At the end of March 2024 I will leave SmartNews after 10 years

News

At the end of March 2024 I will leave Smart News after 10 years , I will be a freelancer from April.

SmartNews story

In the 10 years since I joined the company, I have consistently contributed to the development of Smart News as Senior Vice President, especially in monetizing the company through business launches and acquisitions.

Looking back, 10 years ago, when I managed to become profitable as Director and COO of Mixi, I felt that I had completed my role when Morita-san, Kimura-san, and Okamoto-san's Monstar was released and achieved incredible growth.

In 2014, the number of users was far fewer than now, but I had always loved news and wanted to contribute to the development of magazines, newspapers, and other content, so when Mr. Suzuki approached me, I initially turned him down, but his enthusiasm inspired me to join the company.

I remember the enthusiasm of Mr. Suzuki and Mr. Hamamoto, as well as Mr. Fujimura and Mr. Katada, and the wonderful engineers, starting with Rich, and the human resources who had a passionate love for content.

The one thing that Smart News definitely lacked was sales.

As the head of the advertising business, I started to launch SmartNews Ads with two engineers. No product, no agency contract, and one sales person (me!). Naturally, sales were zero.

I joined the company on August 1, test sales on November 1, and full-scale sales on December 1. With this outrageous schedule, we developed ad products, built an ad screening system, built an ad submission system, signed a sales agent contract, built sales incentives, built a sales network, and even hired new employees.

I cannot tell you the current sales figures because they are not publicly available, but I can say with confidence that I have created the most responsive and fastest growing business in my life.

In July 2020, I handed over the advertising business to my successor. I will not mention specific numbers of people, but the advertising business and advertising product divisions that I launched have grown to a significant size and have become core divisions within the company.

In August 2020, I established and assumed responsibility for a division for the purpose of acquisitions and capital and business alliances. He will be responsible for the actual acquisition and integration of advertising-related businesses. I am finally able to disclose this because Mr. Noguchi, Mr. Yakimoto, and Mr. Oshita have recently posted on Facebook, but I was responsible for the acquisition of GeoLogic and executed the acquisition and initial PMI, then passed the baton to Mr. Oshita.

I really like the current employees of SmartNews and Alumni. They are all cool, and most of all, they are good guys. And I love SmartNews as a company. There aren't many companies that can grow so big while talking in such a blue-sky way. I will continue to support them from the outside.

When I decided to quit, the current employees gave me a farewell party and Alumni gave me a welcome party. I was so happy.

Reason for quitting

It was because it was the end of 10 years. While the size of Smart News company was growing in a good way, it was something I wanted in itself, and I was also experiencing growth and a sense of accomplishment. It was a lot of fun to work in English with not only Japanese but also employees from various countries and professions with different backgrounds.

On the other hand, I guess I am still a true startup addict. Or somewhere along the way, I completely became one. Also, my desire to commit to a nameless startup and make it big has grown stronger over the years. I had more and more opportunities to talk to startup founders through M&A and investment, and as a result, I really wanted to solve the problems of the environment surrounding startups. I will write more about the problem I want to solve in the next future story.

Future story

I will continue to start up and live forever. I want to work in a way that deepens my commitment more than ever before.

So there are two issues that I would like to solve.

The first is that most of the early startups have fallen into the deep, deep valley of the PMF and are almost never able to crawl back up. Also, there are quite a few startups that never make it to the PMF valley in the first place. We need to guide them to this PMF valley and fly with them through it.

Over the past 10 years, the number of venture capitalists in Japan as risk-taking investors has increased tremendously. As a result, we can now see what kind of depth and width of the PMF valley. This is a wonderful change. What is missing is someone with entrepreneurial experience to fly with the VC to understand the valley and fly with the entrepreneur. The overwhelming optimism is that "I'll fly, too, so let's fly! It's going to be fun!" This overwhelming optimism is necessary.

I believe that this overwhelming optimism can only be created by those who have overcome the hard things and understand them with a high resolution.

Second, in order to scale a startup, it is not enough to have founded one company; one must have experience in founding, selling, and running more companies on a larger scale.

It is boring to live in a world where mega-startups are forever in the realm of the imagination. In other words, going public is important, but more importantly, we need to increase the number of serial entrepreneurs in Japan by 10 or 100 times what we have now by increasing the number of M&As that have more potential. I simply believe that as the base expands, you, or the size of the company, will grow, and the value of the company will increase.

I sold my own company to Mixi and experienced PMI. At Sumanew, I will lead the future acquisition of Geologic, designing and executing PMI. Hatena has gone public, Sumanew has grown, and I have experienced being a director of listed companies at mixi and unipos, so I think my experience as a manager has increased considerably.

I thought that this kind of experience in various phases could be useful in terms of aligning the logic of the buyer and the buyer's logic, as well as the incentives. I would like to add that like attracts like, and having a network on both the selling and buying sides of M&A is also an advantage.

A Request to Everyone

I enjoyed 10 years of crazy Hard Things at SmartNews. And after 10 years, starting April 1, I will be a total freelancer. I would love to meet many of you who have been away and hear all kinds of stories.

In light of the above discussion of the future, or even without taking it into consideration, I would like to have a chance to talk with not only entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, but also many people I have been away from for a long time. If you are interested in meeting, please send me a message now. I will go to breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea party anything.

We are also willing to make angel investments. Our minimum is one company per month.

To achieve this goal, I will attend mentoring events for entrepreneurs, matchmaking events between angel investors and entrepreneurs, and startup-related events as often as possible. I would also like to talk about my past experiences at Hatena, Mixi, and Sumanew. I have overwhelming confidence that I can bring value, so please do not hesitate to contact me! I would like to attend the event as well! If you are an organizer of an event that you would like to attend, I will send you a DM!

I am also interested in the governance of companies that have gone public or are thinking of going public. I am convinced that M&A will become more and more essential after going public, and the perspective of how to nurture startup talent in an organization and how to get them to play an active role in the organization through M&A is quite important. In this regard, I would like to get involved as an advisor or outside director for companies that want to get serious in this area. Please feel free to contact me.

Please contact me at X

https://twitter.com/yukawasa

Best regards!