Hi everyone! Welcome to issue #2 of Release Notes. You can read the previous (and first) issue here.

Quick note: Links are underlined, but don’t have the blue color. Still trying to figure out how to fix it.

One of the strangest phenomena I’ve encountered in my entrepreneurship experience is the pejorative use of the term “lifestyle business”. A lifestyle business is one intentionally designed to support the owner’s way of life in terms of time, finances, flexibility, and other needs. In many cases, the owner actually enjoys doing whatever that business is. Most businesses we encounter in our daily lives are lifestyle businesses. Laundromats, auto repair garages, ice cream, trades, general contracting, small retail stores, art galleries, restaurants, salons, breweries, etc. could be, for the most part, lifestyle businesses.

The predominant narrative in our media landscape instead pushed a perspective that it was more important to launch and scale a company than be concerned with what it actually does and who it impacts. You’d sooner read about a company’s fundraising than any particularly meaningful story about what it actually does and what kind of impact it has. Endless pitch competitions featured founders who would push questionable companies with fantastical growth scenarios to trigger investor excitement and consumer confidence. Even the most publicly prominent entrepreneurs are lauded for how big their companies are and how much money they make, ignoring the often negative impacts on our daily lives. You’d think that doing work that you actually love, or work that was meaningful to a local community, which would likely structurally result in creating a lifestyle business, was neither an important nor respectable thing to do. All that seemed to matter was building a business to scale into a massive billion-dollar “unicorn” often resulting in the pursuit of risky, nonsensical, and extractive ventures and in some cases, straight-up fraud. I think many great entrepreneurs who unfortunately bought into this mindset could have instead built successful, positive, enjoyable, and locally-impactful “lifestyle” businesses.

There’s a famous press conference in which then-Alabama Crimson Tide Football coach Nick Saban responds to a reporter’s question about his team’s performance in a recent game. While the team won, Saban, an extremely successful, process-oriented coach, laments the squad’s execution and lack of focus during the game. He takes particular exception with the way in which his players buy into the media hype, lambasting the complacency that comes with it. Saban says:

“I’m trying to get our players to listen to me, instead of listening to you guys (the media). You know all that stuff you write about how good we are? And all that stuff they hear on ESPN? It’s like poison. You know what I mean? Like taking poison. Like rat poison! I’m asking them, ‘are you gonna listen to me or are you  gonna listen to those guys?”

That year's Crimson Tide squad would go on to win the National Championship, yet Saban’s perspective in the context of his coaching methods offers an interesting insight into how our discourse created the wrong kind of mindset in entrepreneurship versus what it ought to be. I think we were similarly fed a bunch of “rat poison”! Building and running a business is a mostly thankless task. You’re not always being written about in glossy magazines or sitting on a panel pontificating about industry trends while overlooking the Manhattan skyline. You most likely won’t end up on the cover of Forbes, Business Insider, or Wired. Starting a company became as much about image, visibility, and making as much money as possible which directly influenced the types of businesses people ended up in as well as how they ran them. For many, nothing mattered except purely obtaining the right outcome. However, I see signs that the tide (no pun intended) is turning and we’re getting a lot closer to the place where people pursue entrepreneurship with the same enthusiasm and vigor, but directed towards things that really matter.

Sake

In 2022 during a Ceylon showcase for Tokyo Fall Fashion Week, I visited Nomura Shoten, a bar located in the city’s Okachi-machi area. While I don’t have a favorite bar, it ranks pretty highly on my list and I try to stop by as often as I can when in the city. W. David Marx’s essay on taste and congruence does a far better job than I ever could on explaining what makes it such a great bar. The bar’s strongest point is its focus on showcasing smaller spirit brands from all over Japan. From my first visit onward, I became interested in exploring niche wine and spirits from Japan, first focusing on natural wine and eventually looking into sake, shochu, and other spirits.

Sake specifically wasn’t on my radar until a trip the following year, where I was able to stop by a local branch of the shop Imadeya, which stocks a few hundred different sake brands. In the US, outside of a few small shops in major cities, we’re typically only exposed to a handful of brands, which is a real shame because the world of Japanese sake is incredibly deep and rich. First, a bit of historical context: Japan’s government started taxing alcohol in the early to mid 14th century and by the late 19th century, sake amounted to nearly 35% of all incoming tax revenue. That’s how important the category is. While there have only 6000 brewery licenses issued ever, roughly 33% are currently operational. Additionally, about 92% of these remaining breweries produce less than 100,000 liters of sake annually. There are no more licenses available and there hasn’t been a concentrated effort to elicit a major policy change, meaning that if a brewery dies, unless someone comes and revives it, it is effectively gone forever. Even in revival, a brewery may only be legally allowed to produce sake for export only. Concentration of the beverage industry doesn’t help either. In terms of domestic consumption and export, Suntory, Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo control about 95% of the market across all beer, wine, and spirits. It seemed like an interesting category to get involved in!

I’d been intrigued by the idea of providing people more access to this world of sake, as consumers and eventually visitors (similar to wine tours in Napa). Given the sheer amount of inbound tourism into Japan, it seemed like the opportunity for cultural exploration into what is (at least from my perspective) an incredibly deep niche. Additionally, the potential economic impact it might provide for struggling or shrinking breweries made it a compelling project to work on. 

Antler Japan (& Sake pt. 2)

Last April, I joined Antler Tokyo’s Spring 2025 cohort with the idea of creating a platform connecting those thousands of small-scale producers in Japan to wholesalers and retailers in the U.S. The goal was to create a way to access the rich world of Japanese beer, wine, sake, and spirits by independent producers, some of whom have been making their products for over 1000 years. You read that right. Some breweries have been in operation since before the year 1000. Sometimes, I think about how high the quality of a product you make must be to be able to stay in business that long. What kind of incredible knowledge and techniques have been passed down by perhaps 30 or more generations of brewers? 

Unfortunately, after a 10-week sprint to build a team around the idea, we failed to secure an initial investment from the incubator and were shown the door. What was the feedback given? Not leveraging enough AI (and supporting engineers) to create a quickly scalable company with a defensible technological moat. There wasn’t an obvious path to becoming an enormous tech company. Could the platform have become a “unicorn”? I doubt it. I wouldn’t even want to run whatever company that would have been. Going back to my original thought on mindset, it turned out that Antler was still operating under the previous model, where growth was important above all. I think the question of whether or not connecting the world to Japanese craft spirits is worth investing any tech dollars into is an open one. But if those dollars are coming in with the idea that Antler’s Japan program is simply replicating existing Silicon Valley dynamics 5000 miles across the ocean, then the company concept was absolutely the wrong fit.

As many of you have likely read, the vast majority of the companies you’re hearing about are either AI themselves or becoming AI-related in some way. You might even personally be working at some of these companies! Whether the entire business is the technology itself or claiming to use the technology to facilitate whatever the business aims to do, the reality is that so much investment funding is going towards this as to make it feel inevitable in every aspect of our lives. It’s a real shame. 

Differences aside, I found the program to be immensely beneficial. We met so many incredible people! There were so many interesting stories and pathways into the industry. Some makers started their own winery after decades of suffering through corporate job malaise. One was a 20th generation owner continuing their family’s legacy of rice farming and sake brewing. Another makes everything through organic fermentation, with products extending outward from beer, soy sauce, sake, etc. I’m still convinced that alcohol is the original “social media”. We still talk and are figuring out how to bring their stories and products to more people. Attempting to build this company was also a great way to learn about how alcohol regulation in the U.S. keeps prices high, variety low, and props up numerous mini-fiefdoms of wholesalers in the market who aren’t incentivized to seek out more interesting options. 🙂

Grid110

I recently joined Grid 110’s Community Business Accelerator as one of its mentors-in-residence. While I never participated in their programming with Ceylon, I wish I had! Grid 110 is a Los Angeles-based accelerator that seeks to make entrepreneurship more accessible and inclusive as well as creating more enriching outcomes for the communities its entrepreneurs serve. Through the CBA, we’ve been working directly with founders who are tackling all kinds of challenges ranging from food deserts to elder and disabled caregiving to finding climate-positive employment and even new mycological approaches to the difficulties of motherhood. Even in short conversations with founders I don’t directly mentor, I’ve learned a tremendous amount. 

In comparison to other incubators and accelerator programs, where Grid 110 stands out is in its focus on founders that are building for those in the immediate area. Nothing is an abstraction. From the inside, what stands out to me is the passion and dedication these entrepreneurs have for what they do and the way they continue to show up through all the challenges inherent in running a company because they know how important the work they do is. It’s deeply refreshing to be reminded that entrepreneurship can absolutely be a framework to show up for people you care about. If you take a look at each company, you’ll find someone working on something that truly matters. There’s no requirement for them to be large to be impactful. They don’t need to be exceptionally well-capitalized to be effective and meaningful. The pervasive idea that a company needs to solve a really big problem and have the largest possible addressable market? It doesn’t apply here. That mentality has resulted in a lot of deeply problematic outcomes when it comes to startups, especially in technology. We so often hear these founders who say they want to “change the world”. Opening a grocery store in a food desert in South LA changes the world for a lot of people! These companies defy that old mindset about how this is all supposed to go. It’s been through working with my mentees that I can see the tide turning when it comes to what I believe the next phase in entrepreneurial culture is going to be. 

Links

If you happen to be interested in sake and are in Tokyo, you should visit Kuwabara Shoten in Gotanda.

For a good selection of sake to take back home from your travels, any Imadeya shop will do. The Ginza Six branch is probably the easiest to find. 

Gardening Leave is still available. Thank you to those who bought one in the last month!

See you next month.

Patrick