Yusuke Mitsumoto had a hunch: what if you paid people instantly for their used goods over the internet, with no guarantee that they would hand them over?
The 36 year-old e-commerce entrepreneur launched an app in June to test the idea. It worked better than he imagined; after 16 hours, he was stunned to discover he was on the hook for 360 million yen ($3.2 million) and shut the service down. A day later, truckloads of clothes and electronics gadgets started to arrive, with his startup’s employees forming a bucket line to move packages into his company’s tiny office in Tokyo.