This university dropout turned down Japan’s top tech firms to follow his own entrepreneurial path

What makes a world-class entrepreneur? Of course, there’s no cut-and-dry answer, but if you examine the backgrounds of some of the tech industry’s most well-known (perhaps even notorious) CEOs, some traits begin to materialize: computer-obsessed dropouts with passion that borders on hubris and the ability to convince people that what they are doing is the most important thing in the world.

In Japan, a country that beats conformity into the populace at a young age with such cautionary proverbs as “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” Yoichiro “Pina” Hirano had a lot more working against him than his western counterparts. His company, Infoteria, develops enterprise software – and while that’s definitely not as sexy as mobile apps or smart home gadgets, it bears mentioning that a homegrown company has triumphed over global giants in this sector like Microsoft and IBM.

Pina’s story is a special one – made even more unique against the backdrop of Japan.

Nerdy roots

“The first time I touched a computer was in my third year of junior high school,” Pina, 50, says. “At that time I was a kind of hardware, techie boy. My hobby was making radios, interphones, electronic stuff. Every day I was playing with a soldering iron and making circuit boards.”

In high school, his interest shifted from hardware to software.

“I was writing software code in my notebooks all day long. I was almost dead last in my graduating class – there were 10 classes with 45 students each and all three years (Japan has six years of elementary, and three years each of junior high/high school) I was in the bottom 40. I didn’t study, I just programmed.”

When it came time to think about higher education, Pina opted to stay local. He had heard that Kumamoto University had a high-spec computer and dreamed of using it. Pina (barely) passed the entrance exam, enrolled in computer classes, and immediately felt like he had made a bad decision. The curriculum was geared at beginners.

“It was so basic, like binary counting,” he says. “There would be no opportunity to actually touch the computer until junior year.”

In the meantime, Pina joined the university computer programming circle. They were geeks, just like him, and the group got along well. Before long, Pina was going to campus not to attend classes, but to hang out with the club. In his second year, Pina and a fellow club member dropped out to start their own computer software business.

Early deals

Back in the early 80s, starting a company in Japan was no simple feat. A basic requirement – having JPY 10 million (US$97,000) in capital – turned founding a startup into a pipedream for most. Pina, realizing that his ragtag band of university students and dropouts couldn’t possibly raise the money on their own, enlisted the help of an important ally – the neighborhood computer shop.

“We used to visit everyday, so we asked the owner of the computer shop to start a software company. He got it up and running for us and we all became professional software developers. I was writing code day and night.”

In 1985, just two years after setting up the software business, an 8-bit Japanese word processor for the NEC platform that Pina himself created became the national best-seller. However, with the dawn of 16-bit, Pina was convinced that it wasn’t good enough to be the king of a dying format.

“Other manufacturers wanted to port my word processor, but I was only concerned with the future and had already started on a 16-bit version, so I refused,” he says. “They came back with really great deals – millions of yen in prepayment and thousands of orders – but I ignored them. To continue growing the company, I knew we needed a 16-bit version of the software.”

Flowering at Lotus

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