Chapter 1: Why Silicon Valley Is Now Returning to "Process" and "Community"

In Silicon Valley in 2026, two seemingly contradictory currents coexist. On one hand, generative AI is ushering in an era where "a single engineer can produce the output of an entire company" — exemplified by Cursor (Anysphere) surpassing $2 billion ARR in just three years and reportedly in talks to raise funding at a valuation of $50–60 billion. On the other hand, that same AI enables "anyone to mass-produce similar products at near-zero cost," making it impossible to explain customer choice based on feature differentiation alone.

As the new value axis filling this gap, Silicon Valley VC firms have simultaneously turned their attention to "Build in Public" — openly sharing the founder's thinking and struggles — and "Community-Led Growth," in which users themselves become the drivers of distribution, support, and hiring. As discussed on the a16z podcast *How Ecosystem-Led Growth Unlocks the Next Generation of GTM* featuring Crossbeam's Bob Moore, the recognition that "the maturation of the modern data stack and the API economy has turned ecosystems into data assets, generating a new playbook for pipeline creation, deal conversion, and customer expansion" is spreading in tandem with the growing limits of AI-driven differentiation.

Bessemer Venture Partners' Atlas series, updated in 2025 in the *Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report*, reported that the combined market capitalization of Cloud 100 companies reached $820 billion — a 25% increase from the prior year's $654 billion. Within that context, the data point that "three-quarters of Cloud 100 companies are allocating management resources to community functions, and more than 20% of the top 50 are actively hiring dedicated community managers" starkly illustrates how CLG has been elevated from a "soft marketing tactic" to a "board-level strategic agenda."

Chapter 2: The Lineage of Building in Public — From Pieter Levels to Generative AI Natives

The origins of the term "Build in Public" trace back to a practice that emerged organically within the indie hacker community around 2015. Pieter Levels (@levelsio), a Dutch entrepreneur based in Amsterdam, became the emblematic figure of this movement — building and running products like Nomad List, Remote OK, and Hoodmaps on his own, while sharing his Stripe revenue data in near real time. As of November 2025, he publicly reports monthly revenue of approximately $138,000 (around ¥20.7 million), with an annualized run rate of roughly $3 million (approximately ¥450 million). Nomad List, launched in 2015, was still generating $60,000 per month (roughly ¥9 million) as of 2024 — nine years after launch. The narrative of "building a few hits on top of 70 failures," frequently cited in Fast-SaaS and the Indie Hackers community on Medium, itself became the cultural template for BiP.

Arvid Kahl (The Bootstrapped Founder) sold his online education SaaS, FeedbackPanda, in 2019 together with his partner, and went on to write *Zero to Sold* and *The Embedded Entrepreneur*. He is now actively practicing what he preaches by writing his latest book, *Build in Public!*, publicly. Through his podcast and newsletter, he repeatedly states that "building in public means productizing your own learning curve," and continues to provide the ideological infrastructure supporting the "calm company" — the kind of business that operates without Silicon Valley VC funding.

The most prominent example of combining VC funding with BiP practice is Sahil Lavingia's Gumroad. The company raised $6 million (approximately ¥900 million), with $1 million (roughly ¥150 million) intentionally allocated to Naval Ravikant and Jason Fried as lead investors — a structure that signals Gumroad's role as a bridge connecting "VC-backed" with "indie spirit." Lavingia openly shares monthly revenue, hiring plans, and business pivots on X (formerly Twitter), and has systematized this philosophy in his book *The Minimalist Entrepreneur*. Fried himself contributed a blurb reading "Pay attention," marking a convergence between the culture of transparent management rooted in Basecamp and the indie hacker ethos.

What decisively shifted the tone of BiP between 2025 and 2026 was the arrival of an AI-native generation. Josh Miller of The Browser Company publicly documented every step of the pivot from the Arc browser to the AI browser Dia, and said in the Every.to podcast *Inside The Browser Company: Why They Killed Arc to Build Dia*: "Because we shared every prototype along the way, we still had a reservoir of trust even after shifting our focus to AI." According to statistics compiled by MyNextDeveloper in 2025, SaaS founders practicing BiP grew their audience three times faster than silent peers. Buffer's *State of Social Media 2025* report also found that "45% of creators who shared their business processes reported increased user trust and brand loyalty." Furthermore, new data aggregated by Indie Hackers in 2025 shows that founders who build publicly achieve 30% higher community engagement than those who do not.

Edelman's Trust Barometer 2025 found that 81% of consumers said they need to trust a brand before purchasing from it. The concept emphasized by a16z in *The Lighthouse Playbook* — making existing customers visible as "lighthouses" to guide future customers — is rapidly gaining traction in this context of the trust economy.

Chapter 3: The Theoretical Pillars of Community-Led Growth — Bessemer's "5 Laws" and a16z's "Lighthouse Playbook"

The most cited CLG framework published by VCs is Bessemer Venture Partners' *Five Laws of Community-Led Growth*, released on their Atlas platform. After conducting interviews with community leads at portfolio companies including HashiCorp, Twilio, ServiceTitan, and MakersPlace, Bessemer systematized the following five principles.

The first, the 95-5% Rule, calls for intentionally providing a platform for the most vocal 5% of users—both passionate advocates and harsh critics alike. The design of creating a feedback loop that flows directly back to the product team while recognizing top power users through ambassador programs is a shared philosophy at Notion, Figma, and HashiCorp. The second, the Law of Authenticity, recommends promoting community managers from within the community rather than hiring externally. Bessemer cites as examples Thomas Howard, a ten-year ServiceTitan user who became VP of Customer Success, and NFT artist Jarid Scott, who became MakersPlace's community manager. The third, Customer-to-Community Conversion Rate, holds that best-in-class companies engage up to 30% of their customer base in advisory forums and digital channels, and that in technical products in particular, existing users "educating" prospective customers is a typical pattern. The fourth, Measure Your Halo, recommends tracking "whether community growth is outpacing customer growth" as a leading indicator. The fifth, Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration, argues that where the community function sits—under marketing, operations, product, or engineering—should be decided flexibly, while also predicting that "an independent executive post (Community Executive) will eventually emerge."

a16z's *The Lighthouse Playbook*, published in 2025, translates Bessemer's theory into an execution-level framework, advocating for making "lighthouses"—customers, candidates, and investors who have already chosen you—visible, and building a system that naturally draws in the next customer. A Figma case study describes how CTO Kris Rasmussen's history of involvement with Figma as an advisor during the Series A period itself became a signal that attracted other technical leaders, concluding that "a networked lighthouse is more transformative than an isolated one."

MKT1's Emily Kramer published a three-part series, *The Shift to Account-Driven GTM*, in February 2025, arguing that traditional inbound and ABM alone are no longer sufficient to win, and positioning ecosystem marketing as "the next big marketing channel." Her newsletter is read by 75,000 marketers and startup leaders, and CLG and ecosystem marketing have effectively come to be discussed as a single continuum.

Chapter 4: Iconic Corporate Case Studies — Figma, Notion, Supabase, Cursor

Figma is the most frequently cited success story of CLG. Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker "FIG" on July 31, 2025, surging from an IPO price of $33 to a first-day closing price of $115.50, reaching a market capitalization of approximately $68 billion. The company grew 41% for the full year 2025, with ARR surpassing $1 billion in Q4, and has issued full-year 2026 guidance of $1.366–1.374 billion. This guidance is said to be tied to the adoption pace of the "Code to Canvas" feature integrated with Anthropic Claude models, making its bet on AI-era design workflows explicit. Figma's community metrics are equally impressive: community-built plugins number over 1,500, reported to drive approximately 50% of user engagement. Its developer conference Config grew 750% over five years—from 1,000 attendees at its in-person launch in 2020 to 8,500 at the 2025 San Francisco event—and combined with a first-ever IRL event in London, total attendance exceeded 10,000, with tens of thousands more watching at watch parties in over 100 locations across 45 countries. Event Marketer magazine commented that "Figma has handed the management of its conference over to the community, fundamentally rewriting what it takes for an annual event to succeed."

Notion is known as an even purer example of CLG. Having officially announced surpassing 100 million users in 2024, Notion relies on organic growth for nearly 95% of its revenue rather than paid advertising, and its ambassador program received over 600 applications in its first week. According to a case study by Decibel VC, Notion reached a tipping point between 2020 and 2022 by combining a template economy, community-led growth, and the creator economy, reaching 20 million users in 2021. Crucially, Notion's ambassadors receive no monetary compensation. The rewards are intrinsic motivators—"autonomy, insider status, and belonging to a global creative movement"—and this forms the core of what HackerNoon calls "Notion's $10 billion growth engine."

Supabase has drawn attention as a case where the developer community is also its investor base. In September 2024, the company raised an $80 million Series C led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures, with participation from Coatue, Felicis, Y Combinator, and Avra Capital—led by former Y Combinator Growth Fund Director Anu Hariharan. In March 2025, it raised at a $2 billion valuation led by Accel, and in October 2025, it raised an additional $100 million in a Series E again led by Accel and Peak XV, reaching a valuation of $5 billion. Supabase has surpassed 4 million users and, while maintaining its character as an open-source project, is experimenting with opening equity purchase rights to community members. As an extension of community ownership—"infrastructure operated by developers, for developers"—it has implemented one of the most innovative fundraising models of 2026.

In the AI coding space, Anysphere (Cursor) is emblematic. Founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates—Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark—the company achieved a $900 million Series C led by Thrive Capital at a $9.9 billion valuation in early 2025, and by November of that year raised $2.3 billion in a Series D led by Accel and Coatue at a $29.3 billion valuation. As of April 2026, a new round of $2–5 billion co-led by a16z and Thrive Capital is reportedly under discussion, with a valuation of $50–60 billion. ARR doubled from $100 million in January 2025 to $500 million by June, $1 billion by end of 2025, and $2 billion by April 2026—a doubling in just three months. TechCrunch reported it as "the fastest B2B scale from zero on record," with 70% of the Fortune 1000 as customers. What makes Cursor noteworthy is not just that it is a generative AI product, but that the developer community on X self-propagates by sharing prompts and workflows with one another. a16z's decision to lead the new round reflects its high regard for this structure, in which "the developer community is the GTM itself."

Replit also raised $250 million in September 2025 at a $3 billion valuation, then jumped to a $9 billion valuation with an additional $400 million raise in March 2026. With over 35 million users across more than 200 countries as of early 2026, the company has established "Race to Revenue" partnerships with Linear, Rippling, Stripe Atlas, HubSpot for Startups, Ramp, and Visa to provide standardized early-stage runway support for developer communities. This is a prime example of a new 2026 trend: not VCs sharing deal flow with each other, but developer tool providers sharing communities with one another.

Chapter 5: Lenny's Newsletter and Creator-Led CLG

One newsletter that cannot be overlooked as a CLG foundation built by an individual is Lenny Rachitsky's Lenny's Newsletter. With 1.1 million subscribers, it is one of the world's largest newsletters aimed at product managers, and comes equipped with a Slack community of over 30,000 members, in-person meetups at 193 locations across 30 countries, mentorship, AMAs, book clubs, and more. In 2025, it launched a bundle consisting of an "Insider tier" at $350/year (approx. ¥52,500) and an entry tier at $200 (approx. ¥30,000), generating over $1 million (approx. ¥150 million) in revenue from a single email campaign. The structure—providing 19 paid tools such as Lovable, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Bolt, and Devin free of charge for a year—effectively means that Lenny himself has been embedded into multiple startups as a "customer acquisition engine." His own editorial judgment, honed through years of tracking product growth since his time at First Round Capital, has become the de facto curriculum for the AI-native generation.

This model can be positioned as an evolution of Product-Led Growth (PLG), a concept first proposed by OpenView Partners in 2016. OpenView's annual benchmark reports (with 1,000 companies participating in the 2023 edition) have consistently reported that "companies tracking PQLs/PQAs (Product Qualified Leads/Accounts) are 61% more likely to achieve high-speed growth than those that do not." CLG is positioned as the next stage of PLG, and Gainsight's 2025 benchmark reports that "among B2B SaaS companies that have implemented automated scoring, community-sourced expansion revenue accounts for a median of 22% of total expansion revenue." Furthermore, Common Room's cross-industry benchmark confirmed that "upgrade conversion rates for accounts scored by community score stand at 14.3%, versus 6.8% for unscored accounts—a 2.1x improvement." The Smarketers' 2026 guide also reports that companies with active user communities have retention rates up to 26% higher than those relying on traditional sales and marketing. These figures are the driving force that has elevated CLG from a "trend" to an "ROI-optimizable management methodology."

Common Room itself has grown into an AI-driven community intelligence platform backed by $52.9 million (approx. ¥7.9 billion) in funding from Index Ventures, Greylock, and Madrona, and serves as the technical visibility layer for the "95-5% rule" and "customer-to-community conversion rate" articulated in Bessemer's five laws.

Chapter 6: Japan's "Process Economy" — Its Unique Evolution and Points of Convergence with the United States

A concept that has attracted attention as the Japanese counterpart to this idea is the "Process Economy." It was first proposed in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Kensuke Furukawa (known as "kensuu") on the platform note, and gained widespread social recognition when Kazuhiro Obara — known as the author of *After Digital* and other works — published a book of the same title, *Process Economy: Your Story Becomes Value*, through Gentosha in 2021. The concept, which topped Amazon's book rankings upon release, systematizes the idea of "not only releasing a finished product or service, but also transmitting the process by which it is created in order to generate empathy, support, and ultimately revenue." A book review by GLOBIS summarizes it as follows: "In a mature market where differentiation based on features and performance alone has become difficult, the process that reflects a person's unique commitment and philosophy holds value precisely because it cannot be copied by anyone."

Kensuu himself officially launched *00:00 Studio (FoZero Studio)* from Al Inc. on December 16, 2020, as a platform for implementing the Process Economy. This is a service in which creators livestream their work to share the process with fans and receive support while creating. It is symbolically notable that kensuu himself, while livestreaming his daily writing sessions, confessed on note that "streaming while working changed my life."

An important aspect of Japan's unique implementation is its fusion with crowdfunding. CAMPFIRE announced that as of April 2025, its cumulative total funding had surpassed 100 billion yen and its membership had exceeded 5.1 million. The platform recorded growth of 188% year-on-year in regional community projects, 173% in music and entertainment, and 150% in CAMPFIRE Creation, aimed at creator merchandising. In April 2025, it launched "Top Gun FUND" in partnership with IVS, allowing speakers to solicit support directly from the stage, and in May of the same year, it jointly established "JTB Crowdfunding" with JTB. Both are designed on the premise that projects are unfinished at the time of launch, commercializing the shared experience of the process leading to completion. As case analyses by IDEAS FOR GOOD and Liv Consulting have repeatedly pointed out, the Nizi Project audition program that produced NiziU is a prime example: by turning not "the finished idol group" but "the very process of an idol group being born" into content, the pre-debut song "Make you happy" became a social phenomenon even before the group's official debut.

Japanese B2B/SaaS startups are also moving at the intersection of CLG and the Process Economy. SmartHR accepted a strategic minority investment of $96 million (approximately 14.4 billion yen) led by General Atlantic in November 2025, and as a cloud HR/payroll platform used by more than 60,000 companies, it has its sights set on a Tokyo Stock Exchange listing in 2026 and a market capitalization on the order of 160 billion yen (approximately $1 billion). Sansan's "Eight" held *Startup JAPAN EXPO 2025* at Tokyo Big Sight, reaching a scale of 380 exhibiting companies (a 30% increase from the previous event) and an expected attendance of 10,000. What is characteristic of all these cases is that while they operate U.S.-style community programs, they complementarily incorporate Process Economy elements in the Japanese sense — that is, founders with a human face meeting fans directly on the ground.

Chapter 7: The Differences Between Japan and the United States, and Two Paths That Are Both Positive

Japan's Process Economy and Silicon Valley's Build in Public / CLG share the same surface structure of "sharing the process," yet differ in emphasis. Drawing on the dialogue between Kensuke Furukawa and Kazuhiro Obara in Nikkei XTREND, the core of the Japanese-style Process Economy lies in "a consistent Why" and "empathy with narrative," placing priority on intrinsic and emotional bonds that generate passionate fans. It is highly compatible with formats such as support-based consumption, crowdfunding, live streaming, and idol culture, and its demand base rests on the desires of Gen Z and Millennials to "buy from people I want to support" and "connect with people I can empathize with."

Silicon Valley's Build in Public / CLG, by contrast, is primarily designed to quantify process-sharing as "trust capital" and link it directly to B2B SaaS-style KPIs: reducing CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), extending LTV (Lifetime Value), and increasing Expansion Revenue. Bessemer's fifth law, "Measure Your Halo," is the emblematic expression of this thinking — it tracks community size quantitatively and treats the gap between community members and paying customers as a management KPI. As data from Buffer, Indie Hackers, and Edelman demonstrate, the Silicon Valley approach rigorously models the influence of transparency and openness on purchasing decisions as measurable variables.

That said, the two are not a matter of superiority; they are, rather, complementary. The Japanese model excels at "narrative design" that generates emotional commitment, while the Silicon Valley model excels at "measurement and operational design" that scales growth. As a 2026 trend, a16z's "Ecosystem-Led Growth" and Emily Kramer's "Account-Driven GTM" are moving toward foregrounding "the founder as a human story" while maintaining quantitative design — converging, as a result, toward the Japanese-style Process Economy. Meanwhile, Japanese companies such as CAMPFIRE, SmartHR, and Eight are adopting measurement metrics and community management platforms (Common Room, Bettermode, Orbit, etc.), increasingly incorporating the Silicon Valley CLG framework. A bidirectional convergence of both approaches is highly likely to shape the future global standard.

What matters is that both paths have genuine and legitimate positives. The Japanese-style Process Economy sustainably implements an "economy of continued support" that escapes feature-based competition, providing fertile ground for cultivating cultural and creative capital that resists quantification. The American-style BiP / CLG lowers CAC in fast-scaling software businesses, maximizes customer lifetime value, and resolves the information asymmetry between founders and customers — thereby raising the overall capital efficiency of the startup ecosystem.

Chapter 8: Messages and Criticism from the VC Side — Jason Lemkin, Tiger Global, and Sequoia

SaaStr's Jason Lemkin repeatedly emphasized at his 2025 *SaaS Vibe Check* and *VC Funding in the AI Era* sessions that "the winners of 2025 are both builders and storytellers," and his SaaStr Annual—a gathering of 12,000 people—has itself become "an experimental ground for VC-driven CLG." Tiger Global, after peaking in the $12 trillion era of 2021, significantly scaled back its investment approach by 2025, raising Private Investment Partners XVII at just $2.2 billion (approximately ¥330 billion)—compared to previous funds in the $6.7–$12.7 billion (approximately ¥1–¥1.9 trillion) range—while also narrowing its annual investment count to just nine deals. This symbolizes a tectonic shift from "chasing high growth alone" to "prioritizing GTM efficiency and community health."

Sequoia Capital fully launched its *Open Source Fellowship* in 2024, providing living support—including CI infrastructure costs—to fellows involved with vLLM and Chatbot Arena. Its design of supporting two to three individuals annually over a multi-year period without taking equity signals a new posture in which VCs are investing in the very *sustenance* of OSS communities. Programs such as Lenny Rachitsky's continuation of the First Round Capital archive, and accelerator programs like Pear VC's *PearX S25* and *Fall 2025 Female Founders Circle*, have adopted a hybrid structure that uses community both as an "admission criterion" and as a "post-graduation GTM engine."

Critical voices exist as well. A piece on DEV Community titled *The Truth About "Building in Public"* warns that "BiP is not universally effective, and over-reliance on your audience can distort strategic product decisions." As the Browser Company experienced in transitioning from Arc to Dia, the challenge of "how to carry over accumulated trust and credibility when pivoting to a new direction" remains an unresolved governance problem for Silicon Valley VCs. Bessemer has addressed this by advocating for the coexistence of the principle that "the community is not an investor" with "not demanding investor-level decision-making from them," and the design of guardrails that prevent product direction from being swayed by short-term approval votes is increasingly being incorporated into future VC evaluation frameworks.

Chapter 9: The Next Moves Predicted for the Second Half of 2026 Through 2027

The following directions are being suggested by multiple VCs and industry analysts as movements likely to be observed over the next 12 to 18 months. First, as Agentic AI is implemented, there is a high likelihood that communities themselves will evolve into "human + agent hybrid networks." McKinsey's *State of AI Trust in 2026* calls this shift the "transition to the agentic era," offering the outlook that human trust-building mechanisms will become applicable to software agents as well. Platforms such as Common Room, Orbit, and Bettermode have announced full launches in the second half of 2026 for automated moderation by AI agents, power-user identification, and personalization of advocate programs.

From summer through autumn 2026, a concentration of "community-hosted conferences" is expected, including Figma Config 2026 (June 23–25, Moscone Center SF), Supabase LaunchWeek, Notion Make, Vercel's Ship event, SaaStr Annual, and on the Japanese side, IVS, Startup JAPAN EXPO, and the CAMPFIRE Awards. For investing VCs, these events serve as "venues to discover the next CLG stock," while for startups they become "stages for converting existing users into evangelists." a16z announced its *Growth Engineer Fellowship* in 2025, and the 2026 cohort is expected to focus heavily on recruiting engineers capable of analyzing community data with generative AI.

On the Japanese side, SmartHR is likely to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange during 2026 (market participants anticipate a market capitalization of around ¥160 billion), and established SaaS players such as SmartHR, Money Forward, freee, and Sansan are expected to accelerate their move toward officially incorporating a hybrid model of "Japanese-style process economy × US-style CLG" into their management KPIs. CAMPFIRE has already socially implemented "instant integration of events and crowdfunding" through Top Gun FUND and JTB Crowdfunding, and there is a possibility this will be reverse-imported as a model for Common Room in the US and for the emerging "Community Commerce" sector.

Developments on the AI side are equally noteworthy. Models like Cursor and Replit, where "the developer community itself drives GTM," are expected to connect with Anthropic's and OpenAI's developer-facing families, with full-scale cross-ecosystem flow anticipated in the second half of 2026. "Community ownership fundraising" — which opens equity to community members as Supabase has demonstrated — may also, depending on the development of the regulatory environment, spread broadly from the seed to the growth stage.

Chapter 10: Conclusion — "Making the Process Public" as the Last Remaining Defensible Moat

Bessemer's 5 Laws, a16z's *Lighthouse Playbook*, OpenView's PLG/CLG benchmarks, Sequoia's *Open Source Fellowship*, MKT1's Account-Driven GTM, and Lenny's Newsletter's Product Pass — at first glance these appear to be disparate initiatives, yet they are united by a common philosophy: "building not the finished product itself, but the process by which the product is created and the community surrounding it, as assets that cannot be commoditized." In an era where AI is commoditizing code generation, the narrative and relationships of *who built it, with what philosophy, and alongside whom* remain resources that are still extraordinarily difficult to replicate.

Japan's process economy leads the United States in one respect: it has elevated that "narrative quality" into a cultural strength. Silicon Valley's Build in Public / CLG approach, meanwhile, leads in the measurement and operational infrastructure that amplifies and reproduces those narratives at scale. As the two converge by learning from each other, heading into 2027 there is a strong likelihood that the very definition of a startup will be rewritten — from "a company that sells a product" to "an entity that co-manages both the ongoing act of creation and the community that cheers that process on."

The capital and passion that Silicon Valley VCs are pouring into this theme, and the culture of narrative design that Japan's creator communities have accumulated — at the intersection of these two forces, the next unicorn is quietly beginning to rise.

Chapter 10: Conclusion — "Making the Process Public" as the Last Remaining Defensible Moat

Bessemer's 5 Laws, a16z's *Lighthouse Playbook*, OpenView's PLG/CLG benchmarks, Sequoia's *Open Source Fellowship*, MKT1's Account-Driven GTM, and Lenny's Newsletter's Product Pass — these may appear to be unrelated initiatives at first glance, yet they are bound together by a common philosophy: "building not the finished product itself, but the process through which the product is born and the community surrounding it, as non-commoditizable assets." In an era where AI is commoditizing code generation, the narrative and relationships around *who built it, with what philosophy, and alongside whom* remain resources that are still extremely difficult to replicate.

Japan's process economy is, in some respects, ahead of the United States in sublimating that "narrative quality" into a cultural strength, while Silicon Valley-style Build in Public / CLG leads in the measurement and operational infrastructure that amplifies and reproduces that narrative at scale. As the two converge by learning from each other, it is likely that by 2027, the very definition of a startup will be rewritten — from "a company that sells a product" to "an entity that co-manages the ongoing process of creation and the community that cheers on that process."

The capital and passion that Silicon Valley VCs are pouring into this theme, and the culture of narrative design that Japan's creator communities have accumulated — at the intersection of these two forces, the next unicorn is quietly beginning to rise.

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  • The Register, "Arc frozen as The Browser Company pivots to AI-powered Dia" — https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/27/arc_browser_development_ends/
  • Fast-SaaS, "How Pieter Levels Built a $3M/Year Business with Zero Employees" — https://www.fast-saas.com/blog/pieter-levels-success-story/
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  • Indie Hackers, "Acquired by Stripe!" — https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/acquired-by-stripe
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  • CMX / Bevy — https://davidspinks.com/
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  • Kensuu, "'Process Economy' Feels Like It's About to Take Off" — https://kensuu.com/n/nf4270e069c20
  • 00:00 Studio (Zero Zero Zero Zero Studio) — https://0000.studio/about
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  • CAMPFIRE, Inc., "Cumulative Funding Total Surpasses 100 Billion Yen, Membership Exceeds 5.1 Million" — https://www.campfire.co.jp/press/2025/04/02/gmv1000/
  • CAMPFIRE, Inc., "CAMPFIRE and IVS Partner to Launch Top Gun FUND" — https://campfire.co.jp/press/2025/04/24/ivs/
  • JTB Newsroom, "JTB Launches New Service 'JTB Crowdfunding' in Partnership with CAMPFIRE" — https://www.jtbcorp.jp/jp/newsroom/2025/05/22_jtb_campfire.html
  • The Japan Times, "KKR-backed SmartHR said to be mulling Tokyo IPO later this year" — https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/04/06/companies/smarthr-considers-initial-public-offering/
  • Relic Battery, "Why Is 'Process Economy' Attracting Attention Now?" — https://relic.co.jp/battery/other/22316
  • Blackbox Event, "Startup JAPAN EXPO 2025" — https://www.blackboxjp.com/events/startup-japan-expo-2025