Last week, on October 28th and 29th, we held one of the biggest search conferences ever seen in Japan.
FOUND Conf Tokyo 2025 was one of the most enjoyable and, based on the feedback we’ve received so far, one of the most successful events in the industry. This is due to all of the hard work, planning, long distance travel, generosity in time and expenses on behalf of everyone involved, including our amazing speakers and sponsors.
As I mentioned in our opening talk, the idea for this conference was brought to me by Takeru, our Country Manager in Japan.
We had done different versions of FOUND before, in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York City, Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere.
We regularly host throughout the year a smaller version called FOUND Meetups, where we gather 50-75 people together for a fun evening of discussions and celebrations.
But the idea for this conference was different.
It required a level of commitment, investment, and coordination that we had not yet undertaken as a team at DemandSphere.
I loved the idea immediately.
The basic idea was this: there is an incredible SEO community in Japan and there are many incredible SEO communities outside of Japan.
These communities are often grounded in events around the world and the thought-leadership behind many of these events comes from the tireless speakers in our communities.
Due to the distance, language barriers, and costs, there aren’t always many opportunities for the Japanese community to engage with the speakers who are well-known outside of Japan, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to bridge these two worlds.
I also had another motivation: I wanted to provide the opportunity for the leaders in our communities outside of Japan the chance to experience the Japan community and, hopefully, spend a little extra time getting to know this amazing country and its people.
DemandSphere started life as GinzaMetrics in Tokyo more than 15 years ago and, as an entrepreneur in both worlds, I have been incredibly blessed by the Japanese community as well as the communities in the US, UK, Europe, and many other parts of the world.
A big part of that is due to the generosity and vision of the speakers and conference organizers around the world.
For this first big event, we wanted to bring some of the best known speakers outside Japan as well as take the opportunity to introduce some speakers who contribute so much but may not have been known yet in Japan.
Each speaker has helped and inspired us at DemandSphere in one way or another over the years.
Rand Fishkin
Rand, for me, has personified the authenticity that I see everywhere in our community as a whole. On a personal level, as I’ve mentioned in the past, he was one of the first people to reach out in support of what we were doing when we launched the company way back in 2010.
So many people commented to me that having the chance to meet him in person was a dream come true and I think everyone who met both him and Geraldine were struck immediately by their kindness and presence at FOUND.
Lily Ray
Lily, in my mind, serves as the conscience in our industry, reminding all involved to focus on the human impact of changing technologies and strategies in search. She brings warmth to any event and that was certainly true at FOUND.
Her talk on Day 1 on The State of SEO & AI Search in 2025 captivated the audience and her big picture view on what has changed and what is staying the same is something I’ve wanted the community in Japan to hear for 2026.
Mike King
As anyone who has heard him speak knows, Mike always brings the energy. When we first conceived of this event, he was top of my list to invite because Mike does the best job, in my opinion, of challenging our industry to think beyond the path of least resistance.
He frequently challenges everyone to stop being satisfied with doing the grunt work of the internet, and the internet giants, without being properly recognized and compensated for it.
The level of depth and coverage in his presentations is always something to behold and it was this vision of his that I wanted to bring to Japan.
There are so many conversations I have here trying to explain the big picture of what we’re seeing in the global markets and being able to have someone of Mike’s caliber present it so cleanly and clearly will certainly level up our entire space here in Japan.
Mike & Lily performed at a club in Shibuya at the after-party
As many know, both Lily and Mike are professionals at more than search: Lily is a DJ and drummer and Mike is a rapper.
The logistics took a little while to work out but after having such a good time with them at SMX Advanced and SEO Week earlier this year and seeing them both perform, it was a no-brainer to find a club in Shibuya for the after-party.
As usual, they both killed it and everyone there had an amazing time.
Noah Learner
Noah, as many reading this will know, leads the SEO Community, an online and offline community and it is, in my opinion, currently the best global community in our space. He is a very unique person because he is able to combine deep technical knowledge with discernment and grace in every interaction I’ve had with him.
His presentation was Navigating SEO Turbulence: Your Flight Plan for the LLM Era, and was ostensibly about how to build the right processes and data systems for this crazy era in search but I think what came through just as powerfully was his calm demeanor and care that he has for people.
More than a few people commented to me afterwards how much his presentation and, dare I say it, his vibe really spoke to them. I was very happy to have him here with us in Tokyo.
Elias Dabbas
Elias is another speaker whom I have benefited greatly from getting to know in recent years.
I first encountered his work and his project, Advertools, a few years ago when I was looking for some Python-based SEO crawling tools. When I saw what he had put together and released as open source, I immediately knew that he was a guy I wanted to get to know.
What Elias works on is another concept that I often try, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully, to explain what I call the Dataframe Mindset.
We have so many great tools in our space but I think (and I know Mike agrees because he also talked about it) there is still so much of a lack of standardization in data formats, techniques, and, most importantly, mindset.
Elias leads the way with code in his project and he captivated our audience during his presentation last week on Getting Started with Data Science and LLMs for Modern SEO.
Japanese Speakers
I wish I had time here to cover every Japanese speaker from the event.
So many of the Japanese speakers who joined us are the top leaders in the community in Japan and are well-known abroad as well. Many I have known and been helped by over the years. Almost everyone on the list, to be honest.
It was truly a humbling experience to have all of these incredible people join us because I know that they are pushing our industry and community forward every day, both on-stage and in their day jobs.
I will list them all here and offer a heartfelt thank you to each one of them for sharing their time and experience with our audience last week.
- Kazushi Nagayama, JADE
- Tatsuki Uchiyama, Google Cloud
- Rui Kojima, Kakaku.com
- Eishi Tominaga, Kakaku.com
- Atsushi Udagawa, Author and Associate Professor, Musashi University
- Dai Shibayama, Hakuhodo DY ONE
- Akira Noboru, Hakuhodo DY ONE
- Shota Chimoto, Dentsu Digital
- Taro Shihommatsu, Dentu Digital
- Masaki Inagaki, Dentsu Digital
- Mako Sato, LIG
- Go Sugihara, ATARA
- Takahiro Watanabe, DMM.com
- Ryohei Sakai, Recruit Co., Ltd.
- Shimpei Kurosawa, Opt
- Tomohiro Nozaki, Opt
- Shuhei Uzawa, SPRIX
- Koki Mizutani, Meta – Facebook Japan
- Keita Takeuchi, LANY
- Takuma Nakahara, GMO Tech
- Yuichi Arizono, Microsoft Advertising Japan
- Maki Ezawa, Ayudante
- Takumi Shakuya, Ayudante
Lightning Talks
Another favorite was the Lightning Talks that we held in the evening of Day 1.
We always try to include a Lightning Talks session as it’s a crowd favorite. I really like them because it’s a great opportunity to hear from new and experienced voices alike and quick thoughts that are quite insightful.
We’ll be doing many more of these going forward at our events.
Lightning Talk speakers included:
- Tomoko Takahashi, Ayudante
- Yu Aoki, MATCHA
- Shunta Fujiwara, Cuebic
- Mana Takada, Faber Company
- Taisaku Nishio, Zigexn
- Maruyama-San, JADE
- Shinohara-San, JADE
Feedback we’ve received
We have received so many happy messages from attendees and partners that make everyone on the team very proud of the event. There are always areas for improvement and we are taking all of the great feedback into consideration for future events.
Special thanks also to Ikue Yamada for all of the great photos, many of them linked here. It was amazing to see that she had even painted her nails for FOUND!
A special thanks to our sponsors and partners
As I mentioned during the event, FOUND Conf simply would not have been possible without the valued partnership from our many sponsors.
It was incredible to see how quickly each sponsor agreed to support our mission and it was clear that each one of them recognized what a unique opportunity it was to connect the Japanese and global search communities.
A special thanks to everyone at:
- JADE
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Advertising
- Hakuhodo DY One
- Opt
- Ayudante
- GMO Tech
- Dentsu Digital
- Core Tech
I would also like to thank our community partners:
A special thanks to our team
Our team is spread out all around the world but our Japan team led the vast majority of the planning and execution on this event, from start to finish.
We had a couple of great options to work with an event planning team but ultimately, for this first event, opted to handle it with our team so that we could make sure every last touch was the experience we wanted to deliver.
Takeru and the JP team, in addition to their very busy schedules running DemandSphere Japan, worked tirelessly to arrange all of the details for the venue, real-time translations, photos, video, food, etc. in addition to securing the valuable sponsorship partnerships needed to pull off an event of this size.
Our US team also contributed early on with some of the initial branding and planning.
Thanks so much to the entire team for making this event come together.
A special thanks to CHAYKOV
One of the most enjoyable aspects of working on FOUND was getting to work with the amazing illustrator, CHAYKOV, for the main banner of the event.
I have known Chaykov for many years, we became friends when we were both living in California. My family and I have enjoyed his detailed and dreamy illustrations of Tokyo every New Year and I knew, when we first started to plan FOUND, that we wanted him to be involved as the main illustrator for the event.
I think Lily Ray best captured the enjoyment his artwork brought to so many of the attendees, including myself.
Slides & videos
We have been asked if we will be releasing slides and videos soon and we will indeed. Slides will be coming first, but we recorded all of the sessions and will be releasing these sessions as well.
We also have a ton of photos and we’ll be sharing those too!
Plans for FOUND Conf 2026
Many have asked us if we have plans to do this again and the short answer is: yes!
We have already received so much positive feedback from our attendees and our sponsors that we feel confident about being able to do it again and even better next year.
Stay tuned for more as we are already beginning to scope things out.