Why AnimaNext Still Gives You a Physical Card: My CB Insights Interview

CB Insights published an interview with me on October 30, 2026, as part of its Executive Interviews series. The subject was AnimaNext, the NFC business card company I run from Tokyo, and the first question was the one every founder gets sooner or later: "How do you define your market and where does your company fit into that space?"

The line they chose for the top of the page was this one:

"Most competitors assume the future is fully digital, but some people still value the physical card, and that's why we're giving the physical card as well."

The full interview is on CB Insights. Here I want to unpack that one sentence from the design side, because almost every other decision in the product follows from it.

What the digital first argument gets right

The companies building fully digital cards are right about the information. A phone number printed on paper starts going stale the day it comes back from the printer. Titles change, people switch teams, companies rename themselves. A profile that lives on the web can be edited whenever you want, so the link always opens the current version.

AnimaNext works the same way. The profile is digital, you can change it at any time, and the person you meet does not need an app to see it. Their phone reads the card and the profile opens in the browser.

What it gets wrong about the meeting

The part the fully digital view skips is the meeting itself. Two people are standing in a room, often for the first time, and one of them has to give the other something. Asking a stranger to open the camera, find an app or turn on a feature they have never used puts a small chore in the middle of a greeting. Most people will do it. Some will smile politely and never save anything.

I live in Tokyo, where handing over a business card is still a small ritual. Both hands, a slight bow, a moment spent reading the card before it goes into a case. You can move what is printed on a card into a database. The gesture has no digital equivalent, and in a lot of rooms it carries more weight than the data does.

So the card stays. You hold it against the back of the other person's phone, roughly where you would have handed it to them anyway, and your profile opens. The card takes care of the social part of the meeting and the web page takes care of the information.

Why nothing is printed on the card

The AnimaNext card is matte black on both sides. The only mark is the n, debossed in gloss black in the center, and you mostly notice it when the light hits it at an angle. There is no name, no QR code and no URL.

That was a deliberate call. Anything printed on a card is something that can go out of date, and the reason to put the information online in the first place was to stop reprinting. A card that carries only the mark never needs replacing when your title changes. It also tells a stranger very little if you lose it, because all it opens is the public profile you were already showing everyone you met.

A Wallet pass for the day you forget the card

There is an Apple Wallet pass as well. People asked for one, and it is useful on the day the card is in another jacket. But a pass in Wallet cannot be tapped onto someone else's phone the way the card can, so the pass shows a QR code instead. The card remains the main way to share, because it is the one of the two that works with a tap.

Where AnimaNext sits

If I had to put the company on a map, it sits between paper cards and fully digital tools. The card is physical because meetings are physical, and the profile is digital because the information keeps changing. Most of the market picked one of those two sides. The people we build for want both, and I would rather design for how they actually meet people than for where the market says things are heading.

If you are comparing options, the AnimaNext blog has a plain comparison of NFC and QR code cards and another of NameDrop and a tap card. The cards themselves are on animanext.com.