The highs and lows of a Japanese serial entrepreneur

This article is from an episode of Disrupting Japan. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full episode, go here.

Hajime Hirose is a Japanese serial entrepreneur. Throughout his career, he built and sold startups, and he also bankrupted them.

We talk about how Japanese attitudes toward startups are changing, but also how in Japan, a bad rumor – even a completely unfounded one – can kill an otherwise promising enterprise. We also discuss the importance and the difficulty of going global and some interesting stories from his startup stints.

Hajime Hirose / Photo credit: Alphaus

Tell us a little about yourself.

So I was born in Tokyo, I grew up in Yokohama, and I went to Seattle for university. I’ve been living outside of Japan for the last 26 years.

I worked in Microsoft back when it just bought Hotmail in 1998. I was lucky to be one of the only two Japanese guys on the project.

I worked for the company for 10 years until 2008. In 2004, Microsoft decided that we needed to go to China in order to secure more talent. My boss – he was a Caucasian guy – thought I looked Chinese enough and thought that I could speak Chinese.

So they sent me there, and during weekdays, I was working on my project. But then on weekends, I went around the universities in China to interview and hire people. I got to meet a lot of smart people, and I would bring them in.

But you eventually left to join a Chinese company.

In 2007 – that was when iPhone and the App Store just came out – and I thought, “This is my chance where I can actually do my own startup.” I had always wanted to do my own startup, but I was a little bit hesitant.

So, I bought my iPhone and MacBook, and my friend and I went to Silicon Valley to visit VCs. I developed an app and showed it to them, and they liked it in general. But word got out that I was trying to leave Microsoft, and I got offers from five companies.

One of these companies – it was based in China – said that they will give me pre-IPO stock, which was really attractive for me. With this job, I would also be able to manage a subsidiary of the whole company. I thought that that was a good experience.

I was in charge of the software and service group. When we had our initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, the company wanted to expand even further. We needed to globalize the company, so we brought in talent from the US and stuff like that. But these people could not really adapt to our culture because our core was so single-minded.