 times. But you know what, the starting point for that was a phone call to Hong Kong, and I was kind of nervous about hiring somebody I couldn’t see and never met.

But on the other hand, he seemed like a nice guy, and I just went with my intuition. And that turned out to be the right thing.

Ankita: That’s interesting, that’s very interesting.

So OK, my next question about your career is, what achievement are you proudest about?

Terrie: Well, to be honest, I’m not really proud of any of my achievements because they’re all temporary.

I started Japan’s first online recruiting company, so I’m kind of proud to be the first!

That was dayjob.com, and we were the first mid-career. There was another online company which was Recruit. They were graduates of the university. They had a social site.

But I was the first person to do a mid-career 10 Shocker. And a lot of people told me that it couldn’t be done. They said that recruiting was a dirty business back then. It was considered a dirty business.

And so that’s why I called it Daijobs because actually, the phrase that we used was daijobu. You know the “kenchiku wa daijobu des”

And the year after we started, it was a huge hit. We had 165,000 resumes in our database.

So we went from nothing and an idea to becoming the biggest player by far in the online space. So I’m kind of proud of having started it.

Now it was a successful company, and I had a successful exit. But like I say, all of those things are ephemeral. Money comes. Money goes. Businesses come; businesses go. But the thought of.

Changing people’s lives is really powerful, and that makes me feel good. So, back then, when I first started Daijobs, the average Japanese employee had to work 30 years in the same company. And if they were unlucky and got recruited by a Black Company, they had no way to leave that company because it was shameful to switch jobs and also was considered very risky. Then, for those people, the average young Japanese under 30 has switched jobs two to three times.

So, that is a huge paradigm shift. Between 30 years and one job and being stuck and extremely depressed if you picked the wrong company to now being able to shop around, the quality of life has improved so dramatically for those people.

Ankita: Yes.

Terrie: So, I am kind of proud of that.

Ankita: Yes, indeed, that’s a good one. So, what aspects of Japanese culture do you like the most? Or what aspect of Japan, maybe? Well, there are so many.

Terrie: So many! It’s an amazing country. I mean, there are some not-so-amazing things as well.

But fundamentally, the food, the people, the history, the scenery, and the traditions are all amazing.

I’ll tell you one story that kind of sums it up. So about three years ago, I visited a drum maker.

They, the old Taiko, you know, where they stretch the leather, and then they make the wood for the drum has to be carved very carefully. He took me through his workshop, and you know, it was OK. I mean, you don’t drum, OK? So once you’ve seen one drum, you’ve seen them all.

And I was kind of bored, and I said to the guy, look, you know, I know that this is your shop, and you’re showing us all your drums, and that’s cool. But do you have a really interesting story that you can tell me?

And he smiled, and he took me upstairs. The rickety old stairs were up to a second floor, and his warehouse was in the back.

He also showed me a couple of ancient drums that were 500 years old.

And he told me that the local temples are actually temples around the country, not just the local ones. They sent him drums so that he could repair them.

He opened the drum and showed me that the maker of that drum 500 years ago had written inside it. He said that sometimes when he opens the drum, what’s written there is different from the official history recorded in the history books.

And that means that history was rewritten for some reason, right? Political reason.

But this guy is looking back in history, 500 years to the person who made that drum and sealed it. And then it was never opened again until he saw it.

And you know, for me, that tradition. I mean, he’s a skilled Craftsman, so that’s obviously great. However, the history, tradition, and uniqueness of Japan are encapsulated in that story.

Ankita: Yes.

Terrie: So yeah, that’s what fascinates me about Japan. It’s really a cool place.

Ankita: Nice, so, when I talk about the working style, what changes do you bring into your working style to fit in, You know, to be successful in Japan?

Terrie: Umm… Well, Japan is still conformist, so entrepreneurs have plenty of space.

And you know, as you must have noticed, recently, there has been a drive or a push by local and regional governments to recruit foreign entrepreneurs.

So I’m a member of TiE, which is The Indus Entrepreneurs and Indus. Obviously means India. TiE originally started in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley. But I’m a founding member and a charter member here in Japan.

It is a truism that most, not most, but many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are not originally American. They are immigrants.

And why is that? Because they’re, you know, they have no old boy network to fall back on. They have no one to depend on, so either they survive & thrive or they don’t.

And I think immigrants are super important for any economy, especially a mature economy like Japan’s.

So, you know, I’m encouraging other young entrepreneurs to start. It’s not just my stuff; I also help others.

And I want to create a kind of like a link or a bridge between Japan inside and outside using these talented people so that we can sort of like change the basics of society in Japan. I don’t want Japan to lose its traditions.

But I do want to plan to survive in the future. You know, I have five kids, and they’re all half-Japanese, so I only want the best for them.

And, uh, you know, we need a healthy, vibrant Japan commercially and societally, and one way to do that is to bring in new blood. Anyway, the good news is that there are several national efforts to help startups in Japan.

Places like Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Sapporo, where they’re deliberately inviting foreign entrepreneurs to enter competitions, and then in winning those competitions, they get local support and local investment, and they set up in Japan. And this is really exciting to see.

So, I want to see more of that, and I think it can only benefit the country in the long term.

Ankita: Yes, that is true. Uh, I would also like to know if you have any tips and advice for Japanese professionals working in multicultural teams. What would be your message to them?

Terrie: Hmm… I often find that the Japanese are reluctant to take leadership positions.

And that’s understandable because the education system doesn’t emphasize people wanting to be outstanding and that they’re supposed to be part of a group. But actually, successful companies need leaders.

And my model has been that when I start a company, I will usually bring in 50-50 foreigners and Japanese.

And then, as the company starts to work up the food chain, it needs more fluent Japanese speakers and also better penetration into the client base, which is usually Japanese, and so that is a fantastic opportunity for young Japanese because, well, people like myself and there are many like me now.

We don’t promote based on seniority, right? We promote based on results and capability.

And so I have absolutely no problem with a 25-year-old Japanese female managing much older Japanese males if she can do the job.

So I think that my message is that if you’re Japanese, and if you’re young, perhaps you are, you know, looking at a 30-year career plan to get to a responsible position. Foreign companies or mixed companies like mine are really a great place to start.

And then once you have that experience and you have it on your resume, larger or more famous companies will want to hire you because you’ve got that training and you have that experience, and you have the proof that you can do it.

Ankita: Alright, what wisdom, advice, or tips can you give people new to Japan? Or the ones who are planning to come to Japan now?

Terrie: Well, well, clearly, being able to speak some Japanese is very important. But I do get people asking me what’s better. Shall I learn Japanese, or shall I learn technology?

And my answer is that you usually get hired for your technology chops, not for your language skills. And actually, there is this kind of like a paradox – When you don’t speak a lot of Japanese, Japanese are actually can be very kind to you because they want to help, especially if you have other skills.

But once you get to a certain level of Japanese, if you are not perfect in speaking, people actually get irritated with you.

Because every now and again, you’ll say something a little bit weird or a little bit off, or inappropriate or something like that, and it’s just like it’s jarring. You know you’ve got this person who seems to be fluent, and then suddenly they’re not. And then people start to wonder. They say that on purpose. Or did they make a mistake?

And so that paradox is there. And so if you’re going to learn Japanese. The only way to learn Japanese is by immersion.

And then that means coming to Japan. So you know, I have a company in Pune in India, and as you may know, Pune is a kind of center of Japanese learning for any one of them.

Thousands of people are learning Japanese in Pune (India) right now, and many of them get to the JLPT N3 level, some manage to pass N2, and a few get to the N1 level, too.

But unless they’ve actually worked in Japan, even if they’re N2, It’s pretty difficult for them to communicate.

Yes, so you know again, it comes back to this question. Do I spend all my time learning Japanese, or do I learn the tech first and then learn Japanese? And you know, if you’re signing up for university or in your first or second year, I would say that you focus on your tech first.

And then, uh, Japanese secondarily.

Ankita: Yes, yes. Thank you so much, Terrie. This has been an interesting interview for all the insightful information and talking about your experience.