TOKYO -- When Daisuke Sasaki quit Google to start an accounting software company in 2012, he struggled to find investors who would back his idea: that small businesses would ditch traditional packaged software for a tool delivered through cloud computing, a business model now widely known as software-as-a-service, or SaaS.
"Japanese venture capital funds did not believe in cloud or SaaS models," he recalled in an interview. "They said, 'Others failed in the past. Why would you succeed?'"
