Shunsuke Kawamura | Employee Interviews

The trust we build up

will one day move the world.

That conviction is why I am on the front line.

COO

Shunsuke Kawamura

After graduating from Kyoto University and working at an IT company, he became an executive officer and CRO at a startup. He grew it into an organization of 200 people within just three years of its founding and led its sale. He joined ABCD as COO in April 2024. Today he oversees sales across an integrated global supply chain, from approaching major Japanese manufacturers and trading companies to sourcing and auditing partner factories in India.

A grand future is reached only by those who build it up step by step

To be honest, I do not carry some grand picture of how I want to change the world someday. If anything, it is the opposite: I believe a big future is created not by the people who talk about it, but by the people who have built it up one step at a time.

Deciding to join was, at bottom, a rational judgment. The shape of the business had not even been decided yet, but I had no hesitation. It was an era in which launching something quickly and selling out was becoming the norm, and yet I wanted to settle in and build value that can only be reached over the long term. Who to bet that time on, and on what. When I thought it through, teaming up with our CEO Shiono, whom I have known since we started our careers and whose strengths and weaknesses I know as well as he knows mine, was the shortest route. And today, I genuinely believe this is the most interesting place in the world.

Calling it a business of moving goods explains only half of it

On the surface, what we do is trade: moving goods from India to Japan. It means visiting factories on the ground, going as far as audits and quality improvement, then bringing proposals to major Japanese companies and delivering the numbers. But that only explains half of it.

I used to think that selling intangible products was the hardest kind of sales. With physical goods, though, the difficulty is of an entirely different kind. Because there is an actual product, no matter how good a relationship you have built with the client, it is over the moment they say this product will not do, and we are not the ones manufacturing it either. It only works when you tie the whole process together: negotiating with suppliers, earning their trust, guaranteeing quality, and selling every last unit. The way you fight is so fundamentally different that I am not sure it should even be called sales, the same word as the work I did before. It is also a complete team sport.

And every single deal carries three meanings at once. The transaction data itself becomes the fuel for DealBase, the product we are building to turn deals into trust. The customers we are bound to by trust today become the first customers of that future platform. By deliberately entering through the most complex area, we are building a moat that competitors cannot cross later. The friction we hit on the ground is not a war story; it is exactly the problem ABCD is trying to solve with its product.

Raising the whole company's level of execution, as a member of management

My role as COO is not simply to generate revenue. As a member of management, I take on the areas I can run with the most precision and speed, raise the level of the entire team, and, with my own hands, build a state in which we can step into bigger bets.

Underneath all of it is keeping our promises to the very end. A company only a few years old tells both a supplier in India across the sea and a Japanese company sitting in front of us that we will get it done by a given date, and then acts exactly as promised. Each of these actions may look obvious on its own, but that is how a balance of trust accumulates. We are the ones building a system that turns deals into trust, and I stand on the front line feeling that we have to prove first, through ourselves, that it is real.

ABCD today is nothing but room to grow. We have a mountain of challenges and, above all, not enough people. Turn that around and it means the earlier you jump in, the bigger the at-bats you get. What matters most in this phase is not whether you can or cannot do something, but whether you can look at the area handed to you and think that you are going to expand it yourself. I am looking forward to meeting people who want to take on a long, patient game in earnest rather than measuring themselves by short-term results.