Taishi and Marie Turned Canadian Engineering Years into Beyooond Creative Agency

Beyooond Creative Agency is a Vancouver production company founded by Taishi and Marie after Frog-supported engineering chapters in Canada. The interview shifts from how they got hired to why they incorporated.

Taishi came from Yahoo Japan backend work into Semios, an agtech firm, as a fullstack engineer—Frog had already told that hiring story separately. Marie arrived without Japan engineering years, finished a local specialty school, and grew from junior to intermediate front-end in under a year at Operto Guest Technologies, a hospitality IoT operating-system company. Both had done part-time stretches at COS, a Frog partner; founder Fujii later stood as a reference when they sought full roles—local proof that mattered more than they expected.

The agency aims first at Japanese companies needing sites and services built with English-sphere resources. Taishi’s Yahoo, Semios, and personal projects already lived in that stack; Marie argues Japan often globalizes with domestic-only tooling and underestimates cultural fluency beside language. They want to sell technical proposals plus North American ways of working—a hub, not a souvenir shop.

They also want to help the next wave. Japan titles do not automatically impress Canadian employers; even Taishi felt the gap after expecting Yahoo to translate cleanly. Asking Japan managers for English phone references across timezones is awkward; small local references change negotiation math. Beyooond project work, after seeing someone’s craft firsthand, could become that reference—pressure included—and they invite Frog to route people who need it.

The name nods past Frog’s “frog leaves the well” metaphor: after the ocean, more walls appear; Beyooond is the leap beyond. Frog’s startup support compressed research that would have been a hundred tasks into something closer to ten—visa, incorporation, introductions—while both still held day jobs. Without it, Marie says they might have quit the founding attempt. Complementary industry experience—agtech and hospitality tech, teamwork, environments, English-sphere tooling—is the inventory they now sell back across the Pacific.