Taihei Kobayashi has gone from sleeping on the streets of Tokyo to heading a technologies startup whose industry worth topped $1 billion.
His rags-to-riches story is amongst the most outstanding to emerge from a tiny-cap stock boom that is minting fortunes in Japan. Kobayashi’s enterprise, which aids startups and other firms to style and develop new firms and items, went public in July and its shares have because more than tripled.
It’s an outcome that couple of could have imagined two decades ago. As Kobayashi tells it, his parents kicked him out at 17 when he quit a prestigious higher college to concentrate on his band. He played music throughout the day and largely slept outdoors, applying cardboard boxes to retain warm throughout freezing winter nights. He was homeless for a year and a half.
A series of encounters got him off the streets and sooner or later into a job as a software program engineer. He was 1 of the core members in establishing the predecessor to the enterprise now recognized as Sun* Inc., pronounced Sun Asterisk, in Vietnam in 2012. He’s now Sun*’s chief executive officer.
“The winters were cold,” Kobayashi, 37, stated of his practical experience on the streets. “There may have been times when things felt like hell. But I’ve overcome those times.”
According to Kobayashi, his parents would not accept his selection to drop out of higher college. They had created economic plans to enable him to get a university education, he stated. Attempts to make contact with Kobayashi’s parents have been unsuccessful.
“They told me to leave, so I left, and that was that,” he stated. “I wanted to live my life doing what I enjoyed.”
Kobayashi ended up spending two winters on the streets of the Shinjuku and Shibuya districts of Tokyo.
Mostly Outdoors
“I might have died,” he stated. “I slept anywhere I could,” he stated. “About 80% of the time it was somewhere outside.”
Yushi Fukagawa, a close buddy because Kobayashi’s college days who at present performs at Sun*, recalls the time the entrepreneur became homeless.
“I didn’t think too much of it,” Fukagawa stated. But “my parents seemed worried.”
At 19, a manager of a reside-music club took pity on Kobayashi, providing him a job and saying he could crash at the club. He did so for about six years.
Eventually, Kobayashi decided it was time to move on. First, he created some cash trading music records on the net. Then he came across a job advertisement that did not need any qualifications or practical experience. All you had to do was take a test, it stated.
The six-hour examination tested applicants on places such as mathematical abilities, logical considering and IQ. Koyabashi passed and began working at the firm, which educated him to grow to be a software program engineer.
Start Company
That’s how he met Makoto Hirai, 1 of the founders of Sun*. The two agreed there have been quite a few software program engineers who excelled in programming, but couple of who could use these abilities to come up with working company models. They decided to start off a enterprise to bridge the gap.
Kobayashi moved to Vietnam in 2012 to employ employees from the country’s pool of young engineers. In March 2013 the founding members incorporated Framgia Inc. in Japan, which changed its name to Sun* in 2019. The thought was to deploy the engineers to assist Japanese startups that have been struggling to develop a viable company.
“Our stance was to commit ourselves to the growth of those startups, regardless of whether it left us mired in losses,” Kobayashi stated.
Over the years, Sun* grew its company, and now has more than 70 consumers. The enterprise listed in the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers industry for startup firms in July. Its shares rose practically sixfold to a higher in September, taking its industry worth above $1.4 billion. They’ve because dropped 38%, with the company’s industry capitalization dipping back under $1 billion. Kobayashi’s 7.9% stake is worth about $71 million.
Sun* posted net revenue of 649 million yen ($6.2 million) on income of 3.97 billion yen for the nine months ended September.
Stiff Competition
Mitsushige Akino, a senior executive officer at Ichiyoshi Asset Management Co., stated there is superior demand for the firm’s services but sales and profit are nonetheless low and competitors could be stiff.
“Things could be difficult,” Akino stated. “You have to see whether the company is able to sustain its pace of growth. This is especially so for its revenue, which isn’t much right now.”
Kobayashi, who returned to Japan from Vietnam in 2019, stated the enterprise is winning company from larger firms, such as these in the blue-chip Nikkei 225 Stock Average. Its buyers include things like Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Corp., according to the Sun* site.
“We want to be aggressive in offering our services to big corporations,” he stated. “That’s why we went public.”
Sun* is in search of to raise earnings by at least 20% to 30% a year, and doubled employees in its Tokyo workplace to about 130 folks this year, he stated. Vietnam continues to be the firm’s largest workplace with about 1,300 workers.
Sun* is 1 of quite a few businesses in the TSE Mothers Index whose shares surged this year as investors bet on technologies businesses amid the pandemic. The startup gauge hit a 14-year higher in October prior to paring some of its gains. Despite more than tripling, Sun* is not even in the index’s best 10 performers this year. The company’s shares trade at about 195 instances earnings and about 19 instances book worth.
“It’s what you’d call a momentum stock,” stated Tomoichiro Kubota, a senior industry analyst at Matsui Securities Co. in Tokyo, noting its “extremely high” value-to-earnings ratio. “It’ll be impacted by how long the positive trend for the startup Mothers gauge will persist.”
Kobayashi stated he’s conscious of the dangers but not daunted by them. He stated he’s faced more tricky challenges prior to. He has because reconnected with his parents, and his time on the streets is a distant memory.
Also Read: Australian PM Scott Morrison Says 10,000 Citizens Stranded In India Amid COVID-19
“What I want to do now is keep working to realize our company’s vision,” he stated.