I've recorded a podcast with Autify CEO Chikasawa-san a few times now. This post is about how we met and how I see him — things the podcast format didn't quite have room for.
In that conversation, we discussed Autify (a SaaS that automates E2E software testing), what the product does, and much more — worth a listen.
I met him in December 2016. Back then, his company wasn't Autify — it was called Locki, a translation CMS product. As I remember it: embed JavaScript into a GitHub README or various web pages, and they'd be automatically translated into multiple languages, letting products grow faster through automated localization. Something like that.
He was at the time interviewing potential users to understand which audiences would find the product valuable. I was one of them — he wanted to know if startups that blogged regularly would have any need to multi-language their posts. I remember meeting him at a Starbucks in Roppongi Hills where Mercari (where I worked at the time) had offices.
We spent a short time talking about the product, exchanged a few words, and that was that. My impression was: "This is a hard product to build — but he's going straight for it with real conviction. Straightforward and easy to root for."
Seven months later, I started 10X.
When I was founding the company, I knew I wanted to build something great but had zero knowledge of how to raise funds or find office space. I reached out to various senior entrepreneurs for advice — Chikasawa-san was one of them.
At that point, he still hadn't landed on a final product direction. He was working out of a competitive short-term shared office space. I needed office space, he introduced me to it, and with his strong encouragement I ended up moving in. The space was TECH LAB PAAK — a shared office run by Recruit that no longer exists. His team was leaving just as 10X was moving in, so we never actually worked side by side.
The connection continued. After both companies left TECH LAB PAAK, we both ended up setting up offices in Ningyocho, and had occasional lunches. Then he announced they were shutting down the Tokyo office and heading to Alchemist — one of the top SaaS accelerators in the US — and flew off.
The Chikasawa-san who came back six months later was clearly a different person. He had committed to the test automation market — a space with acute burning pain — signed contracts, crystallized the product, built an advisory board in the US. Non-linear growth had happened. The story since then is well known, but I genuinely believe the potential of that product, team, and market is still not fully appreciated by most people. (Those of us who've been PMs or worked in QA understand exactly how necessary what they're building is.)
What I remember most from the first time we met: we talked about how hard it is to thrive inside a large company when you have the instincts of an entrepreneur. "You kind of have no choice but to live as a founder" — something like that. Chikasawa-san had the determination to stand on his own feet from that very beginning. That's why failure hasn't stopped him. That's why the non-linear challenges keep coming, and the results are slowly becoming visible.
Of course neither of us is close to satisfied. What we're seeing right now is maybe 1% of what we're aiming for.
Someone I've been watching from the side since the very start of 10X, still running in the same lane, still pushing each other — that's a rare and valuable thing to have.
