Yoshikazu Tanaka on the right.
Dressed casually in sneakers, dark blue jeans, and a simple black outfit, he looked very much like your typical tech geek. Perhaps it was the warm Singapore weather that inspired the casual dress. The young founder of GREE (TYO:3632), Yoshikazu Tanaka, shook my hand, handed me his business card and bowed like any other Japanese professional. I managed a clumsy bow in response, in admiration of his sincere and polite attitude. We had met once before in Beijing last year, but our conversation hadn’t lasted long.
Many know that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. But Yoshikazu Tanaka amassed a whopping $1.6 billion fortune by the young age of 32. He is now 34.
His entrepreneurial story dates back to 1999 when he was a fresh graduate. Prior to GREE Inc. Tanaka didn’t have any experience building a startup. But he was always a keen admirer of great Internet businesses. He told me that the the Japanese version of Wired magazine was his source of inspiration.
“Back then, I witnessed Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo’s phenomenal growth in the Internet world. That got me very inspired and motivated to do one myself,” said Tanaka. But like most aspiring entrepreneurs, he didn’t jump straight in. “I wanted to work and gain some experience first,” he noted.
Hungry to learn and succeed
Tanaka graduated in March 1999 from Nihon University. Within a month he was recruited by So-net Entertainment Corporation, which is a Sony Internet service provider affiliate. That job didn’t last very long, though.
“I enjoyed my time at So-net, but I thought I needed a change to a more startup-like environment and culture. So-net is too large of a corporation to learn how to run a business,” Tanaka remarked. After ten months at So-net, on February 2000, Tanaka joined Rakuten as employee number 50.
When Tanaka joined, Rakuten — now one of the world’s biggest and most successful e-commerce sites — was just a three-year old venture. As he explains, it provided him with “very good exposure in managing a startup.” At Rakuten, Tanaka had a chance to challenge his abilities:
“Besides my technical role, on Rakuten’s range of products, I also managed online product reviews, the blog network, and affiliate marketing… the marketing stuff,” he explained.
Tanaka spent a good four years at Rakuten and was part of the team that witnessed the Japanese e-commerce giant listed on JASDAQ in April 2000, the rollout of Rakuten Travel in 2001, the acquisition of Infoseek Japan K.K and DLJSecurities in 2003.
All this would prove useful when Tanaka started his own empire.
Billion-dollar hobby
While Tanaka was focused on his job at Rakuten, he was also a keen observer of what was taking place outside of Japan. In 2003, he was inspired by Friendster, the popular social network with a large number of users from both the US and Asia. Tanaka was fascinated by the online social networking concept as the possibilities and growth seemed limitless. That sparked his entrepreneurial instinct, and he began to wonder if there was any way to bring the social networking concept to the Japanese market.
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