"Is 10X Still a Startup?"

During a recent 1on2, a small-group conversation exploring 10X's history and values, an employee asked me, "Is 10X still a startup?" I answered that the question itself, framed this way, isn't quite the right one to ask. In this post, I want to put into words the thinking behind that answer, using two qualities, industriality and creativity, as my guide.

What the Startup Label Measures

At bottom, a startup can be defined as a company pursuing the scale of its enterprise value. Under that definition, a company is measured on a single axis, size, and I don't believe a Japanese company will ever reach a scale that rivals OpenAI or Anthropic on that axis. If that's true, then giving a meaningful answer to "is it still a startup" requires choosing a different framework than one based on scale.

Industry and Creation

When I thought about what makes 10X distinctly itself, two keywords came to mind first: industry and creation. My approach was to dig into the nature of each of these concepts and deepen my understanding of the company through them.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I think the essence of industry lies in sustaining itself by circulating all kinds of things, capital and labor, but also people, goods, data, and emotions, and in forming a part of society through that circulation. The platforms we aim to build are tools for keeping that circulation running efficiently.

Creation, on the other hand, is essentially about taking concepts and hopes for the future that are floating around loose and scattered in the world and giving them concrete, grounded form. Both "buying groceries online" and "ordering with AI" existed as concepts long before now. Value gets created only when they're delivered to stores as something realized in their everyday operations.

10X's Relationship to the Retail Industry

The main players in the retail industry are retailers themselves, not 10X. 10X doesn't operate within the retail industry itself; we operate in a different industry altogether, one that provides platforms for retail. On top of that, we run our Stailer business so that the retail industry can keep holding together and enduring.

If we split "holding together and enduring" apart, holding together is the question of whether a circulation closes on itself, and enduring is the question of whether it can keep going as its environment changes. Industriality handles the former, and that's where 10X supports retail's circulation. Creativity handles the latter, and that's where 10X brings new concepts down to the field in response to changes like population decline and labor shortages, updating what runs through that circulation.

By nature, an industry is supposed to renew its own circulation from within. But the more successful a company is with its existing business, the more rational it becomes to protect that business, and the harder it gets to make discontinuous leaps. This tendency, known as the innovator's dilemma, shows up across many industries, not just retail. That's precisely why I believe an outside party, one with no existing business to protect, needs to take on renewing the industry as a whole rather than serving any single company. This is my hypothesis for why 10X exists.

An Example of Renewal Through AI and Algorithms

10X's AI pricing and AI ordering are one example of this kind of renewal from the outside.

In retail, sales data has to turn into decisions about pricing and order quantities, and those decisions have to become action in the store, before they can lead to the next round of sales. For a long time, those decisions rested on the experience and intuition of buyers and store managers, but amid labor shortages, it's become a real burden for each retailer to keep securing people who can do that work.

10X takes on part of that decision-making, building an environment where the same quality of judgment gets made over and over, even as the people in charge change. Rather than having every retailer build the same mechanism in-house, we provide it as something the whole industry shares. That strengthens the continuity of the circulation, and at the same time, it's an act of creation: turning the knowledge that used to live only in an expert's head into something that actually runs.

The "Company That Has Found Its Purpose" Label

In place of the startup label, the question I hold up as the important one is this: how does this company exist in and engage with society, and can it define that purpose and live up to it? What this standard measures isn't the size of the company but its relationship to society.

Defining that purpose means taking the "what are we here for" that floats around in the heads of leadership and employees and giving it the shape of a mission and a credo. That's creation itself. Living up to that purpose means making decision after decision in line with it and keeping the circulation going. That's industriality.

From my own experience running a company, setting a purpose is extremely hard. It's something the people running a company only manage to squeeze out after a lot of trial and error, reflection, and back-and-forth with the environment. Today's 10X has defined itself through a mission and a credo, and we're walking straight toward them, so I can say with some pride that 10X is a company that has found its purpose. But that pride has to keep being earned, decision by decision, like choosing the sustainability of the whole industry over the request of a single company when the two come into conflict.

Credo and Mission

Our credo, "Build 10x," describes a company that creates something discontinuous yet important to how an industry works, without tying itself to any one domain like retail.

Our mission, "Opening the Future of Retail," points to the mid-to-long-term work we're committed to for the next decade.

With the mission alone, it's unclear who we'll be once we've achieved it. With the credo alone, it's unclear where we'll plant ourselves. That's why I think having both matters.

None of this rules out pursuing scale on the way to that mission. We aim to become the de facto platform because supporting an entire industry simply requires that kind of scale.

Answering "Is It Still a Startup?"

Whether 10X is a startup is no longer the essential question.

10X is a company that defines, and keeps living up to, a purpose: making sure the retail industry holds together and keeps going. When I introduce 10X, I want to describe it through that purpose.

Industriality, which sustains the circulation, and creativity, which renews it, are the two defining qualities that let us live up to that purpose.