Special Interview
Interview with Marty Roberts, Founder and CEO of TOTEMO KK

Graffiti Art Sold by an American
Entrepreneur in Tokyo
By Japan SPOTLIGHT
In Tokyo one can occasionally find creative graffiti on the streets. Some are beautiful, some are sarcastic
and some are brilliant. Such art can be sold, as there are many people interested in buying photos of it.
Marty Roberts, an American entrepreneur living in Tokyo, tells Japan SPOTLIGHT how he turned graffiti art
into a profitable business by using digital technology.
(Online interview on Sept. 7, 2022)

Self-Introduction & Company“Totemo”

their medical reps. So how do I take people
who have lots of skills but can’t make money
anymore? And how do I enable them to make
JS: Japan SPOTLIGHT is delighted
money? So, I was able to help these people toto feature an interview regarding
make money again and during the pandemic.
your business andMy daughter is now 12 and my son is now
entrepreneurship in general. Could
nine and when the pandemic started both
you tell us a bit about how you got
were at international school – so they were
into this startup world?
sent home. My daughter was fine learning
online but my son found it very hard as heRoberts: I am American and I was a clinicalwas only six years old at the time, so to sit inpsychologist in New York City. I decided I
front of a computer all day was very hard. It
wanted to move into research so I had thewas driving my wife crazy to have tochoice of going into academia or business. I
constantly sit next to my son. So I told her
went into market research for pharmaceuticalthat I would take some subjects and would
companies and worked in pharma for aboutteach them music and physical education
20 years (I’m 45 now). I went into pharma(P.E.). So for music I taught my children thewhen I was still in graduate school andhistory of punk rock and how it developed
started working in pharmaceutical companies
from the 1970s and who the original bands
Marty Roberts
and market research companies, and I ended
are. For P.E. I taught them skateboarding. It
up running a market research and softwarekind of made me feel like I was 12 years oldcompany in Japan. It was a French company but I was running theagain because I’m skateboarding and listening to punk rock and I
Japan branch and we were one of the most profitable.
was thinking what else did I love back then? A big part of theI kept building new products that were only available in Japan –skateboarding scene was graffiti. In skate parks they would be filled
such as physician databases and patient records and all thiswith graffiti and people would put up these big murals and pieces,
healthcare-related stuff. Then I had this new idea seven years ago
and it was always fun because you could watch the artists do whatthat instead of having medical reps and doctors connect face to face,
they wanted to do.
they could do a meeting like you and I are doing now. I kind ofSo that got me thinking that this is a market where there are acopied technologies from overseas and built a company in Japan andbunch of artists creating fantastic art and there are lots of art lovers
after four years sold that company, selling the majority to a publicly
like myself who love it but there is no way to sell it – because the art
listed Japanese company.
is on a wall and will get destroyed or the government will paint overThe company I founded was called ENTOUCH and I sold that toit or the weather will damage it. These artists go out of their way toToho Holdings, a large pharmaceutical distribution company. I’m still
scrimp and save and quite honestly often steal paint to be able to do
working with them and supporting them but I had more free time
this. So I was thinking that people are putting themselves out to do
and so started thinking about where I could take the lessons fromthis especially in Tokyo, because after your second arrest for graffiti
my last startup and apply them again. The last startup was based on
you can go to jail for three years. It’s very strict.
the idea of pharmaceutical companies cutting their sales reps andIf these people are putting themselves out there and they are
50 Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2022

https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/

making art that some people appreciate, then how can we monetize
this for them? How can we make it permanent? How can we make itmonetizable? How can we make it collectible and tradeable? I wasthinking about the idea and was talking with some venture
capitalists, and one friend in particular told me to look at thisEuropean soccer trading card company that was using thistechnology called Non Fungible Token (NFT).

Photo: Martin Holtkamp

JS: I’m not so familiar with NTF, so please explain alittle bit.

Roberts: It’s based on cryptocurrency. It’s not Bitcoin, it’s somethingcalled Ethereum, but the thing about NFT is that it allows you to own
something digital. So there might be millions of copies of this digital
item out there. Someone might take a picture and everyone might
have it on their computer but on the blockchain you are the one
person who owns it. So you have total ownership of it and you canresell it.
So there was this company in Europe doing this for soccer tradingcards and when I saw that I realized this solves all of the problems.
We can find street artists and collect their work from the street andnow save it permanently online, connect it to the blockchain andmake it monetizable.
At the last startup I was the single founder and that was really
tough. I didn’t want to do that again. This time around I found threeother people to be co-founders with me, who all have expertise inareas that I don’t. My first company was just me with a crazy idea,
but in my new company there are four of us with a crazy idea but atleast each person has some expertise. My co-founder Elena for
instance has an MA in art conservation focused on street art andshe’s from Spain. She lives in Tokyo but she has experience all
around the world working with street artists. Another co-founderMinami splits her time between Tokyo and Germany and also has abackground in the art industry in Japan. The other co-founder has
experience in IT & financial systems. We all work together and have
put together a platform which we will launch in about a month or atleast within October, which will mean people will be able to buy andsell street artwork.
JS: I have seen a lot of graffiti art in American andEuropean cities and also in the movies theysometimes highlight graffiti. But in Tokyo is it easy
to find?

Roberts: There’s more than you think and once you start looking forit you will see more of it. But it’s very difficult because of the laws; ofcourse there are cultural aspects, but the laws are very strict inWith my co-founders, Minami (left) and Elena (center)

Japan. So you need to be very careful. For our business it doesn’t
matter so much. We are a Japanese company only because we allreside in Japan. The company itself is global and so when we launch
next month, the artists on our platform will be from all over theworld including Fukuoka, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin andMelbourne. But we do have of course a lot of love in our hearts for
the Japanese artists.
I can share a funny story – when we first raised our first round offunding about a year ago I called up the venture capitalist (VC). We
had one VC company and a few angel investors who all wanted tocontribute. A month after we raised the money, I called up the VC
and asked permission to use some of the money he just gave me tobail a kid out of jail. I needed to bail out a 24-year-old kid who wasjust arrested in Shibuya. And the VC to my surprise said absolutely –it makes so much sense to think about the credibility the company
will get from having gone out of our way and hired a lawyer to get
this graffiti artist out of jail after the police arrested him.
The lawyer (who was actually Carlos Ghosn’s lawyer) told me thatwhen she met with the prosecutor it was over in 30 minutes! It wasvery quick but she explained to the prosecutor that they are trying toarrest him for 200 crimes but they only have video of one, so could
they negotiate. It was so quick, the lawyer called me and apologizedfor taking our money and finishing the job so quickly. I asked if she
would mind helping me with the rest of the time to write a guideregarding the laws about graffiti in Tokyo so that people know what
their rights are, what they have to tell the police and what they don’t
Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2022

51

have to tell them.
So she and I wrote the guide. We haven’t published it yet but it
was a pretty funny story to have a lawyer help me write it. We arealso taking pictures of the security cameras in Shibuya and putting
together a map. This is a crazy business but it is kind of fun and at
the end of the day it’s really just about art, it’s nothing criminal.
JS: From the legal perspective of what you

mentioned, the question of the police is a big one.
Another question might be copyright. Would graffiti
artists assert copyright for the art that you are
selling in auctions for example?

Roberts: Well we actually work with the artists – we’re not taking
pictures of other people’s artwork; we’re having the artists
themselves submit pictures of their artwork. The beautiful thing
about NFT sales is that in a normal gallery for instance, the gallery
would take 50% of the sales and the artists would take 50%, because
the gallery is lending their name, they’re doing the promotion, they’reputting up the money up front. So they take 50%. In our case we are
only taking 35% and we are giving 65% to the artist.
In a normal gallery situation, if you walk in as an artist and put apiece up there and someone buys it for example for ¥100,000, theartist may get ¥50,000 and the gallery might get ¥50,000 and thenthe buyer takes that piece and might sell it for five times the priceseveral years later and make a big profit. However, with NTF it’s
programmed into the code so that when you resell it the artist will
still get a cut and the gallery will still get a cut. So maybe you get
90%, the artist gets 5% and the gallery gets 5%.
That means perpetually you can end up building a market where asthings sell and resell, everyone keeps winning. Some of the biggest
artists in modern history were all street artists – Banksy and Keith
Haring, for example, were both graffiti artists. So I think there is abig market and a lot of people love this art; it is just unfortunate
because when it is painted on a building you can’t really own it.
We’ve spent about a year now building the technology that will
enable people to own this kind of artwork.
JS: How did you decide on the name of yourcompany “Totemo”?

Roberts: Well, we thought it would work well in other languages as
we’re a global company, so we wanted a Japanese word but wanted
it to be something that makes sense in other languages. “Totem”
represents culture such as the totem pole in America, and the word
totemo has a very positive meaning in Japanese, for example.

52 Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 2022

JS: Just to clarify, in your business model you takephotos of graffiti artworks and then sell them. Is that
correct?

Roberts: The artists themselves take the photographs. A lot of times
the animation style sells better than the still photos, so a lot of times
the artists might know how to animate the work. If they don’t know
how to animate it but they think it will look good we have a team ofanimators as well which I don’t include in my head count – but wehave three animators who connect with the artists so that the artist’s
work can be animated and look very cool.

Growth Potential of Graffiti Art Business
JS: How do you see the future of this graffiti or digitalart and the market potential?

Roberts: I think it’s huge. We already see some major museums arestarting to collect it, including the Met Museum in New York City
starting to collect digital art. There’s definitely a marketplace becausewith blockchain you can trace ownership. So who bought the firsttime, who was it resold to, who was it resold to next? This idea of
provenance of when the art was created and who had or has theownership allows you to prove true ownership. This is really
important and I hope that some of the art pieces that we are making
will end up in major art museums 20 years from now.
JS: You mentioned the question of the law as achallenge but what are the other challenges that
could arise in future?

Roberts: In the near term our challenges are marketing but we know
how to overcome those – it’s just execution. I think another challengethat we can’t control too much is the fluctuation of cryptocurrencies.
To some extent, NFT has kind of separated from the fluctuation ofcryptocurrency. Crypto has gone down where NFT value continues togo up, but they are still dependent on each other because everyone
is buying the artwork in crypto. Since crypto is so volatile that’s a bitof a challenge because, for instance, our operating expenses are inyen. I pay people overseas in Australian dollars for example but it’san actual fiat currency, whereas our revenue comes in crypto. It’s abit risky but I think in the long term it will work because I truly
believe in crypto and if I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t take on thisbusiness model or this project.

Future Business Plan in the Digital Economy
JS: What are your future plans for promoting yourbusiness?

Roberts: A lot of that will be organic. Many of the artists that wework with already have collectors. The artists invite the collectors
and they join the portal online and can then buy from the artist. They
also start seeing other artists who they didn’t know about so theywant to buy works by other artists, and in this way the collector baseand all of the artists can kind of crossbreed and create a bigger
collector base for each artist. That’s our first strategy, but beyond
that there are some paid promotions as well but mainly we are goingfor organic growth.
JS: So this is a business that is based in the digitaleconomy, isn’t it?

Roberts: Yes, maybe 90% will be but we will also be doing live
events to promote specific artists or groups of artists. On Oct. 15 atJoint Gallery in Harajuku we will do a live event where we have twoartists from Osaka. One named BakiBaki and the other named Kuua
will come and do a collaboration artwork live in front of everyone.
We will also show their NFT artwork too so we’ll do a live auction
after that. We did something similar in March at Ultra Super New
Gallery in Harajuku where the artists La Mano Fria did live art and weauctioned it off. I think we sold about 3.5 million yen worth of art
that night. We want to do more live events eventually and do those
all around the world such as in New York and Melbourne or London.

Views on Japanese Entrepreneurship
JS: I would be interested to hear your views on

Japanese venture companies and Japanese
entrepreneurs, and also in a general sense theeconomic circumstances or the educational
circumstances around entrepreneurship in Japan.

Roberts: I think the environment has greatly developed over the past
10 years. One American acquaintance of mine is just launching anew venture. He started a company in Japan 20 years ago and thethings he went through were even harder than what I went throughwith my first company. There definitely has been a new wave ofentrepreneurs. You have people such as Masayuki Son from 30 or 40years ago but then only about 10 years ago there was another waveof younger entrepreneurs like Yo Shibata – people who createdawesome companies, sold them, and who became wealthy andstarted investing in new startups.
So it’s certainly not at the level of Silicon Valley or anything like
that, but there is definitely an ecosystem that has developed in whichpeople reinvest. After I sold my last startup I am now an angel
investor in five different companies, because I want them to succeed
too. Also beyond just the ecosystem and entrepreneurs supporting
new entrepreneurs – which I think is critically important – beyond
that the government policies have changed a lot too, so there’s moreaccess to funding. But it is still Japan, so there are many challenges.
As you know everything needs to be sealed and stamped correctly
and so it’s not very easy-going, but at least there is something there.
The Shibuya Ward government has been very supportive ofTotemo and has offered to help us negotiate to get places for events
like Miyashita Park and other cool venues like that. I have only built
companies in Japan so I don’t really know the US circumstances,
despite being an American, but I can say for certain that theenvironment is getting more hospitable in Japan and morewelcoming to startups. This is great to see. In the past, almost every
startup I knew was started by a foreigner but now it’s great to seelots of Japanese people launching startups.
JS: In Japan we are now becoming an aging society– there are a lot of elderly people with money andtime. They might be interested in startups too. Whatdo you think of the environment for these moresenior people in Japan as potential entrepreneurs?

Roberts: It’s a very interesting question. Let me jump back to my
medical startup ENTOUCH for a moment. The medical reps werebeing fired or were leaving and were taking retirement packages.
There were basically two groups: young women who had left to havechildren (or because Japan has a horrible childcare system) or
veteran older men who were leaving because they got paid three
years’ salary to leave. So the sales force that I put together waseither women or older men and it just goes back to your question:these older men had enough money to go and play golf but theywanted to contribute, they wanted to use their skills and they wanted
to do something fun. So I was able to put together a team of them soquickly.
Also if you’re older you have a lot of disposable income and a lotof time. Why not fund a startup?
I had never thought about that before but it’s a very interestingquestion.

Written with the cooperation of Joel Challender who is a translator, interpreter,
researcher and writer specializing in Japanese disaster preparedness.

Japan SPOTLIGHT • November / December 202253