I’m Akiko Naka, the founder & CEO of Wantedly. Ask me anything!

Hi Tech in Asia, I’m Akiko Naka, founder and CEO of Wantedly, the largest business social networking service in Japan.

Wantedly started as a social recruiting service that utilizes Facebook platform. Traditional recruiting service mainly focuses on salary and professional experience during job matching. Wantedly, on the other hand, values motivation, environment, and team to match employers and job seekers. By prioritizing “people” as the core element, we are able to introduce the most suitable candidate for businesses. Wantedly now has over 10,000 clients, as well as over 600,000 monthly active users, and is now becoming the largest business social networking service in Japan.

We’ve been running the service for almost four years. Ask me anything on the following topics:

• Entrepreneurship and creating cool products
• Fundraising and hiring in Japan
• Insights into the Japanese startup ecosystem
• Challenges faced when I gave up my corporate career (I was previously from Facebook and Goldman Sachs) to embark on the entrepreneurial journey
• I am a self-taught rails developer and coded my first prototype. Should everyone learn to code?

Fire away!