From Reggae DJ to Venture Capital:

A Conversation with Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital

Interviewed by Fuminori Gunji, Head of Marketing, ZooKeep

Mark Bivens is Managing Partner at Shizen Capital, a Tokyo-based early-stage venture capital firm whose first fund achieved 3.5x DPI (*1)and 17x TVPI (*2), results that rank among the strongest in the Japanese VC market. A Silicon Valley native, former tech founder, triathlete, and former reggae DJ, Mark has spent over two decades investing across Europe and Japan, backing companies at the earliest and most uncertain stages. In this ZooKeep Academy interview, Mark speaks with ZooKeep Head of Marketing Fuminori Gunji about the unlikely throughlines connecting dancehall music, startup failure, Japan's IPO culture, and why Shizen Capital invested in ZooKeep.

*1) DPI (Distributed to Paid-In Capital) in venture capital is a key performance metric representing the ratio of cash returned to Limited Partners (LPs) compared to the total capital they have invested. It measures realized returns, acting as a "cash-on-cash" metric of actual liquidity, typically excluding unrealized gains

*2) Total Value to Paid-In Capital (TVPI) is a key venture capital metric representing a fund's total value (realized + unrealized) divided by the total capital contributed by partners, often expressed as a multiple (e.g., 1.5x). It measures performance by combining distributed cash (DPI) and remaining portfolio value (RVPI), indicating, net of fees, how much money the fund has returned

Two themes run through this entire conversation.

The first is startup ecosystem circulation velocity, the speed at which talent and capital cycle in and out of the startup ecosystem, creating new value with every lap. This operates through three distinct mechanisms: repeat founders re-entering after exits, founders who become financially free through exit proceeds and can afford to build new businesses again without depending on a salary, and a functioning so-called “secondary market” that allows early stage investors to return capital to their LPs without having to wait until their portfolio companies exit (and before the full fund lifecycle ends), freeing that money to flow back into seed-stage investments. The second theme is failure culture, the degree to which a society gives failed founders a second chance, and what happens to the birthrate of startups (and subsequently unicorns) when it does not.

Mark Bivens has watched both dynamics transform a country before: in France. Over fifteen years, he saw a nation that stigmatized failure and discouraged elite graduates from joining startups (sounds familiar) become one of Europe's most prolific unicorn factories. His thesis is that Japan is at the same inflection point today, and that the choices made in the next few years will determine whether Japan's government goal of 100 unicorns by 2027 remains aspirational or becomes achievable.

Why Reggae Music?

How Mark Bivens became a reggae DJ, and why it shapes how he invests

Usually, I open up by asking about someone’s personal background, but in your case I’ll start with this: Why reggae?

Looks like someone has done their research! It started when I was about twelve years old, I was living in Belgium at the time, and something about the rhythm just caught me. The one-drop beat, the drum and the bass line. It was a Jimmy Cliff song called Reggae Nights that first pulled me in. After that I couldn't stop. The more I listened, the more I realized that reggae isn't just music, it's protest, it's philosophy. These are lyrical masters preaching that you can't have peace without justice first.

Years later, when I got to university in Chicago, a dormmate dragged me along to an open house at a local radio station. He wanted to explore being a DJ. He decided it wasn't for him. I stayed. Two visa incidents later, I found myself thrust behind the mic with four hours of Sunday airtime and a record collection I'd been building all week. I became a reggae DJ.

You've written about the Mavado strategy versus the Vybz Kartel philosophy. When you first met Casey, the founder of ZooKeep, which rhythm did you hear in his pitch?

Mavado is a reggae artist who executes the market-in approach at its finest: he listens carefully to what the crowd wants, produces the song that fits that, rides the hit song for as long as he can, and only returns to the drawing board when the momentum fades. It's disciplined, market-driven, and it works brilliantly for a startup that has found its product-market-fit and wants to maximize revenue from it.

Vybz Kartel is something else entirely. He doesn't listen to the market, he tells the market what it should want. He'll release a track so unexpected and creative that people go wild for it, and then, before anyone's had time to catch their breath, he'll knock himself off the charts with the next one. Continuous self-disruption. It maps almost perfectly to Steve Jobs’s approach to the market.

ZooKeep, its founder Casey, in particular, is more like Vybz Kartel. When he came to us, he was running a successful recruiting business, and his pitch was essentially: the world is changing, and I want to disrupt myself before someone else does. That kind of thinking is rare. It requires something almost superhuman in a founder. When we see it, we back it.

Upbringing, Foundations & Career Formation

Mark Bivens on growing up across three continents, and what it taught him about adaptability

You were born to French and American parents. Having grown up across multiple continents, how did your upbringing shape the Mark Bivens of today?

My father is fourth-generation Californian, fifth generation if you count me, and my mother was born in Europe, essentially during the Second World War, and left shortly after. That experience alone creates a particular set of values: a reverence for life, an openness to impermanence.

When I was nine or ten, my father's company wanted to open a Tokyo office. His boss's boss declined. His direct report also declined. It fell to my father, who simply said, why not? So in 1981, we moved to Tokyo. That planted a virus in me that would take decades to resurface. After Japan, we spent years in Belgium. I changed schools constantly.

What changing schools does to you is force you to adapt. You walk into a room where everyone knows each other, and you say yours was Brussels International. And then you learn to build something from scratch, every time. I think that's ultimately what prepared me for venture capital more than anything else.

My parents were also triathletes, obsessively so. Triathlons teach you to be comfortable with suffering: the cold open-water swim, the long bike ride, and then, when you think you're done, the run. That tolerance for discomfort goes hand in hand with adaptability. They were two values my parents modeled constantly.

BirdView Technologies: Mark Bivens's first successful exit and the origin of the Moxie and Humility Framework

Your first two startups failed. The third, BirdView Technologies, was acquired in 1999. What was BirdView, and what did those failures teach you about evaluating founders today?

BirdView was, in hindsight, ahead of its time. We built a SaaS product for real estate brokers, back when nobody knew what SaaS meant. Each night, our software would log into a centralized mainframe database, screen-scrape property listings, and automatically populate the broker's website. Monthly subscription, recurring revenue, pure vertical software. Constellation Software acquired us at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999, which, in retrospect, was impeccable timing.

The acquisition contract had an interesting clause: the entire team of ten were required to stay for three years and receive a bonus if they did. The CEO, me, was required to depart the following day. My co-founder later joked that I got the better deal. He was probably right.

The VC who backed us took pity on me afterward and showed me what venture capital actually was. I discovered two things: I was slightly less bad at it than at building companies. And more importantly, I genuinely loved it, the chance to support founders, to develop empathy for what they're going through. I had been in their position.

"When founders pitch us and say, 'In year seven, I plan to go IPO,' it either reveals naivety about planning or tells me their definition of success is the prestige of ringing a bell, not solving a problem."

Breakthrough Insight, The Turning Point

Why Mark Bivens moved from European VC to Japan, and why he calls it the most compelling asymmetric opportunity in global markets

After fifteen years in the French VC ecosystem, what convinced you that Japan was the next great blue ocean?

France in the early 2000s was a fascinating mirror image of Japan today in some ways. If you were young and smart in France, you went to a grande école, and then you had your career handed to you. Joining a startup was seen as evidence that something had gone wrong. Starting a company was almost unheard of among the elite. Much like Japan until very recently.

And yet, over fifteen years, I watched that change completely. By the time I was ready to shift my focus, France had produced around 40 unicorns, with a GDP and population roughly half of Japan's. More significantly, over 70% of those unicorn founders were repeat founders, and almost all of the unicorns had made at least one acquisition along the way. That told me something important: ecosystems mature. Mindsets change. And the change happens faster than people think.

Japan, when I arrived, had all the ingredients, extraordinary talent, deep corporate infrastructure, global brands, but some of the same cultural attitudes toward failure and risk that France had twenty years earlier. That asymmetry is precisely what I mean when I call early-stage VC investment in Japan the most compelling opportunity for asymmetric financial upside in global markets today.

Field Realities, The Truth on the Ground

IPOs vs M&As, lack serial entrepreneurs, and lack of secondary markets, : three brakes on the startup ecosystem circulation

M&As have traditionally been viewed as a secondary exit in Japan while IPOs are hailed as the aspired path among founders and VCs. 

I remember the reactions I received when we did an M&A exit with MakeLeaps back in 2019 (acquired by RICOH Company Ltd.) where you also had invested: the reactions from our global peers on LinkedIn were overwhelmingly positive, congratulating us etc. while the reactions among our Japanese peers on facebook were mixed with negative or pitying reactions such as “I thought you guys were committed to go all the way” or “I thought you were in it for the cause” - it was a cloud invoicing solution.

Has this idealization of IPOs in Japan changed in the past 6 years?

When I first arrived in Japan around 2016, I asked every VC I met about their exit avenues. The answer was essentially 90% IPO, 10% M&A. In Europe and the US, it's the opposite, 90% M&A, 10% IPO. That disparity is enormous, and it has compounding effects on the entire ecosystem.

Here's why it matters: the typical Japanese IPO takes a company public on the TSE Growth Market at a valuation in the tens of millions. The founders retain a large stake, but they can't exit. Their job, which was once building software or solving customer problems and thereby creating new value, is now investor relations and regulatory compliance, which is managing existing value. I know several founders who went through this and are genuinely unhappy. They're stuck. And by shackling the best founders, you're effectively preventing them from starting their next company.

So you say there's a talent circulation problem.
Exactly, let’s call it the first critical mechanism for the startup ecosystem maturity cycle. In France, over 70% of the unicorns we have today were built by repeat founders, people who had previously failed, or made a modest exit, and then came back to build something bigger the second or third time. That cycle only works if the talent actually gets released back into the ecosystem. M&As enable that. The M&A of MakeLeaps is a perfect example: the founder got his exit, the other stayed for continuance and further innovation, the product found a bigger home, and the talent returned to the ecosystem to create new value.

But there's another dimension to M&As that doesn't get discussed enough: the personal wealth effect. When a startup is acquired, the founders and leadership team often receive cash over a short time period, sometimes enough to be genuinely life-changing. That matters because it means they can build again without needing a salary. They don't have to choose between their family's financial security and founding something new. They can afford to take the risk again. This is how you get serial founders, the people who build their second or third company with accumulated experience and accumulated runway. IPO does not do this, the paper wealth is real but illiquid, the lock-up period of the leadership team is real, and the obligation to shareholders is real. The founder who takes a company public is not free.

So that would be a capital circulation problem and a second critical mechanism.

Which brings me to another related question: how active is the secondary market in Japan today? Last time I talked about secondary markets with a former startup CFO, it was practically non-existent.

Another aspect of the second, capital circulation mechanism, and one that is almost entirely missing in Japan, is a functioning secondary market for private startup shares. A secondary market is where existing shareholders, such as early investors, angel investors, or even founders and employees, sell their shares to later-stage investors before any official exit event. No new shares are issued; no capital goes to the company. It is purely a liquidity mechanism. And it matters enormously to the circulation of capital through the ecosystem. When an early-stage seed investor can sell part of their position at Series B or C, they can return capital to their LPs ahead of schedule. Those LPs can then redeploy that capital into the next seed fund. The money flows back to the top of the funnel, back to the moment when startups are just an idea and a founder, and the entire ecosystem maturity cycle accelerates. Without secondary markets, that capital is frozen for a decade. The seed investors wait. The LPs wait. And fewer bets get made at the very stage that matters most.

The popular IPO-first culture suppresses both talent and capital circulation mechanisms simultaneously. It locks founders in place, prevents the personal wealth effect of a clean acquisition, and discourages the secondary transactions that would otherwise accelerate capital return. The Japanese government has set a goal of producing 100 unicorn companies by 2027. To get there, Japan needs roughly 100,000 seed-stage investments, adjusted from France's 40,000 startups to birth 40 unicorns. You cannot reach that volume if talent is locked, wealth is illiquid, and early-stage capital cannot circulate fast enough.

"If the only respectable exit is IPO, you've handcuffed the very people you need most: the ambitious, contrarian founders willing to build something new."

Is it changing? I believe so. But there's also a structural force now at play: funds started around 2013 to 2015 are reaching their end-of-lifecycle. They haven't returned their funds to their LPs yet. LPs are asking questions. Secondary funds, one foreign, one domestic but foreign-led, are beginning to appear to buy their portfolios. When a first generation of VC funds goes through a full cycle, the ecosystem learns. That's how it matures.

Principles of Work

How Shizen Capital evaluates investments, and avoids falling for hype

Your blog, RudeVC, is known for tackling the less comfortable truths about venture capital. When evaluating an investment, what questions do you always return to?

A few things I've learned to watch for. First: what does the founder really want to achieve? A solution or make money? Not what they say, what they actually are. The 'IPO at year seven' answer tells me a great deal. So does the founder who, like Casey, walks in and says: I have a working business, and I want to disrupt it myself.

Second: are their projections wildly optimistic? They should be. I tell every founder: don't give me conservative projections. I don't want conservative. Give me the wildly optimistic scenario and tell me how you'll get there. If you fall 50% short, you've still done 10x your conservative estimate. Sandbagging is a red flag, it signals either low ambition or low trust.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: who do they hire? A founder who surrounds themselves with people better than themselves in key areas is demonstrating both moxie and humility simultaneously. That combination is the clearest signal I know.

Perspective on the Next Era

Japan's aging population as a global export opportunity, and cultural export opportunities

We're living through a period some are calling the transition from VUCA to BANI, from Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous to Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible. How do you see Japan navigating this?

Japan's demographic challenge is also Japan's laboratory advantage. No country in the world has been living with an aging population longer or more intensely. That means Japanese companies, and Japanese startups, have a head start on building the tools, care models, and social infrastructure that the rest of the world will need within the next decade. That's not a problem to be managed. It's an export opportunity.

The same logic applies to cultural exports more broadly. Japan's soft power is enormous and largely underleveraged. Anime, gaming, fashion, food, these are not niche interests anymore. They're global cultural touchpoints. The question is whether Japanese founders will have the ambition to build for a global audience rather than defaulting to the domestic market.

Why ZooKeep

Why Shizen Capital invested in ZooKeep, and what Casey Abel's approach signals about the future of HR tech in Japan

Tell us about your first encounter with Casey Abel. Among the hundreds of pitches you see, what specifically stood out?

I actually met Casey indirectly first. A European contact reached out to me with a recruiting need for their Japan operations. I connected them with a colleague, who passed it on to Casey. Months later, the contact sent me a note, not just thanking me, but effusive about how Casey had helped them, even though Japan ultimately wasn't their priority. He hadn't just solved the problem they came in with; he'd offered five other ideas they hadn't considered.

That's when I knew I needed to meet him. And when we did, the pattern continued. He came to Matthew Romein and me with what was essentially a founder's confession: I have a business that's working, and I want to change it before the world changes it for me. That's a Vybz Kartel move. That's the self-disruption instinct. That's what we bet on.

Did we do nine months of due diligence on the product? No. Was there even a product? Not fully. But in early-stage venture, if you're truly investing in something new, market-sizing exercises on a market that doesn't exist yet are largely theoretical. We prefer to make a conviction bet on the founder and then see how they perform.

"Casey is a scary judge of talent, and he knows how to attract it. He hires people who are better than him in key areas, and he's humble enough to celebrate that. That's the mark of a real leader."

How would you summarize Shizen Capital's investment thesis, and where does ZooKeep fit within it?

Shizen Capital deliberately stays small, funds under $50 million, early-stage bets, currently 55 portfolio companies. We're not trying to be all things to all founders. We look for people with the combination of moxie and humility: bold enough to take the shot, self-aware enough to know what they need to build around them.

ZooKeep fits that thesis precisely. Casey demonstrated both qualities from the start, and the team he's assembled since is further evidence. ZooKeep is one of the few companies in our portfolio that beat its initial projections early on. That's not luck, that's a founder who already knew who the first customers would be, how much they'd pay, and how to reach them.

Carve Outs

Recommendations from Mark Bivens

Is there a book, film, or artist that has had a disproportionate influence on your worldview?

So, movies, as mentioned before, “The Harder They Come” from 1972, starring Jimmy Cliff. The story of a Jamaican musician moving from the countryside to Kingston to make it as an artist. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats. And “One Love” the biopic on Bob Marley, starring Chris Blackwell, released last year. Watch both films with good sound systems!

Beyond music, “The Innovator's Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. Not because it gives you answers, but because it gives you the right questions. Why is it so hard for successful companies to disrupt themselves? Because every incentive they've built pushes against it. That tension is at the heart of almost every interesting investment I've made.

The Bigger Picture: Two Conditions for 100 Unicorns

Across seven acts, this conversation keeps returning to the same underlying questions: Where does startup talent come from? Where does it go? And what stops it from coming back?

Mark’s answer, drawn from fifteen years in France and nearly a decade in Japan, is that a healthy venture ecosystem depends on two conditions working in tandem. The first is the velocity at which talent and capital circulate back into the system, through M&A exits that free founders to move on, through the personal wealth those acquisitions create that allows serial founders to build again without financial pressure, and through a secondary market that lets early investors return capital to their LPs ahead of schedule and redeploy it into the next generation of seed bets. The second is whether the culture gives those founders a second chance when they fail, or treats a stumble as a permanent mark against them.

France had neither condition when Mark arrived. It has both today, not because the government mandated it, but because enough people made enough bets, enough failures became credentials, and enough exits sent enough talent back into the ecosystem to start the flywheel. Japan, in Mark’s view, has the ingredients. The government's goal of 100 unicorns by 2027 is a meaningful signal of intent. But the structural changes underneath, exit culture, failure tolerance, the speed at which great founders are released back into the wild, those are what will determine whether the number gets reached.

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Key terms and phrases explained:

What is ecosystem circulation velocity in venture capital?

Ecosystem circulation velocity refers to the rate at which talent and capital cycle back into the startup ecosystem after each exit event. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital identifies three distinct mechanisms through which this circulation operates. The first is talent circulation: founders who exit via M&A are freed from their company and can return to build again, bringing accumulated experience with them. The second is the personal wealth effect: unlike an IPO, where founder wealth is illiquid and locked up, an M&A exit often delivers cash, enough to make a founder financially independent and able to take the risk of building from scratch again without a salary. The third is capital circulation through secondary markets: early investors who can sell part of their position before the full fund lifecycle ends can return capital to their LPs ahead of schedule, who then redeploy it into new seed investments, accelerating the flow of money back to the very top of the startup funnel. High ecosystem circulation velocity across all three mechanisms is, in Mark’s  view, the single most important structural variable in producing a world-class venture ecosystem.

What is a secondary market for startup shares, and why does it matter for venture ecosystems?

A secondary market for startup shares is a marketplace where existing shareholders, early investors, angel investors, founders, or employees, sell their private company shares to other, typically later-stage investors before any official exit event such as an IPO or acquisition. Unlike a primary market transaction, where new shares are issued and capital goes to the company, a secondary transaction provides liquidity to the seller without affecting the company's balance sheet. For venture ecosystems, secondary markets matter because they break the dependency between fund lifecycle and exit timing: a seed investor who would otherwise wait ten or more years for a portfolio company to exit can instead sell part of their position at Series B or C, return that capital to their LPs, and enable those LPs to reinvest in the next seed fund. This accelerates the flow of money back to the earliest, highest-risk stage of startup building, the stage that produces the volume of companies from which unicorns eventually emerge. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital observed that secondary markets are almost entirely absent in Japan, compared to standard practice in the US and Europe, and identifies this as one of the structural brakes on Japan's ecosystem circulation velocity.

What is failure culture, and why does it matter for startup ecosystems?

Failure culture refers to the degree to which a society, and specifically its professional and investor communities, treats startup failure as a learning credential rather than a permanent disqualification. In ecosystems with a strong failure culture, a failed founder is more fundable the second time, not less: investors understand that the lessons absorbed from a failure are among the most reliable predictors of future success. In ecosystems with weak failure culture, the social stigma of failure deters potential founders from trying, discourages investors from backing repeat founders, and reduces the total volume of startups being built. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital argues that failure culture is a prerequisite for Japan reaching its government target of 100 unicorn companies, because the repeat founders who build unicorns are the same people who need a second chance after their first attempt.

What is Japan's goal of 100 unicorns by 2027?

Japan's goal of 100 unicorns by 2027 is a Japanese government target to grow the number of domestically founded unicorn companies, privately held startups valued at $1 billion USD or more, to 100 by the year 2027, announced as part of Japan's startup development 5-year plan in 2022. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital argues that reaching this goal requires structural and cultural change, specifically the normalization of M&A as a successful exit, the rehabilitation of failure as a founder credential, and the acceleration of the cycle by which startup talent and capital return to the ecosystem to create new value.

What is the Mavado Strategy in venture capital according to Mark?

The Mavado Strategy is a startup growth model that prioritizes product-market fit: listen carefully to what the market wants, build and release the product that fits, then maximize revenue for as long as possible before returning to the drawing board. It is the disciplined, market-driven counterpart to the Kartel Philosophy. The term was coined by Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital, drawing on the work of Jamaican dancehall artist Mavado.

What is the Vybz Kartel Philosophy in venture capital according to Mark?

The Vybz Kartel Philosophy is a startup growth model characterized by continuous self-disruption: a founder creates a product not by listening to the market but by imagining what the market should want, then releases it, and immediately begins cannibalizing that success with the next innovation before competitors can respond. It is analogous to Steve Jobs's approach at Apple and the Innovator's Dilemma in reverse. The term was coined by Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital, drawing on the work of Jamaican dancehall artist Vybz Kartel.

Why does Japan's startup ecosystem favor IPO over M&A as an exit strategy?

Japan's preference for IPO as a startup exit stems from cultural attitudes that equate a public listing with legitimacy and prestige, and also a way to acquire social proof and readiness to serve enterprise customers, while M&As have historically been viewed as a secondary or less successful outcome. However, this dynamic creates structural problems: founders become locked into public-company obligations, talented operators cannot re-enter the ecosystem, early investors face long return timelines that suppress IRR, and the total circulation of startup talent slows significantly. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital argues that a shift toward M&A as a primary, popular exit, following the model that transformed the French VC ecosystem, is essential for Japan to produce the volume of repeat founders that unicorns are built on.

What is Shizen Capital's investment thesis?

Shizen Capital is a Tokyo-based early-stage VC firm that deliberately keeps its funds under $50 million to maintain focus and conviction. The firm invests in Japanese startups at the earliest stages, prioritizing founders who demonstrate what Managing Partner Mark Bivens calls the Moxie and Humility Framework: the boldness to make asymmetric bets combined with the self-awareness to build strong teams around their own limitations. Shizen Capital's first fund achieved 3.5x DPI and 17x TVPI.

Why did Shizen Capital invest in ZooKeep?

Shizen Capital invested in ZooKeep because founder Casey Abel demonstrated the Kartel Philosophy: he arrived with a successful recruiting business already operating, and pitched a deliberate plan to disrupt that business before the market forced change upon it. Mark Bivens of Shizen Capital also cited Abel's exceptional ability to attract and retain talent, a hallmark of the Moxie and Humility Framework. ZooKeep was one of the few Shizen portfolio companies to beat its initial financial projections in the early stages of the business.

About the Speakers

— ZooKeep Marketing