Kota Kubo is starting over. On purpose.

Kota Kubo moved to the United States in 2024 with a company already behind him and a beginner’s job ahead of him. He would find leads. He would take sales meetings. He would work on making himself understood in English. A co-founder’s title travels rather better than a co-founder’s instincts. Those have to clear customs all over again.

He had co-founded Ubie with Yoshinori Abe in 2017. By the time he relocated, he had years of experience building software, recruiting engineers and designing the organisation around them. Yet his account of entering America contains an admission that gives the story its bite: while still in Japan, he had struggled to give the new business his full attention.

Success at home had become a competing appointment. The move required a practical correction. Kubo handed over much of his Japanese workload and began speaking with prospective customers himself. There is something pleasingly inconvenient about that decision. An engineer who had spent years thinking about delegation had found a job he needed to reclaim.

Two friends, one company

The partnership with Abe began well before Ubie. They were friends in high school, then took different university routes: Kubo to Kyoto University, Abe to the University of Tokyo. Graduate study brought Kubo to Tokyo too. The company would eventually give their friendship a shared name and a very full calendar.

Kubo earned his master’s degree in engineering at the University of Tokyo. His working life also included M3, where software development sat alongside web marketing. That combination matters in a founder’s biography. Writing the thing and persuading someone to use it are separate occupations; he had experience of both before starting Ubie.

The founding date was May 2017. The work leading toward it had started earlier, with research during his student years. This was an idea allowed to acquire some mileage before it acquired a company. The familiar startup tale likes a single flash of inspiration. Kubo’s route offers the quieter spectacle of someone returning to a problem after learning more ways to approach it.

The chair was part of the strategy

In 2018, Kubo described a young organisation with 15 full-time employees and roughly 30 people when partners and interns were included. Engineers made up more than half the full-time staff. Remote work, flexible hours and attention to the development environment were already part of his account of the place.

The details were wonderfully unceremonious: displays and chairs belonged in a discussion of productivity. So did access to information. Business plans, accounting information and objectives were shared internally. Kubo described an open culture in which his own suggestions could fail to carry the room.

It is a small, revealing admission from a founder. People who celebrate candour in company presentations tend to picture themselves delivering it. Kubo made room for the less glamorous experience of receiving it. A company can purchase a handsome chair quite easily. Making it possible for someone in that chair to disagree with the boss requires more care.

Software you can bear to throw away

The early engineering team did not arrive fully assembled. In a retrospective originally written in 2020, Kubo recalled periods with only two or three engineers, himself included. Recruiting meant interviews and outreach alongside the product work, with messages going out even on weekends. Hiring was stubborn work before it became a chart.

His advice from that period has a distinctly practical edge. An engineer in a young company needs to test an idea quickly and accept that the application may be discarded. Beautiful code has limited consolation value when nobody needs what it does. He also distinguished replaceable applications from underlying data that needs much more durable care.

That combination helps explain his technical temperament. He treats some decisions as experiments and others as foundations. The skill lies in telling them apart. Anyone can praise speed in the abstract. Asking a developer to throw away something they have made is a rather more searching examination of the principle.

Who gets to make the decision?

Kubo’s organisational experiments grew alongside the software. In 2021, he wrote about building a technology culture that extended into business roles. His proposals included fewer rules, more transparent information and trust in people’s ability to act without waiting for permission at every turn.

The argument had conditions. Hiring carefully and making information available were part of the arrangement. Freedom without the means to exercise judgment would be a rather expensive office decoration. Kubo’s version asked the company to supply the context as well as the discretion.

By his 2022 account, parts of Ubie used Holacracy, with responsibilities distributed through explicit roles. Other parts used a hierarchy. The distinction is useful: the company was experimenting with several ways of organising work. A person could hold responsibility for a decision without becoming everybody’s conventional supervisor. For a founder, that creates an interesting test of conviction. Delegation only becomes real when someone else is allowed to choose.

The offer letter has a question in it

Kubo’s 2023 checklist for engineers considering startups reads like a recruiter prepared to lose a candidate for the right reason. Could they tolerate uncertainty? Could they work outside their specialty? Could they accept that a fashionable engineering practice might be the wrong answer for the company’s current stage?

He asked candidates to examine the employer too. Was the problem worth their time? Were capable engineers already there? Did the company invest in technology? Compensation and the amount of available data also made the list. Idealism was expected to do some homework.

Then came the personal question: “Can you love the team from the bottom of your heart?” It is disarmingly tender language in a document about career decisions. His point concerned the difficult periods, when a business stalls or an unforeseen risk appears. The question makes recruiting a two-sided choice. A candidate should investigate the people they may have to struggle beside, as carefully as the work they hope to do.

“Can you love the team from the bottom of your heart?”Kota Kubo, 2023

New York does not accept a forwarded résumé

Ubie had begun its US business before Kubo moved. In March 2023, he described America as the next focus of the company’s international plans. JETRO had already helped with networks and an earlier launch in Singapore. Overseas ambitions were therefore part of an existing sequence of experiments.

His New York chapter brought those ambitions down to the level of daily work. In November 2024, he wrote that founders entering the US needed to spend time in the field and make important early choices themselves. He also acknowledged his own delay in committing fully. The criticism came with his fingerprints on it.

The implications extend beyond this one company. An introduction to a capable local executive cannot supply all the judgment a founder has to develop. Nor does an established domestic business conveniently stop asking for attention. Kubo’s response was physical and operational: relocate, delegate much of the work back home and resume the direct conversations from which a new business learns.

A startup can grow old surprisingly young

Then AI began changing the assumptions again. In June 2025, Kubo warned that startups raised on rapid organisational expansion could become legacy businesses themselves. Youth, apparently, is no permanent defence against having yesterday’s habits. The warning explicitly included his own company.

He argued for smaller units able to make decisions quickly and for a shorter journey from hypothesis to working prototype to feedback. He also described Ubie moving people toward new ventures and revising its culture guide and expectations around AI. These were his prescriptions for keeping an established startup responsive.

The interesting thread is continuity through revision. Kubo had spent years recruiting a team and arranging how it worked. Now he was questioning whether the organisation’s familiar measures of progress still fitted the tools available. A founder can become very attached to the machinery that helped build the company. His essay treats that attachment as something to inspect before it hardens into a policy.

Six hundred applications, and a fresh argument

In December 2025, Kubo supplied a memorable detail from New York recruiting: an engineering internship had attracted more than 600 applications in two days. He used the experience to question the preference for senior hires that he was observing in American technology companies.

His argument favoured looking for overlooked potential. He placed weight on defining problems, forming hypotheses and using AI to test ideas. These were views about hiring and the changing nature of engineering work, rather than a guarantee that a particular age or résumé produces better results.

There is a broader aspiration behind his move, too. Kubo wants more founders from Japan to attempt the American market. In his writing, he treats the lack of a comfortable playbook as part of the challenge. That makes his willingness to describe his own misjudgments useful. A polished success story can leave the next person admiring the result while learning very little about the work.

His public record has room for changes of mind. In a 2023 retrospective, he described revisions to Ubie’s organisational structure and an employee stock-option programme called U-win. The company he writes about is repeatedly under construction. Readers can follow those revisions across essays, rather than treating one appealing management idea as a permanent description of the place.

The position fits the questions he keeps returning to. Who can see the problem clearly? Who should decide? Which work needs experience, and which assumptions deserve to be disturbed? Kubo’s public writing gives those questions room to remain unsettled. There is ambition here, certainly, but also an engineer’s willingness to reopen the design. New York has given him another place to do it, and another set of people who need persuading.