UnicoMarketing: The dreams we carry and why we pray

Saturday, 17 January 2015

The dreams we carry and why we pray

The Buddhist priest speaking to the crowd

I haven’t prayed in ten years. I don’t even think about reaching out to a higher power unless I am looking for enlightenment to fix my Apple TV’s wifi problems or desperately need a sea of traffic to part so I can arrive on time. But last night, in the early, quiet moments of a chilly dusk, I breathed in the incense, took another look at the temple’s golden pavilion, and I bowed my head alongside 400 Japanese entrepreneurs and investors.

Kigan. Japan is not a particularly religious country, but this is its word for “prayer.” Japanese people are most likely to say a prayer at one of the many Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples dotting the countryside. There is no either-or rule in Japan – 80 percent of Japanese get married in a Shinto or Christian-style ceremony and 90 percent hold Buddhist funerals. Pray where you want to whom you want.

The business world is not commonly associated with spiritual affairs. However, every January in Japan, businessmen and women make pilgrimages to their local shrines and temples to pay their respects and ask for their companies to be blessed with good fortune in the coming year. In large companies, the management team will usually do a trip and then individual teams, often on the sales side, will do their own. Startups will likely just go with all employees together. Either way, the prayer is personal, closed. You pray with your team.

Last night, the Tech in Asia Japan team changed the rules. We decided that our team should include everyone who wants to support the domestic startup community. To our delight, 400 of them (the physical limit of the temple) decided to come. Of course, some of them wanted to meet our co-organizers Spacemarket and PayPal’s Startup Blueprint leaders. Others had different networking targets. And maybe a few just came out of curiosity and after-party drinks. However, the optimist in me believes that in the quiet moments, when all you can hear is the sound of hundreds of people being silent and the weathered voice of the Buddhist priest, we understood ourselves as a community.

Before the group prayer, each individual had a chance to take a moment for themselves.

We all have the same basic dream. It can be scale of millions or billions, but everyone wants to believe that their pirate ship of a startup can stay afloat and the men and women traveling onboard are going to steer it to success. We build products to solve problems, to delight users, because there is a core, unshakeable belief of not only that we can do it better, but also that we have a responsibility to try.

No one can predict who will still be standing tall at this time next year. Fickle consumers, dangerous burn rates, and unexpected competitors are just a few in the litany of startup-killers that claim victims with impunity. For every startup celebrating its success with champagne supernovas, there are dozens more softly disappearing, crushed together in a purgatory of unfulfilled promise.

So, yes, we prayed. We prayed on a cold January night, offering up our hopes and dreams to a night sky that we can only assume is listening. And afterwards, we talked. About big plans and brilliant schemes. About our confidence in the new year, our year.

Now, the chill of the evening has given way to a begrudging morning thaw. It will be another day for heavy jackets and scarves. Will our prayers be answered? Will our hard work be enough?

Those answers are hidden, and the inscrutability of our own fates will gnaw daily at our startup community for the rest of the year. One eye one the prize, the other on a shrinking runway. When we meet again on a brisk January day to celebrate another new year, there will be faces missing. Some lost to failure, others to success. But there will be new faces, bright faces. And, again, we will pray.

The dream, it doesn’t change. Only the dreamers do.

See: These numbers will remind you that doing a startup is brutal