Can Japan Mind-Set Change On Start-Ups?

Last autumn, when I had lunch with him in Tokyo, Nakashima wasn't too keen on the idea of taking VC money. But now, six months on, he's relented, and is lining up backers.

He's always said he wants to build a second billion dollar business, the first was when he headed up Mitsubishi's flash division, and Genusion is intended to be both the second billion dollar business he's built and the first billion dollar chip start-up in Japan.

Nakashima has a better mousetrap. His flash technology is 100X faster than NOR to write, 10X faster than NAND to write, with a read speed the same as NOR but one hundredth the read speed of NAND.

The technology is  more enduring, more reliable and half the cost of  exisitng fllash technology. 

His flash cell can be recycled a million times, with 20 year continuous read operation and ten year memory retention at 150degC.

"The mobile phone manufacturers in Europe and Japan are worried about quality", said Nakashima. That gives him the market opportunity.

Japan's electronics industry is in roughly the same state as the UK was in the 1980s with the big majors, Plessey, Ferranti, GEC, STC, Thorn and EMI beginning to look creaky, and about to begin their slow process of de-consolidation, Japan is going to be a feast for VCs backing engineers.

Not only are the big Japanese companies starting to shed engineers, but engineers within the big companies are sensing that managements have lost a meaningful sense of direction.

All these guys need, like the UK engineers needed in the 1990s, is some high-profile start-up successes like ARM and Virata, and they'll be inspired to go down the start-up trail themselves.

So the success of companies like Genusion is very important to Japan's entrepreneurial future.

The country has already has a notable semiconductor start-up success, the mixed signal company THine Electronics, founded by an ex-Toshiba engineer Dr Tetsuya Iizuka, and advised by Toshiba's legendary former chip boss Tsuyoshi Kawanishi.

The big VC funds are all in Tokyo, and the engineers in the big companies are looking for viable future directions. It should be a formidable combination.