I recently appeared on Hiro Maeda's podcast to discuss "habits for high performance." We got deep into details and ran through only about half the agenda — the conversation was too enjoyable to stay on track.

I also got feedback from a few people who said "it was interesting but hard to follow without reading it." So I'm publishing the show notes I prepared before recording.

(Thanks, Hiro-san!)

Q: When did you first start thinking seriously about your own performance?

During my university years, I was playing American football. Facing the problem of how to improve as an athlete while managing daily physical care — that's what got me started.

Q: Why does performance matter? Why should it be a goal?

  • Life is uncertain and short. (Being a disaster survivor made this viscerally real for me.)
  • Maximizing performance is the means to living as fully myself as possible, and protecting the people I care about.

Q: How do you think about performance as an executive?

Scheduling

  • Everything goes into Google Calendar — making my time visible to myself
  • I have standing recurring blocks: sleep from 10pm–4am, gym from 5am–6am
  • I use Calendly for scheduling, reducing the overhead of coordinating to near zero
  • Wednesdays are fully blocked for internal communication — no external meetings possible
  • For focused work, I block calendar time before I need it

Task management

  • I maintain a Kanban board in Notion and update a daily log
  • Same system in my personal life
  • I share all of this openly with stakeholders — my work is fully visible to them

Diet

  • I'm obsessive about this
  • I track PFC (protein, fat, carbs) and caloric intake daily
  • Micronutrients are hard to control precisely, so I supplement
  • I avoid eating out as much as possible since it's hard to calculate
  • Zero alcohol — it breaks down muscle

Habits

  • The time between waking up and leaving for the gym is my dedicated input time: reading books, reading articles, listening to podcasts, recording, writing, watching sports — all of it happens in that window
  • Lately I've been writing poetry privately, for no one. Something about beautiful, poetic expression moves me. I wanted to try it.
  • Weekends are entirely dedicated to my two sons and family — which is physically exhausting

Managing the company

  • What I want the company to become is fully embedded in our Values
  • Work back from 10x, be autonomous, back to back
  • These are the ideals that I and co-founder Ishikawa — and all current members — brought to the company. I want to protect them
  • Because values are clear, I almost never feel lost about management direction

Refresh

  • Cooking, writing, drawing org charts, writing a small internal document — anything involving creation refreshes me
  • Talking through the product while thinking about where it's going, thinking through company structure — those creative acts are themselves important rest for me

Mental state

  • I consider myself fairly stable mentally. Good days and bad days, like everyone
  • Whatever state I'm in, I try to verbalize exactly what my mental state is
  • Sometimes I verbalize for myself; sometimes to make it known to those around me
  • There's no point engaging with others in a bad state — but sometimes content created in a bad state ends up being useful to me or others
  • The act of creation saves me

Stress

  • Before starting 10X, I used to hold stress inside. That experience deepened my self-knowledge
  • The situations that stress me: one is boredom, when there's no uncertainty to navigate. The other is managing complex interpersonal dynamics while making repeated compromises
  • Through self-reflection I identified the source: friction in organizations with misaligned goals and low growth potential
  • That's a large part of why I designed 10X to minimize those conditions

Q: How is the development process different for B2C vs. B2B products?

  • At the abstract level, there's no difference. You need to see through the user's pain, understand the structure behind it, and figure out how to change that structure. Product should continuously target high-abstraction issues.
  • Stailer is B2B2C — the value to B only materializes if C actually uses it. End users are where we should face first. The retail business model naturally aligns with that.
  • The real difference is in how uncertainty is handled when the business is involved — the "how."
  • B2C means facing N*10,000 use cases with incomplete alignment. Most B2C services don't offer daily churn.
  • B2B means longer decision timelines, clearer budgets, and room to build formal protocols. Full alignment is achievable.

Q: Developing products for vertical SaaS in large, complex industries?

  • It's impossible to understand everything upfront in a large, complex domain
  • Never misidentify the issue. Research capacity and issue analysis are non-negotiable
  • The difficulty isn't in the technology itself — it's in knowing where to start and how to approach the complexity. Often it's not a software problem, it's a governance problem or a business alignment problem
  • You need whole-product management: defining the issue across software and non-software, then prioritizing. This works better through someone aggregating diverse information and making decisions, not through a siloed division of labor

Q: What have you changed recently in how you manage?

  • Delegated massively. First: handed product — which I was most confident in — to my co-founder. Finance and corporate to our CFO. Business development lead to a front-line team member.
  • Shifted my own time to: whole-company vital checks, proactive moves for 10x opportunities, high-uncertainty business decisions, internal structure improvement.
  • That said, I'm still secretly reviewing everything. Honestly, I just enjoy it.
  • We're still a young, small company — leading by example still matters a lot to me

Q: What themes are you most passionate about lately?

  • Nidec CEO Nagamori-san announced a 50-year plan at this year's mid-term strategy meeting — he said he intends to be at the top for 100 years. That resonated deeply with my own mindset.
  • I want to build a great company that, over a long arc of time, can protect the people closest to me. That's been my goal since Day One. The target used to be "a product." Now it's "a company." The scope expanded from users to all stakeholders, to society.
  • I want to create many opportunities where people who've been involved can say "that thing that happened at 10X really stayed with me."
  • Reading Trailblazer by Marc Benioff — he described how, as Salesforce's business impact grew, he found himself confronting issues he hadn't anticipated (LGBT rights, women's empowerment, immigration). That's what it means to operate as part of society, not outside of it. I need to start building that awareness now.