Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You already started thinking about doing something of your own?

Hiro Yoshikawa: He influenced me to start thinking about it. I have to say that until I met him, I didn’t really have any clear idea about starting my own company. He was the influencer. We had joint trips together. When I took him to Japan, I was introduced to the community leader of Hadoop. His name is Kazuki Ohta. Everyone calls him Kaz.

He ended up becoming my co-founder. Kaz and I have a very good chemistry even though both of us are in the very same space. He was more like a community leader. My background was more in business. In the last three years, I did a lot of venture investments. I started spending a lot of time with him and learned a lot about real-world Hadoop use cases. Kaz was involved in many early stage Hadoop implementation projects. He was clearly very sharp and entrepreneurial. He started coming to my house in Silicon Valley. >>>

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Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: As an anecdote, I was at MIT in the mid 90’s. Richard Stallman was there. He was one of the first advocates of open source. This was 10 years before the timeframe that you’re talking about.

Hiro Yoshikawa: That’s true. I could likely become the firsthand witness that Linux took to mainstream. 15 years later, nobody questions Linux or open source.The situation was very different when I started at RedHat. After those exciting years at RedHat, I was hired by a corporate venture capital firm called Mitsui.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get into their venture capital group? How did this connection happen?

Hiro Yoshikawa: One of the former GM of Asia at RedHat joined a Silicon Valley company where Mitsui invested. I remained very friendly with him. I visited >>>

Building a Big Data Venture: Hiro Yoshikawa, CEO of Treasure Data (Part 1)

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A very interesting story of a big data infrastructure management startup.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Hiro Yoshikawa: I am a native Japanese. I was born in Tokyo in 1978 and was raised on the outskirts. Even when I was a very small kid, I loved literature. Mostly, I like Japanese novels like Murakami. Do you know Murakami?

Sramana Mitra: I do. Were you reading in Japanese or in English? >>>

Diamond Auctions Online: Benny De-Kalo, CEO of Worthy.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you today? What are the metrics of the business that you would like to share?

Benny De-Kalo: I cannot share all the information, but I can tell you that we’re growing very fast. We have over 80,000 items and their total worth is over $280 million. We have almost 5,000 buyers online.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the buyer market is the 5,000 that you have?

Benny De-Kalo: Probably, there would be 30,000 buyers.

Sramana Mitra: So you still have a lot of headroom? >>>

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