When entrepreneur Kim Taylor began pitching her online education startup to investors, just like the fictional character Alice, she felt like she'd fallen down a rabbit hole where the normal rules of logic no longer applied. She didn’t just have to prove her idea was solid. She also endured questions about whether the online education market itself was even real. “And you know, this is a market that has several multibillion-dollar companies in it," she said. Of course, said

Founding a startup today has become the stuff of TV and movies around the world. There's even a startup podcast about, you guessed it, startups, that can provide twenty-somethings who were not too long ago eating Cheetos in their dorm rooms while guzzling red bull, the opportunity to brush the crumbs off their hoodies, break out their best Vans and ask billionaires for millions. But in Japan today, founding a tech company is not what you might call super popular. Silicon Val