03 Dec, 2025

Quick announcement: I'll be visiting Japan in April, 2026 for about a month and will be on Honshu for most of the trip. Please email me recommendations. If you live nearby, let's have coffee?

I've always been fascinated by old, multi-generational Japanese businesses. My leisure-watching on YouTube is usually a long video of a Japanese craftsman—sometimes a 10th or 11th generation—making iron tea kettles, or soy sauce, or pottery, or furniture.

Their dedication to craft—and acknowledgment that perfection is unattainable—resonates with me deeply. Improving in their craft is an almost spiritual endeavour, and it inspires me to engage in my crafts with a similar passion and focus.

Slow, consistent investment over many years is how beautiful things are made, learnt, or grown. As a society we forget this truth—especially with the rise of social media and the proliferation of instant gratification. Good things take time.

Dedication to craft in this manner comes with incredible longevity (survivorship bias plays a role, but the density of long-lived businesses in Japan is an outlier). So many of these small businesses have been around for hundreds, and sometimes over a thousand years, passed from generation to generation. Modern companies have a hard time retaining employees for 2 years, let alone a lifetime.

This longevity stems from a counter-intuitive idea of growing slowly (or not at all) and choosing to stay small. In most modern economies if you were to start a bakery, the goal would be to set it up, hire and train a bunch of staff, and expand operations to a second location. Potentially, if you play your cards right, you could create a national (or international) chain or franchise. Corporatise the shit out of it, go public or sell, make bank.

While this is a potential path to becoming filthy rich, the odds of achieving this become vanishingly small. The organisation becomes brittle due to thinly-spread resources and care, hiring becomes risky, and leverage, whether in the form of loans or investors, imposes unwanted directionality.

There's a well known parable of the fisherman and the businessman that goes something like this:

A businessman meets a fisherman who is selling fish at his stall one morning. The businessman enquires of the fisherman what he does after he finishes selling his fish for the day. The fisherman responds that he spends time with his friends and family, cooks good food, and watches the sunset with his wife. Then in the morning he wakes up early, takes his boat out on the ocean, and catches some fish.

The businessman, shocked that the fisherman was wasting so much time encourages him fish for longer in the morning, increasing his yield and maximising the utility of his boat. Then he should sell those extra fish in the afternoon and save up until he has enough money to buy a second fishing boat and potentially employ some other fishermen. Focus on the selling side of the business, set up a permanent store, and possibly, if he does everything correctly, get a loan to expand the operation even further.

In 10 to 20 years he could own an entire fishing fleet, make a lot of money, and finally retire. The fisherman then asks the businessman what he would do with his days once retired, to which the businessman responds: "Well, you could spend more time with your friends and family, cook good food, watch the sunset with your wife, and wake up early in the morning and go fishing, if you want."

I love this parable, even if it is a bit of an oversimplification. There is something to be said about affording comforts and financial stability that a fisherman may not have access to. But I think it illustrates the point that when it comes to running a business, bigger is not always better. This is especially true for consultancies or agencies which suffer from bad horizontal scaling economics.

The trick is figuring out what is "enough". At what point are we chasing status instead of contentment?

A smaller, slower growing company is less risky, less fragile, less stressful, and still a rewarding endeavour.

This is how I run Bear. The project covers its own expenses and compensates me enough to have a decent quality of life. It grows slowly and sustainably. It isn't leveraged and I control its direction and fate. The most important factor, however, is that I don't need it to be something grander. It affords me a life that I love, and provides me with a craft to practise.