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January 9, 2005

About me

A bunch of people asked where my "ABOUT" section was so I decided to write this. I will update and add from time to time.

updated Nov 26, 2004

I was born in Kyoto. We moved to Canada when I was 3 years old. We then moved to the US when I was 4 years old. I lived in Michigan until I was 14 years old. In Michigan, I worked in a tropical fish store called "Wet Pet". My father worked at Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (He still works there.)

My mother joined later, and eventually became the president of Japan ECD, so I moved to Japan with my mother and my sister Mimi. That was in 1981 or so... In Tokyo I went to Nishimachi International School and then the American School in Japan.

After that, I went to Tufts University. At Tufts I studied computer science and hated it. I thought learning computer science in school was stupid. I think that less now, but I think learning bubble sorts in FORTRAN in 1984 and getting a "0" on a quiz for writing a quick sort was stupid. That's one of the reasons I dropped out. The only thing good about Tufts was that I met Peter Chiang, my roommate and Pierre Omidyar who lived in the next dorm over. Pierre went on to found eBay.

I tried again and went to the University of Chicago, but I dropped out again. At University of Chicago I tried to study physics because I wanted to be a physicist. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, but it felt like I was among people who wanted to be engineers. I once asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I could understand it more intuitively. He said, "you can't understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you'll get the right answer." That was it for me. I left the University to spend time with REAL people with REAL problems in the streets of Chicago. I became a DJ in Chicago working at the Limelight and sometimes at the Smartbar. I really learned a lot during the short time working in clubs in Chicago. I learned that everyone can be caring, funny, good and lovable. I learned that education and prestige didn't have much to do with how interesting you could be.

After Chicago, I helped my mom who was working with NHK. I worked on "Indian Runner" a movie directed by Sean Penn. I did a lot of hard labor on TV sets and events. I was also doing club events in Tokyo. During the day started a company called MDG Japan to localize and sell Caucus in Japan. Caucus was a groupware product developed by Charles Roth and the Metasystems Design Group. I also helped start a computer graphics company called Magic Box Productions and tried unsuccessfully to launch MacZone in Japan. I started writing a little and was on the masthead of Mondo 2000 and Wired Magazine. (Although the only thing I ended up writing was one article for Mondo 2000 and nothing good enough to make it in Wired.) I spent a lot of my time in LA as well as Tokyo. Timothy Leary, who I met in Tokyo and who recruited me as his God Son and introduced me to a lot of interesting people in LA and San Francisco. When my mother's cancer got worse and my sister started at Stanford, we moved our US base to Portola Valley in Silicon Valley. When my mother finally died, we sold the house and I moved permanently to Japan.

I had been playing with computer networking since 1983 or so, but when John Markoff gave me MacPPP on a floppy disk in 1991 or so, I realized something big was happening. Jeffrey Shapard was setting up IIKK which was later acquired by PSINet in Japan; I lent them my bathroom to be their first POP in Japan. (People wouldn't rent space to an unknown US company.) I was probably one of the first people in Japan to have a 128K leased line in their toilet.

Then, the founding Eccosys team gathered around the leased line. Cyrus, Shimokawa, Daishi, Sen, Jona. We bought a used Sun SPARC 1+ over USENet and set up a server. When the NCSA web server came out in 1993 we were ready. We were bunch of kids with a lot of free time, a leased line and a UNIX server. We started one of the first web pages in Japan. We created a web join venture with an ad company, From Garage and called it Digital Garage. We eventually merged all of the companies into Digital Garage and took it public in 1999. In parallel to this, I served as CEO of PSINet Japan for a year and helped get them out of my bathroom and into a real office. Digital Garage also built Infoseek Japan and the Digital Advertising Consortium. Infoseek Japan was acquired by Infoseek which was then acquired by Disney. I left Digital Garage to help run Infoseek Japan as Chairman. It was eventually acquired by Rakuten and I still serve on the board. Rakuten recently acquired Lycos and Infoseek Japan is the third largest portal in Japan after Yahoo and MSN and is profitable and continues to grow. DAC went public in 2001.

After all of the major transactions finished, Neoteny, my personal company raised $20mm from Whitney (a VC) and PSI Ventures. Incubators were hot at the time so we started life as an incubator but have now shifted to more traditional venture capital model. I have been focused on Neoteny since we took the first round of capital in December 1999. We raised more money have the first round have raised about 4.7bb yen in capital in total. In 2004, after Neoteny invested in Six Apart the weblog company, I decided to return the remaining cash to the shareholders and focus Neoteny's resources to building Six Apart Japan instead of continuing to invest.

Since then, I have made investments personally in Technorati, SocialText, flickr and others. (See my wiki for gory details.)
My primary work now is VP of International and mobility for Technorati and Chairman of Six Apart Japan. I'm also on the board of Creative Commons and starting in December 2004, ICANN. I also spend a lot of my not-so-spare time doing government committee work, lecturing, writing, being on TV, being an activist against government stupidity, and recently being invited to lots of cool conferences and awarded a lot of important sounding awards.

Please see my CV for a more organized view of my life.

How to contact me:

email: jito@neoteny.com
IM - jito23/YahooIM, joiitosk/AIM, 4251587/ICQ, joichi_ito@hotmail.com/MSN, joi_ito@mac.com/AIM, joichi@jabber.org/jabber

Please do not email me on any of the IM/email accounts. I generally only read mail to jito@neoteny.com

Neoteny Co., Ltd.
Plaza Mikado 3F
2-14-5 Akasaka
Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0052 Japan
tel +81-3-5549-2280 / fax +81-3-5549-2271

Posted by bopuc at January 9, 2005 8:13 AM