How a high school dropout became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur

Born in 1980, Haruhisa Okamura (pictured above) is the founder and CEO of Adways, one of the largest tech companies in Japan that focuses on online advertising. Adways also has its own ad network, internet services, and mobile games. Today, it employs more than a thousand employees worldwide and recorded revenue of over JPY 22.6 billion (US$221 million) last year.

What’s most impressive, however, is that Okamura is one of the youngest founders to bring a company from zero to IPO in Japan.

His success is only possible because Okamura started his career early. At age 16, young Okamura decided he was too cool for school. He opted to drop out of high school to join a company as a salesperson.

“I couldn’t make friends in school so I chose to work early,” he says.

(See: Razer CEO tells students it’s okay to waste time, get an ‘F’)

Okamura’s sales performance saw him rise through the ranks. He was so good at selling door-to-door that he became the company’s top salesperson on many occasions. At 16, Okamura was already displaying signs of a good entrepreneur. He had at least proven that he understood the art of sales.

Intrigued by internet fever

In 2000, Japan was hit by the internet craze, which saw many internet companies go public. Okamura was fascinated by the industry and wanted to be a part of it.

“I saw the CEO of CyberAgent [Mr. Susumu Fujita] on TV and I was very inspired,” he says.

He didn’t know much about the internet back then and laughed, saying he thought “CyberAgent was the internet.”

Okamura tried to apply for a job at CyberAgent but was rejected. With few other options left, Okamura was determined to start his very own online marketing company.

In February 2001, Adways was born. With just one million yen (US$10,000), Okamura spent his first JPY 300,000 (US$3,000) on a computer. The rest of the money was to be invested to build an email marketing software. In search of talented developers, he went to engineering colleges distributing flyers and randomly pitching to students to convince them to build him the system. He eventually found one who did it for 500,000 yen (US$5,000), but the product turned out to be unusable.

Okamura didn’t give up despite hitting the bump. Rather, he went to a top engineering university and continued pitching to students. He was almost broke. So instead of offering straight cash, he offered 30 percent of Adways’ sales margin if the engineer could deliver the software he wanted.

With some luck, Okamura met Sanki Nishiguchi, a talented engineer who agreed to help Adways. Nishiguchi later became Adways first CTO. “I was so determined to find good talent to work with that I even go to [the] bookstore searching [for] and stalking good engineers,” he says.

Zero to IPO