In 2023 I spent a semester at Waseda University in Tokyo, away from UNC and away from the American default settings of how business works.
What stuck wasn’t the classroom. It was watching distribution executed at a level Americans don’t believe exists: konbini supply chains that restock three times a day; vending machines profitable in places no US operator would service; retail staff treating a ¥150 purchase with the ceremony of a luxury sale. Japan runs on the compounding of small, reliable, verified interactions — trust as infrastructure.
That’s the standard I brought back to our campus operations: the table is clean, the pitch is honest, the operator shows up on time, every signup is real. Reliability at small scale is what permission to scale looks like. (Also: the best marketing conversation I had that semester was with a vending-machine restocker. Talk to operators.)