Startup Founders Program (SFP)
Hongo Tech Garage, the University of Tokyo
- Selected for the Startup Founders Program at Hongo Tech Garage, the University of Tokyo
Overview
I was selected for the Startup Founders Program (SFP), a founder development program run by Hongo Tech Garage at the University of Tokyo, and took part from February 2026. The program concluded with the final presentation in May.
Activity log
I participated with Alnilam, which I am commercializing through NEDO NEP 2026, as my subject.
The program taught hypothesis-driven thinking and methods for raising the resolution of a problem: put into words whose problem you are solving, what it is, and how deeply you actually understand it, then prioritize the hypotheses to test and reject them one at a time with the smallest possible experiments. This was not classroom study; you apply the method directly to your own business.
In fact, I rebuilt Alnilam’s customer hypotheses here. I dropped the policy of chasing the problems of three candidate segments (robotics competition participants, hardware startups, and educational institutions) with equal weight, and reset the order of validation. I presented these results at the final presentation in May 2026.
Being able to argue things out with founders of my own generation was another part of the program’s value.
Technology moves forward as long as you keep your hands busy, but a business goes nowhere if you pick the wrong hypothesis to reject first. That sounds obvious, yet it is hard to practice on your own business. SFP was the place that trained that judgment most.