Part IThe Story
A Parcel from Shikoku
The noodles came from Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, from a shop small enough that nobody in Tokyo would have heard of it. This was October 1996. The man who ordered them was thirty-one, a Harvard MBA who had recently walked away from one of the most prestigious banks in Japan, and he was sitting at a computer doing something almost nobody in the country did: buying food from a stranger he would never meet, through a screen, on faith. "The checkout process was primitive," Hiroshi Mikitani would write years later, "but my order arrived in the mail, and it was as good as everyone had said it would be. I realized immediately that online shopping would be commonplace someday."
Hold that parcel in mind. Everything that followed came out of it: a regional shopkeeper, a long distance, a box that crossed it, and a buyer who was pleased. The noodles were not standardized. They had not been warehoused, optimized, or priced against a competitor's by an algorithm. Someone on Shikoku had made them and someone in Tokyo had eaten them, and the internet had been only the road between.
He was already planning the company. It went live about six months later, on May 1, 1997, with six employees, one server and thirteen merchants. Its name, when it eventually got a proper one, would be Rakuten. The word means optimism.
Almost three decades on, Rakuten Group reports revenue of about ¥2.5 trillion a year, runs more than seventy services across some thirty countries and regions, owns a baseball team in Sendai, a football club in Kobe and another baseball team in Taiwan, has had its name stitched onto the jerseys of FC Barcelona and the Golden State Warriors, and operates Japan's fourth mobile network — a network that has cost so much that the group posted net losses every year from 2019 through 2025, more than ¥1.3 trillion in all. The founder is still the chairman, president and CEO. He has never been anything else there.
It is tempting, and Mikitani himself encourages it, to tell this as a story of a man who kept doing what everyone said was crazy and kept being right. The structure of his interviews runs on that rail: Everyone opposed it. They called it madness. And then vindication. It is a good story. It is also, as one Japanese commentator dryly noted after a 2026 CNBC interview, the sort of story only the survivors get to tell — "there are countless people out there who 'pushed through despite everyone's opposition and it ended up being a failure,' and those people aren't invited to interviews with CNBC."
The more interesting story is about a parcel and a language. About a man raised partly abroad who decided that the way to save Japan was to make a Japanese company speak English; who built a bazaar to protect small shopkeepers from the vending machine, and then spent the 2010s trying to buy his way into the vending machine's home market; who wrote down, in a list of principles for success, Don't risk bankrupting the company, and then bet the company on a phone network.
By the Numbers
The Rakuten Ledger
13Merchants on Rakuten Ichiba at launch, May 1, 1997
¥50,000Monthly fee to open a shop — against roughly ¥1 million at department-store malls
526.2 → 802.6Average employee TOEIC score, October 2010 to 2015
1 trillion+Rakuten Super Points issued to members
¥2.5TRecord group revenue, year ended December 2025
¥1.3T+Cumulative net losses, 2019–2025, driven by mobile
70+Services in the Rakuten ecosystem
The City Was on Fire
Before the noodles there was the earthquake.
In January 1995 the Great Hanshin earthquake tore through Kobe, the port city where Mikitani had been raised and where his family still lived. He went home to look for his aunt and uncle, who were missing. He found them in a makeshift morgue set up in a local school. Close friends were dead too. When he describes it, he does so in the compressed, almost administrative cadence of someone who has told it many times and has decided not to decorate it: "There was a big earthquake in my hometown city of Kobe and my uncle and aunt and some of my close friends died. The city was on fire."
— Hiroshi Mikitani, writing in Harvard Business Review, 2013I realized in those days how tenuous our existence is. We have only one life, and it must be lived to the fullest—not someday, but now.
It is worth being precise about what he was leaving. Mikitani had joined the Industrial Bank of Japan in April 1988, straight out of Hitotsubashi University's commerce faculty. IBJ was not a retail bank; it was one of the institutions through which postwar Japan had financed its own reconstruction, and joining it was the kind of achievement a Japanese family could mention without seeming to boast. The bank sent him to Harvard Business School from 1991 to 1993. He came back and worked on media-related M&A, and in the last phase of his banking career — according to Japanese profiles of the period — grew close to Masayoshi Son through deals with SoftBank.
The career had a shape that everyone around him understood. Harvard's own entrepreneurship office, writing about him decades later, laid it out with the patience of an anthropologist: succeed in school, join a reputable company, climb by working long, grueling hours. "The job is a lifetime commitment and your success is tied inextricably to the company's success. Giving that up for the uncertainties of a startup venture is almost unheard of." When he did it anyway, the same account notes, "his family, friends and colleagues were astonished."
He had seen another model. At HBS, studying case after case of startup success, something had turned. "It was in an HBS classroom that I first considered starting my own company," he said later, and he has said he would never have followed that path had he not gone to Harvard. To a class at Keio University in May 1998 — he was thirty-three, still running the company out of what was essentially a startup's cramped beginnings — he put the cultural difference bluntly. In Japan, a person was successful if he became an elite salaryman at a big company. "In the United States, taking risk and starting one's own company makes one the real hero."
So the earthquake did not supply the idea. It supplied the deadline. The idea had been sitting there since Boston; what Kobe took away was the illusion that he could wait. Not someday, but now.
In February 1996 he founded a consulting company and called it Crimson Group. The name is never explained in his official biographies, though anyone who has spent two years in Cambridge, Massachusetts would recognize the color. It would keep turning up. Crimson Group would hold his stake in Vissel Kobe — the football club founded in 1995, the year the city broke — through an entity called Crimson Football Club, of which he became chairman in April 2006. And when Rakuten consolidated its sprawling Tokyo offices in 2015 into a single tower in the Tamagawa district of Setagaya, it named the building Rakuten Crimson House.
A Family Practiced at Leaving
There is a version of the Mikitani story in which a young man bolts from Japanese convention. The genealogy suggests something closer to the opposite: he came from people who had been crossing the Pacific and returning for three generations, and who had a habit of losing status and rebuilding it.
Through his paternal grandmother he claims descent from Honda Tadakatsu, one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Tokugawa Ieyasu — the warlord-generals who helped found the shogunate that, in the seventeenth century, closed Japan to the outside world. The grandmother herself was born into a noble family that had fallen on hard times. She raised Mikitani's father as a single mother, running a tobacco shop. A grandfather on the family tree was a businessman active in New York and a co-founder of Minolta.
His mother, Setsuko, attended elementary school in New York before graduating from Kobe University and going to work for a trading company — the Japanese institution most dedicated to the business of being somewhere else.
His father, Ryōichi Mikitani, was a monetary economist, a professor at Kobe University and eventually chairman of the Japan Society of Monetary Economics. Wikipedia's account, drawing on Wired, records him as Japan's first Fulbright Scholar to the United States. From 1972 to 1974 he taught at Yale, and the family lived in New Haven, Connecticut. Hiroshi, the youngest of three, was seven when they arrived. He learned English there the way children do, without thinking about it — a fact that would matter enormously, and somewhat unfairly, forty years later, when he asked thousands of adults to do it on deadline.
The siblings went where a professor's children are expected to go. Ikuko took her MD at Osaka University and became a physician. Kenichi became a professor of biology at the University of Tokyo. The youngest, by his own admission, "did not like to study" at university; he was "the kind of student who would put off the work until the last minute and then cram the night before the exam." Japanese profiles add that he played competitive tennis through high school and captained the team at Hitotsubashi, and that he had once hoped to play professionally.
Read the family as a set and a pattern emerges. A noblewoman selling tobacco. A grandfather in New York. A schoolgirl in New York. A scholar at Yale. The family's relationship to Japan was never simply membership; it was a sort of commute. They left, they absorbed, they came back and applied what they had learned. When Mikitani later described Japan's isolation as a kind of reversion to Sakoku — the Edo-period seclusion his supposed samurai ancestor had helped make possible — he was speaking about the country. He was also, perhaps, speaking from inside a lineage that had always refused it.
Fifty Thousand Yen a Month
The company was founded on February 7, 1997, at Atago in Minato-ku, Tokyo, as M.D.M., Inc. — Magical Digital Market. The capital was ¥10 million. Wikipedia puts the founders' own stake at about $250,000 among Mikitani and three co-founders; Mikitani, telling it to the interviewer Alain Elkann in 2019, rounded it to "200,000 dollars" and described what he did with it: "I hired four young guys, university graduates."
The timing looked terrible. It was, in the language of a Keio University class report from 1998, Japan's "ice age" of internet ventures. Famous companies had already tried online malls and failed — Mikitani names IBM in particular. People told him it was foolish. He would later turn this into the first principle of his business philosophy: "All concepts are relative... You shouldn't put your faith in dubious expressions such as, 'It's just common sense.'"
What he got right was the price. Department-store-backed internet malls charged merchants listing fees on the order of ¥1 million a month and kept tight control of the virtual storefront. Mikitani charged a flat ¥50,000 — Harvard's account puts it at $650 — and let merchants design their own shops. A corporate history compiled in 2026 notes the detail that made it work as a business rather than a charity: merchants paid six months of fees in advance on signing, which funded the company's working capital. A man who had spent eight years at an industrial bank knew how to build a balance sheet out of other people's prepayments.
The opening was not triumphant. Asked about it in May 2026 on CNBC, Mikitani recalled the first month's sales with a laugh: most of them, he said, he had bought himself. The founder was his own best customer. He had done this before, of course, with a box of noodles.
By the following spring the number of companies on the platform had climbed from 21 to 180, he told the Keio students. Asked whether he had made mistakes, he replied that a day had not passed without one. "Mistakes are okay," he said, "but the important thing is to learn from them and to never make the same mistake again."
— Hiroshi Mikitani, interview with Wired, April 2013We are a bazaar. We are not a supermarket. We are creating a first-class shopping district instead of being a retailer ourselves.
The philosophy hardened early, and it is the most consistent thing about him. Amazon, which went public weeks after Rakuten Ichiba launched, was in Mikitani's phrase "a vending machine; a hyper-efficient supermarket with standardized offerings." Rakuten would be a bazaar "where the owners of many small shops curate the merchandise and interact personally with customers." He described the merchants as curators who did best when they owned a narrow niche: wine, fashion, furniture, eggs. "My point is you don't need to kill the human factor," he told Wired. "You can amplify the human factor by using information technology." The Japanese word he and his interviewers reached for was omotenashi — hospitality, the scrupulous anticipatory service of a good Japanese shop. Kara Swisher, who interviewed him for AllThingsD in 2012, translated it as "empowerment," which is not what the word means and is exactly what he meant by it.
Then came the compounding. The company renamed itself Rakuten, Inc. in June 1999 and listed on JASDAQ on April 19, 2000, in the teeth of the dot-com collapse, with 2,300 stores and 95 million page views a month. That January it had opened Rakuten University, a school for teaching merchants how to run an internet shop. In December it bought Infoseek Japan, the portal and search engine. In 2001, with gross transaction value at ¥36 billion, Mikitani announced a target of ¥1 trillion — twenty-seven times larger — and hit it in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006.
The quieter decisions mattered more. In April 2002 he replaced the flat ¥50,000 fee with a model combining a fixed fee with commissions on sales — so that, as the company history puts it, "when a merchant grew, Rakuten's own revenue grew with it." In November 2002 came the Rakuten Super Point program: buy something, earn points; spend them later. In 2003 Rakuten bought the travel site Tabi no Mado and DLJ Securities; in September 2004 the consumer lender Aozora Card for about ¥7 billion, which became Rakuten Card. By November 2016 thirteen million people held the card and nearly 40 percent of group revenue came from financial services; Rakuten was running Japan's largest internet bank and its third-largest credit company.
The points were the glue — his word, borrowed from analysts. One membership ID, one pool of points, redeemable across shopping, travel, cards, eventually even investable through Rakuten Securities. More than a trillion points have been issued. The bazaar had become what Mikitani started calling an ecosystem, and it had taken, by the company's own reckoning, more than twenty years to assemble.
There was always a weakness at the root. A landlord who merely lets space does not control the foot traffic. Yahoo! Shopping, riding its portal, overtook Rakuten Ichiba in user numbers as early as October 2000. Japan's internet commerce, as late as 2012, accounted for only about 3.9 percent of retail sales. The bazaar was beloved and enormous and still, in some sense, waiting for the country to arrive.
Late to the Contest
In 2004 Japanese professional baseball came apart. The Pacific League, in financial distress, dropped two teams; the players went on strike. League officials, looking for someone with money and appetite, approached Mikitani about an expansion team in Sendai, in the northeastern Tōhoku region.
He was not the only suitor. Takafumi Horie, the founder of Livedoor, was the loudest of Japan's young internet tycoons — a man who made a public sport of challenging the establishment, who would attempt a takeover of Fuji TV, and who in early 2006 would be arrested on allegations of covering up losses at his company and vanish from public view. Horie wanted the franchise first. Forbes, ranking Mikitani as the 224th richest person in the world that year at $3 billion, put the outcome in one sentence: "Late to the contest, Mikitani won."
The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles played their first season in 2005, the first new entrant to Japan's professional league in half a century. Mikitani rebuilt and renovated the stadium in Sendai. He also, by his own telling, decided what to sell in it. On a chilly night at the ballpark he mentioned to a team executive that he'd seen hot wine served at stadiums abroad. The executive "didn't think it sounded appealing at all." Within a week they had a vendor. "Soon we had the data we needed: hot wine was a hit. It stayed." He tells this as a parable about acting before thinking. It is also a small, exact portrait of the man: the traveler bringing back a foreign habit, the chairman involving himself in concession stands, the refusal to commission a study when a week's experiment would do.
The baseball team won the Japan Series in 2013, two years after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 — Mikitani's forty-sixth birthday — devastated Sendai and the Tōhoku coast. The boy from a shattered Kobe owned the team of a shattered Sendai, and the team won. It is the kind of symmetry one would edit out of a novel for being too neat.
The other contest of that era he lost. Convinced that broadcast television's advertising model was breaking and that internet and TV combined would be "a home run for all involved," Mikitani began accumulating shares of Tokyo Broadcasting System. TBS's leadership did not share the vision. They fought him with everything they had, including a poison pill. He gave up.
— Hiroshi Mikitani, LinkedIn, 'The Acquisition That Got Away'Once I lost millions in a failed acquisition attempt. It was the best mistake I ever made.
The lesson he drew was about fit: "We did not see the future in the same way." From 2007 to early 2010, chastened, Rakuten made five acquisitions that he judged to be good fits. And then, in his own retelling, comes a strange and revealing sentence, one that collapses two very different projects into a single cause: "Then I started our Englishnization project... This vastly expanded our potential for good fit acquisitions around the world." In his mind, the failure to buy a Japanese broadcaster and the decision to make his Japanese company speak English were the same lesson. Shared vision required a shared language. He would simply manufacture one.
The Language of the Market
He had been floating it since early 2010 — telling staff, almost casually, "Soon, our company meetings will be conducted in English." The reaction, he recalled, was "There goes Mikitani with some nonsense again." Some predicted he would forget about it.
He had been at a retreat, listening to a presentation of GDP projections. Japan had held 12 percent of world GDP in 2006. The forecast said 8 percent by 2020, 5 percent by 2035, a mere 3 percent by 2050. "Sitting in the audience, I tried to imagine what a Japan with only 3 percent of global GDP would be like," he wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012. "Our presence on the global stage would be akin to the Sakoku era of the Edo period—when we were closed off to the world by legal decree."
In March 2010 he stood before several thousand employees, nearly all native Japanese speakers, and addressed them in English. From now on, he told them, Rakuten would conduct all its business — official meetings, internal email — in English. "I still remember the shocked expressions on listeners' faces," he wrote. "No major Japanese company had ever changed its official language." Employees would have two years to clear minimum TOEIC scores set by job type. Fail, and "it would not matter if they were an experienced development engineer or a talented salesperson—they would not be promoted, and they might even face a demotion." At the time, an estimated 10 percent of the Japanese staff could function in English.
The reaction outside was louder than the reaction inside. Takanobu Ito, then president of Honda, called the plan "stupid" — "notable," Mikitani observed, "in a country where executives do not generally criticize one another in the press." Rakuten employees who had come from other firms heard from their old colleagues: If that crazy Englishnization thing gets to be too much, you can always come back here. At after-work drinks, someone from another company could always be counted on to ask about it. CNN covered it. Some staff quit.
Inside, the first months were grueling and, in places, comic. The first board meeting conducted in English ran four hours, twice the usual length. Executives asked if they might say certain things in Japanese. "I told them no." Around the Tokyo headquarters, English schools filled with Rakuten employees. The company, after a while, conceded what it should have offered at the start: free classes, paid time to study, and an explicit statement that learning English was part of the job.
The numbers moved. The company-wide average TOEIC score went from 526.2 in October 2010 to 697.7 by June 2012, an improvement of 171.5 points in about a year and a half, with some employees gaining over 400. Mikitani declared success in 2012 and wrote a Japanese book about it, Takaga Eigo! — roughly, It's Just English! — announcing on Twitter that, as with his previous two books, all royalties would be donated. The average crossed 800, the threshold usually read as advanced proficiency, only in 2015, at 802.6. TOEIC itself has critics who question what it measures. By 2016 nearly 40 percent of Rakuten's engineers in Japan were non-Japanese.
Two of his arguments for the policy deserve to be taken more seriously than the headline. The first was about recruitment and acquisition, and it is obvious: an English-speaking company can hire from anywhere and absorb a Canadian e-reader company or a Cypriot messaging app without a layer of translators. The second was sociological, and stranger. "The language has few power markers," he wrote. Japanese encodes hierarchy in its grammar — in honorifics, in verb forms that shift depending on who outranks whom. English, by comparison, flattens. "Its use can therefore help to break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society."
He was not blind to the cost. "Staff who speak English well suddenly acquire a higher status; those who do not fear for their careers." One manager who thought he would have to leave the company went to an intensive English school in the Philippines, met Korean and Chinese students grinding just as hard, came back fluent and, as Mikitani tells it, rose. It is a good story and it is also an admission: the policy that was supposed to flatten hierarchy created a new one, with the founder — who learned English at seven in a New Haven classroom — at its very top.
The professor who wrote the case on all of this was Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School, a scholar of global work and language who turned "Englishnization" into a staple of HBS teaching and later of an HBR podcast. She was a student of the experiment, and then, in time, she joined the board of Rakuten Group. When Mikitani returned to Harvard to talk about artificial intelligence, it was Neeley interviewing him on stage. The case writer had become a director. In Mikitani's world, the people who study him have a way of being absorbed into the enterprise.
His later formulations are the ones that get quoted. "English is not an advantage anymore — it is a requirement." "The only way to compete in this interconnected Internet age is to speak the language of the market — and that language is English." Worth noticing is the image he chose to justify it, in an essay published in Japan's Toyo Keizai: "A seismic shift demands that we adapt to a new landscape." A man from Kobe does not use the word seismic idly.
Buying the World in Translation
Rakuten had made its first move abroad in February 2008, a joint venture with Taiwan's President Chain Store to launch Rakuten Ichiba Taiwan. At a Ruby developers' conference in Matsue, in Shimane Prefecture, on September 7, 2010, the company's official speaker profile set out the scale and the plan: over 6,000 employees, $3.2 billion in group sales for 2009, 64 million registered members, more than 33,000 merchants, and a "mid-to-long term strategy" to operate in over 20 countries. Englishnization was six months old. The shopping spree was already underway.
In May 2010 Rakuten bought Buy.com for $250 million in cash. The seller was its founder, Scott Blum, a Californian who had launched the company in 1997 — the same year as Rakuten — selling computers at below cost and betting on ancillary revenue, and who did $125 million of sales in 1998, his first full year. Masayoshi Son's SoftBank had put $120 million into Buy.com in 1998 and 1999. It went public on February 8, 2000 at $13 a share, touched $37.50 that day, then slid until NASDAQ delisted it. In November 2001 Blum bought his own company back for $23.6 million, about seventeen cents a share. He took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal promising Amazon's customers a better deal. Blum was a man who kept trying to beat Amazon in America. Mikitani bought him and kept trying.
The rest came quickly. PriceMinister in France. Kobo, the Canadian e-reader company. Wuaki.tv, a Barcelona video service founded by Cédric Dufour, in June 2012 — later renamed Rakuten TV. Viki in 2013, for a reported $200 million: a streaming service for Asian dramas founded by Razmig Hovaghimian, Changseong Ho and Jiwon Moon, funded early by Joi Ito's Neoteny Labs and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, moved to Singapore in 2008 to be a pan-Asian hub. Its name was a portmanteau of video and wiki. Its whole proposition was subtitles — volunteer translators rendering Korean and Chinese and Japanese television into some 200 languages, about fifty of them endangered. Of all the companies Rakuten bought in that period, it is the one that most precisely mirrors its buyer: a business built on the conviction that language was the barrier and that enough human effort could cross it.
Viber, the Cyprus-based messaging app, followed in February 2014 for $900 million; Ebates, the American cash-back site, in September 2014 for $1 billion. By the end of 2015 overseas acquisitions totaled roughly $4 billion.
The venture bets were made in the same spirit and often to better effect. In 2012 Rakuten led a $100 million round in Pinterest — "every venture capitalist within 100 miles of Silicon Valley wanted to squeeze their khaki-clad selves into what had become tech's hottest deal," Swisher wrote, and the deal went to Mikitani on the strength of "a strong rapport with Pinterest's quirky founder." He saw Pinterest as a "socially enabled publishing platform," a cousin of his merchant curators. In 2015 Rakuten took about 12 percent of Lyft for $300 million and he joined its board. "We have seen the future and this is it," he said. When Lyft floated in 2019, Rakuten booked a gain of $989.7 million. In August 2020 it took a ¥25 billion write-down on the same stake, and Mikitani resigned from the board. The future had been seen; it had also been marked to market.
Gerard Piqué, the FC Barcelona defender and a personal friend, co-founded the investment vehicle Kosmos Holding with him in 2017; Kosmos acquired the rights to tennis's Davis Cup and the tiny club FC Andorra in 2018. In November 2016 Rakuten had already agreed to become Barcelona's main global partner, a four-year deal worth at least €220 million, its name across the front of the most famous shirt in world football. Mikitani told the BBC's Mariko Oi he was paying $58 million a year for it. In September 2017 he added a three-year, $60 million patch on the Golden State Warriors' jerseys. "A brand is a flag," he wrote in Business-Do. "Your brand is a symbol of your values, as important a symbol as a nation's flag."
Flags are expensive to plant and humiliating to lower. In February 2016 Rakuten announced it would shut operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand — two years after declaring Southeast Asia a priority. In June it exited the UK, Spain and Austria. Nicole Fall, a trend forecaster who runs Asian Consumer Intelligence, called the pattern a "scattergun approach to investment." In the same year, at home, Rakuten lost its long-held position as the largest e-commerce site in Japan. To Amazon. In July 2020 it announced it was closing the American marketplace that had once been Buy.com; it stopped taking orders on September 15, 2020. Germany closed weeks later.
What lasted is revealing. The bazaar did not travel well; the things that traveled were the things that were not bazaars at all — a cash-back site, a chat app, a stream of subtitled dramas, an e-reader. The ecosystem was easy to describe in English. It was very hard to export.
Seventy-Seven Percent Off
To celebrate the Golden Eagles' Japan Series championship in November 2013, Rakuten threw a site-wide sale. Some merchants advertised discounts of 77 percent. Within days the press had found the trick. A ten-pack of cream puffs that had sold for ¥2,525 was listed at a "regular" price of ¥12,000, so that 77 percent off brought it to ¥2,500 — a discount of twenty-five yen. About twenty merchants and up to a thousand products were implicated. Rakuten first said it was a matter of individual vendors. Then it emerged that three of the twenty had received checks and approval from Rakuten employees, and eventually that eighteen employees had pressed the idea of inflated reference prices on merchants. Seventeen vendors got one-month suspensions and were not named. Asked why, Mikitani said, "We're not the police and we think we do not have that right." Rakuten apologized and promised a monitoring team.
It was not an isolated lapse. In July 2012, the Kobo Touch e-reader launched in Japan with software that did not work; devices could not be activated. When customers flooded the product page with one-star reviews — "my expectations were betrayed" — Rakuten disabled reviews for the first time in its history. A spokesman promised negative reviews would not be deleted. Days later Mikitani said, "Bad feedback is misinformation so we'll remove them and reinstate them after close review." Kobo's marketing had promised 30,000 Japanese titles; there were 19,164. Mikitani vowed to exceed 30,000 within July and reach 60,000 by August. The marks were met on August 27 and September 24. The Consumer Affairs Agency issued guidance and Rakuten apologized. The store had also padded its catalog with some 500 repackaged Wikipedia articles under new ISBNs.
In March 2014 the Environmental Investigation Agency named Rakuten the world's biggest online retailer of whale meat and elephant ivory. It stopped selling whale and dolphin meat that April. Ivory took until July 2017.
None of this is a secret, and the pattern is less about villainy than about a philosophy taken literally. A bazaar's owner rents stalls; he does not inspect the cream puffs. We're not the police. The empowerment ethic that made Rakuten beloved by small merchants also made it reluctant to discipline them — until the regulators, or the newspapers, or the conservationists did it for him. And the founder's own instinct, the speed-first instinct, compounded the problem whenever he spoke before the facts were in. "I believe speed is essential to success in business," he once wrote. "But what I have been forced to realize is that when I insist on speed, I have to accept that will come with another element that does not make me as happy — mistakes."
Not everyone has accepted the trade. Rei Saito, who writes the Japan-focused investment newsletter Konichi-Value, has accused him of "blame-shifting" and of assigning "pointless tasks to push employees to quit." In 2010 the company had a Saturday-morning all-hands meeting called asakai; it later moved to Mondays at 8 a.m. In the Mikitani canon, from the corporate philosophy called Rakuten Shugi, there are "only two kinds of people in the world": "Best Effort people" who console themselves after failing by saying they did their best, and "Get Things Done people" who are "absolutely committed to reaching their goals." It is a bracing creed. It is also the kind of creed that does not leave much room for the cream-puff vendor, or the employee, who simply tried.
The Habit of Walking Out
He joined Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, in 2004 — the same year he was granted the baseball franchise. It was the establishment's club, the institution through which Japan's largest companies speak to government with one voice. In June 2011, three months after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, he quit.
How he did it mattered as much as why. He announced his resignation on Twitter before sending the formal letter. Keidanren, he said, was no longer the organization he had joined. He objected to its support for continued reliance on nuclear power and its reluctance to pursue reforms that would help Japan compete. He mused openly about founding a rival. On June 1, 2012, the Japan e-business Association he had chaired since February 2010 was renamed the Japan Association of New Economy, opened to non-internet businesses, with Mikitani as its representative director. The man who had once lost a fight to join the old media had built a parallel chamber of commerce instead.
It did not keep him out of power. Prime Minister Shinzō Abe named him to the Industrial Competitiveness Council in 2012, one of the three "control towers" of Abenomics. There, too, he threatened to resign — over the government's reluctance to allow over-the-counter medicines to be sold online, a reform bricks-and-mortar pharmacies opposed. The issue itself was "trivial," he admitted to CNBC, "but it was very, very symbolic for the entire deregulation." His conclusion was a summary of a career: "The more protective you become of domestic industries, the less competitive most likely you're going to be. If you keep doing this, you will be segregated from the rest of the world."
The walking-out became a style. In May 2021, with Covid surging and the Olympic opening ceremony ten weeks away, he told CNN's Selina Wang that hosting the Tokyo Games was "a suicide mission." On February 27, 2022, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, he announced a personal donation of ¥1 billion — about $8.7 million — to the Ukrainian government, calling the invasion a "challenge to democracy." Ukrainian outlets reported it under the headline "Founder of Rakuten Viber," which says something about which of his businesses had traveled furthest.
The honors kept coming from abroad: the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award in 2012; Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 2014; the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 2017; an invitation to President Biden's state dinner for Prime Minister Kishida on April 10, 2024. In October 2011 he became chairman of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the oldest in Japan. He holds his outsider's credentials and his insider's chairs at the same time, with no apparent sense of contradiction. All concepts are relative.
The Fourth Carrier
"I myself thought it was a crazy idea at first," he said in 2026, of the decision taken in 2017. "But I said let's try it. There are risks. But we have always challenged the status quo."
The idea was to become Japan's fourth mobile network operator, against NTT Docomo, KDDI and SoftBank — the last of these built, of course, by Masayoshi Son, the friend from his banking days whose company had once bankrolled Buy.com. Rakuten Mobile was incorporated on January 10, 2018. It launched 4G in April 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic, and 5G that autumn. It made a radical architectural choice: a fully virtualized, cloud-native network on Open RAN, standard hardware and software instead of the proprietary equipment the incumbents bought from a handful of vendors. "The architecture of mobile networks has not fundamentally modernized, even as the numbers have changed from 1G to 5G," he argued. "Our operating costs are a fraction of our competitors'. We are not affected by legacy supply chains."
His strategic logic was ecosystem logic, and it is internally coherent. "Many other mobile companies first provide mobile services and then try to build their ecosystem on top of that," he said. "We're doing the opposite." Rakuten already had shopping, travel, banking, cards, payments, securities and insurance; the phone was to be the device in every member's pocket that tied them together. He even began selling the network technology to other operators as the Rakuten Communications Platform, later through Rakuten Symphony, and claimed at least fifteen international customers by spring 2021. In December 2023 Germany's 1&1 launched an Open RAN network built with Rakuten.
The bill arrived anyway. In March 2021 Rakuten sold more than 8 percent of itself to Japan Post Holdings for ¥150 billion — its first major capital tie-up, making the postal giant its third-largest shareholder after the Mikitani family — with Tencent and Walmart taking smaller stakes. It was not enough. By July 2023 the Bloomberg Opinion columnist Gearoid Reidy was writing that the company had "lost money in 15 of the last 16 quarters," that it had sold dollar bonds at yields of up to 12 percent — "eye-watering rates for a company that gets nearly 85 percent of its revenue from Japan" — and that it had ditched its stake in the supermarket chain Seiyu after two years. It had raised nearly ¥300 billion through a dilutive stock sale, floated about a third of Rakuten Bank, and sold 20 percent of Rakuten Securities to Mizuho. "Optimism," Reidy wrote, "isn't a word one associates with Rakuten Group Inc these days." Users complained about network quality. Subscriber growth stalled.
For fiscal 2024 Rakuten reported revenue of ¥2.279 trillion and an operating loss of ¥194.7 billion. For 2025 revenue reached a record ¥2.5 trillion; internet services earned ¥89 billion in operating profit and FinTech ¥200 billion; mobile lost ¥162 billion. Group operating profit came to ¥14 billion. In March 2022 Mikitani made himself representative director and chairman of Rakuten Mobile. In August 2023 he became CEO of Rakuten Symphony too. When the bet is the company, the founder holds the bet personally.
Here is the strangest document in the archive. At one of the Monday asakai meetings, an employee asked Mikitani how he made decisions. He offered a three-step checklist and later published it:
- Don't risk bankrupting the company.
- Don't do something you'll regret. But also don't hold back if you'll regret that later.
- Make choices that will better society.
He elaborated on the first rule with real feeling. "Before I had my own company, I had seen many firms go bankrupt because they expanded too far, too fast. As I plotted our growth, I kept our financial health top of mind, ever careful not to overreach." He was an IBJ man; he had watched balance sheets die.
Rakuten did not go bankrupt. But a company that is selling bank shares and brokerage stakes to fund a phone network, paying 12 percent on dollar debt, is not a company that has kept rule one top of mind so much as a company that has decided rule two outranks it. Don't hold back if you'll regret that later. The checklist does not say what to do when the rules conflict. The founder resolved it the way founders do.
The verdict remains open. Even the sympathetic Japanese commentator who chronicled the 2026 CNBC interview concluded that Rakuten Mobile was "in a phase where it can be said that it has 'succeeded' or is 'still in the process of trying,'" and that the real variable was whether investors would have patience to match the speed of the market. "I believe the answer to that question is still unknown."
How Is Your Health?
The newest mandate has the same suffix as the old one: AI-nization. On stage at Harvard with Tsedal Neeley, Mikitani described a "Triple 20" objective — 20 percent more operational efficiency inside Rakuten, 20 percent better marketing efficiency, and tools to make hundreds of thousands of merchants 20 percent more productive. "I designed the Rakuten marketplace so that I could help small- to medium-sized merchants, not destroy them," he said. "So we would like to use AI to empower them." In August 2023, at the company's Rakuten Optimism conference in Yokohama, he announced a partnership with OpenAI. English, he pointed out, had made Rakuten a place where AI engineers from anywhere could work. The first mandate had become the precondition for the second.
He was also, notably, skeptical. "If you asked AI 27 years ago, Should I start an internet marketplace? It would probably say no. Should I start this crazy new mobile company in Japan? It would probably say no." A prediction machine trained on what has been done, he argued, gives "a good batting average, but it won't give you a totally different idea." It is the purest statement of his creed he has ever made, and it carries an unspoken concession: the machine would have been right at least once.
At the April 2026 induction ceremony for new employees, he spoke about genba-ryoku — literally, the power of the actual place, the shop floor, the front line. "It's not enough to just have dreams," he told them. "You need the strength to keep winning in an increasingly complex and chaotic world." He runs a program in his own name for the previous year's graduates and, by the company's account, is in touch with them nearly every day, working on improvements to Rakuten Mobile's retail stores. At sixty-one he is the chairman of a ¥2.5 trillion conglomerate and is personally coaching twenty-three-year-olds on how to run phone shops. Some of it is control. Some of it is the hot wine all over again.
He still tells the noodle story. He told it to the BBC in 2017 — his first online purchase — between explaining drones and the Barcelona sponsorship. The shop in Shikoku has never been named in any account. It doesn't need to be. It is every merchant on the platform; it is the reason he still insists, against the economics of a phone network and the gravity of Amazon, that the human factor can be amplified rather than killed.
In early 2013, a few months into his service on Abe's Industrial Competitiveness Council, he sat down with his father to record a long conversation about what had gone wrong with the Japanese economy and how to fix it. It became a book, published in English by Wiley in 2014 as The Power to Compete — the economist and the entrepreneur, the Fulbright scholar who took his family to New Haven and the son who took his company into English. Ryōichi Mikitani died in 2013. Bill Gates later put the book on his summer reading list. It opens with the son setting out the agenda — Japan's persistent stagnation, what should be done to revive it — and then, before any of that, a question.
"But first, how are you feeling? How is your health?"
"Oh, it's all right, I suppose. I'm in a relatively good shape. I'm really happy that I can talk with you about the Japanese economy like this."
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not a hagiography in bullet form. Mikitani's record contains some of the most original organizational moves made by any Asian founder of his generation, alongside expensive overreach and recurring failures of governance. The principles below are drawn from both columns of the ledger. Several of them are lessons he articulated himself; a few are lessons his own record teaches against him.
The principles
- 1.Lower the threshold by an order of magnitude, then align the meter.
- 2.Be the merchant's ally, not its rival.
- 3.Build the glue before the empire.
- 4.Set the target that embarrasses the present.
- 5.Change the language to change the hierarchy.
- 6.Tie the mandate to promotion — then pay for the learning.
- 7.Act in order to think.
- 8.Finish the loop: Shikumika.
- 9.Fit before synergy.
- 10.Your merchants' sins are your sins.
- 11.Exit is a form of voice.
- 12.Write down the rule you're most tempted to break.
Principle 1
Lower the threshold by an order of magnitude, then align the meter
The original Rakuten Ichiba was less a technology innovation than a pricing one. The department-store-backed internet malls of 1997 charged merchants roughly ¥1 million a month and kept the storefront under their own control. Mikitani charged ¥50,000 and handed over the design. That twentyfold difference did not merely win share; it changed who could be a customer at all. Small, regional shops "unfamiliar with computers and the internet," as the company's own history puts it, could suddenly afford to try.
The second move matters as much as the first. In April 2002, with a merchant base established, Rakuten replaced the flat fee with a hybrid of fixed fees and sales commissions. A flat fee is the right price for a market that needs convincing; a commission is the right price for a market that has been convinced. The shift tied Rakuten's revenue to its merchants' success — and the six-months-in-advance fee structure at the start had already funded the company's working capital out of those same merchants. The pricing evolved with the relationship.
Tactic: Price your earliest offer to remove the decision entirely, and schedule the moment you'll switch to a model that grows only when your customers do.
Principle 2
Be the merchant's ally, not its rival
Mikitani's most durable idea is the distinction between the bazaar and the vending machine. A platform that also sells its own inventory will eventually compete with the people who make it valuable. Rakuten declined to hold inventory or build its own logistics in the early decades, and Mikitani framed this not as a constraint but as a philosophy: "I started [Rakuten] to re-empower society, community and local merchants... [Others] started the business to replace the gigantic merchants, so that's a fundamental philosophical difference."
The positioning gave Rakuten a moral and commercial identity no American rival could easily copy in Japan, and it is still the frame he applies to AI: "help small- to medium-sized merchants, not destroy them." The weakness is equally real — a landlord does not control foot traffic, and in 2016 Amazon Japan overtook Rakuten in the very market the bazaar was built for. The principle is not that being an ally always wins. It is that the choice has to be made deliberately and explained relentlessly, because it is the thing customers and merchants are actually buying.
Tactic: Decide in writing whether you will ever compete with the people on your platform, and make that answer part of your pitch to them.
Principle 3
Build the glue before the empire
Rakuten bought a portal, a travel site, a brokerage and a credit card company in its first seven years. What made these an ecosystem rather than a holding company was the Rakuten Super Point program, launched in November 2002 and extended across nearly every service — shopping, cards, travel, even investing through Rakuten Securities. Mikitani calls it a shikumi, a framework, and acknowledges analysts' description of it as "glue." More than a trillion points have been issued.
The order is the lesson. One membership ID and one pool of points were put in place before the acquisitions multiplied, so each new business plugged into an existing loyalty loop rather than having to build its own. By 2016 nearly 40 percent of group revenue came from financial services — a business that only made sense because shoppers already held Rakuten points and the card that earned them faster. The contrast is the overseas expansion of the 2010s, which mostly bought standalone businesses abroad with no shared glue, and much of which was later shut down.
Tactic: Before your second product, build the single identity and reward currency that will make your third, fourth and fifth products reinforce rather than merely coexist.
Principle 4
Set the target that embarrasses the present
In 2001, with gross transaction value at ¥36 billion, Mikitani announced a goal of ¥1 trillion. Rakuten hit it in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006. A target nearly thirty times current scale is not a forecast; it is an instruction to stop thinking incrementally. Business-Do calls it "the power of the moonshot": "Aim higher than you think is reasonably possible. It's the stretch goal that fuels greatness."
The same book pairs the moonshot with its opposite: "If you improve by just 0.1 percent per day, after a year you will be 44 percent better at what you do." The pairing is the point. The audacious number sets direction; the tiny daily increment makes it executable. Mikitani measures relentlessly — group-wide KPI meetings every month, KPIs for engineers and accountants alike — so the absurd ambition is always attached to a dashboard.
Tactic: Announce one target large enough to make the current plan obviously insufficient, then attach it to a monthly metric that every team can move.
Principle 5
Change the language to change the hierarchy
Englishnization is usually discussed as a globalization strategy, and it was: it enabled hiring from seventy countries, made the acquisitions of Viber, Ebates and Kobo integrate faster, and later made Rakuten attractive to AI engineers. But Mikitani's subtler claim was organizational. English, he argued, "has few power markers," and could "break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society and reflected in Japanese conversation."
This is a genuinely non-obvious lever. Most culture programs try to change behavior by changing values statements. Mikitani changed the medium in which every behavior happened. A junior engineer and a senior executive speaking English cannot reach for the grammatical deference the Japanese language provides. He was candid that it also created a new hierarchy — fluent speakers "suddenly acquire a higher status." Any leader borrowing the idea should expect the same: changing the medium redistributes power, and not always toward the people you intend.
Tactic: If you want a culture to change, look for the medium every interaction passes through — language, tools, meeting format — and change that rather than the slogans.
E
Englishnization, Step by Step
How a two-year mandate actually unfolded, according to Mikitani's own accounts and press reports.
Early 2010
Mikitani begins telling staff meetings will move to English; employees dismiss it as "nonsense again."
Mar 2010
Announces to several thousand employees, in English, that all official business will be in English. About 10% of Japanese staff can function in it.
2010
Honda president Takanobu Ito publicly calls the plan "stupid." First English board meeting runs four hours — double the norm.
Oct 2010
Company-wide average TOEIC score: 526.2.
2011
Harvard Business School case by Tsedal Neeley published.
Jun 2012
Average TOEIC: 697.7. Mikitani publishes Takaga Eigo! and declares success.
2015
Average TOEIC reaches 802.6, crossing the advanced-proficiency threshold.
2016
Nearly 40% of Rakuten's engineers in Japan are non-Japanese.
Principle 6
Tie the mandate to promotion — then pay for the learning
The moment Englishnization stopped being a slogan, Mikitani says, was when he tied TOEIC scores to promotion and warned of demotion for those who missed their thresholds within two years. "Around our headquarters in Tokyo, English language schools began to fill up." Consequences turned an aspiration into a priority overnight.
But the record also shows what consequences alone produced: resignations, poaching offers from competitors, the four-hour board meeting. The policy began working at scale only after Rakuten offered free classes, gave employees time to study and stated explicitly that learning English was part of the job. The lesson is the sequencing a better plan would have used from the start. A hard mandate without institutional support reads as a threat; with support, it reads as an investment the company is making alongside the employee.
Tactic: When you impose a capability requirement, fund the time and training to meet it in the same announcement — never as a later concession.
Principle 7
Act in order to think
"Are you thinking about doing something innovative? If so, stop that. Stop thinking, and act." The hot-wine episode at the Sendai stadium is Mikitani's favorite illustration: an idea skeptically received, a vendor found within a week, and data in hand shortly after. No focus group. "A single experiment is far more valuable than a mass of information." His principle number nine in Business-Do puts it as epistemology: "You should be taking action in order to think things through."
He is explicit about the cost: "we've changed policies that drew criticism from our customers, launched services too early, and pursued acquisitions that failed to close." The Kobo launch of 2012 is what that looks like in practice. The principle works best where experiments are cheap and reversible — a concession stand, a feature, a pilot market. It works worst on a public product launch with regulatory exposure. Mikitani himself scopes his slower three-step checklist to "BIG decisions"; for small ones, "just do it."
Tactic: Sort every pending decision into "reversible and cheap" or "irreversible and costly," and for the first category replace research with a one-week live test.
Principle 8
Finish the loop: Shikumika
Rakuten's founding principles included a three-step loop for innovation: Hypothesize → Practice → Validate. Mikitani later realized something was missing and added a fourth word: Shikumika, "systemize." "What is the value of a great idea if it never makes its way through the entire company?" A feature that works in one product but isn't shared, a waste reduction found in one department but not spread, is, in his framing, a loss.
This is the counterweight to Principle 7, and it is the more valuable of the two. Fast-acting organizations generate many successful local experiments and then fail to propagate them. Mikitani's admission — "It's the word I didn't think of right away, when I was a young entrepreneur" — is a rare founder's confession that speed without codification wastes most of what speed discovers. Toyota is his explicit model: its value lies "not simply in its automobiles, but in its unique, clearly defined frameworks."
Tactic: Add a mandatory final step to every successful experiment — a named owner responsible for turning it into a default somewhere else in the company within a quarter.
Principle 9
Fit before synergy
The failed pursuit of Tokyo Broadcasting System cost Rakuten "millions" and taught Mikitani the lesson he calls his best mistake: synergy on a spreadsheet is worthless if the target's leaders "did not see the future in the same way." He applied it immediately, making five better-fitting acquisitions from 2007 to early 2010, and later folded it into his partnership doctrine — whether vetting a baseball sponsor or a Silicon Valley startup, "we seek partners who share our values."
The overseas record tests the principle. Some deals with genuine cultural alignment — Viki, a company literally built on translation; Ebates, a loyalty business — survived and grew. Others, like Buy.com, never became the American bazaar Mikitani hoped, and closed in 2020. Pinterest was won on "rapport" with its founder rather than on price. Fit, in his practice, is something you can read in the room before any diligence model is run.
Tactic: Before modeling synergies on any deal, ask the target's leadership to describe the industry five years out, and walk away if their picture contradicts yours.
R
A Ledger of Bets
Selected Rakuten bets and how they resolved, drawn from public reporting.
| Bet | Terms | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| TBS stake | Hostile accumulation, mid-2000s | Blocked by poison pill; "lost millions" | Lesson |
| Aozora Card | ~¥7bn, 2004 | Became Rakuten Card; 13m+ holders by 2016 | Scaled |
| Buy.com | $250m cash, 2010 | Rebranded 2013; closed Sept 2020 | Shut |
| Led $100m round, 2012 | IPO at a reported ~$11bn valuation, 2019 | Paid off | |
| Viber | $900m, 2014 | Retained as Rakuten Viber | Held |
| Ebates | $1bn, 2014 | Now Rakuten Rewards | Scaled |
| Lyft | ~12% for $300m, 2015 | $989.7m gain at IPO; ¥25bn write-down 2020 | Mixed |
| Rakuten Mobile | Decided 2017; launched 2020 | Net losses 2019–2025 exceed ¥1.3tn | Open |
Principle 10
Your merchants' sins are your sins
This is a lesson Mikitani's record teaches rather than one he preaches. A marketplace's founding ethos of empowerment can harden into a refusal to govern. In the 2013 championship sale, Rakuten's first response was that inflated reference prices were the act of individual vendors; it later emerged that eighteen of its own employees had pushed the practice. Mikitani's line — "We're not the police" — is the instinct of a landlord, and customers do not experience a marketplace as a landlord. They experience it as a store with one name over the door. The same dynamic produced whale meat and ivory listings that persisted until outside pressure forced bans.
Each episode ended the same way: a regulator or NGO stepped in, Rakuten apologized, and a monitoring function was promised. The cheaper path would have been to treat the integrity of listings as a product feature from day one. Rakuten Shugi already contains the principle — "the means of pursuing a mission are as important as the ends" — and the gap between that sentence and the cream-puff listing is the whole lesson.
Tactic: If your brand is on the storefront, own the enforcement — publish your marketplace rules, name the consequences, and audit your own staff's incentives before a journalist does.
Principle 11
Exit is a form of voice
When Mikitani disagreed with Keidanren over nuclear policy and reform in 2011, he did not lobby from inside. He resigned, publicly and first on Twitter, then built an alternative body, the Japan Association of New Economy, from an industry association he already ran. When the Abe government stalled on online sales of non-prescription medicine, he threatened to leave the competitiveness council and explained why a "trivial" issue was "very, very symbolic."
For a founder whose business depends on deregulation, the credible threat to leave is a source of leverage the establishment cannot easily grant or withhold. It also carries real costs in a culture where executives rarely criticize each other in public. The approach works because Mikitani paired each exit with an alternative institution or a specific policy demand — never just a protest.
Tactic: When an industry body or partnership no longer serves your mission, leave with a specific, public reason and a ready alternative, so the exit reads as leadership rather than a tantrum.
Principle 12
Write down the rule you're most tempted to break
Mikitani's three-step checklist for big decisions begins: "Don't risk bankrupting the company." It is the instinct of an industrial banker who "had seen many firms go bankrupt because they expanded too far, too fast." The second rule — "don't hold back if you'll regret that later" — pulls the other way. The mobile network is what happens when the second rule wins: a strategically coherent ecosystem play and a genuinely novel architecture, funded by bank and brokerage stake sales, a postal-company investment and dollar bonds at up to 12 percent.
The value of the checklist is not that Mikitani always followed it. It is that writing it down made the conflict legible — to employees at asakai, to investors, to himself. Most founders carry their risk appetite as an unexamined temperament. Mikitani put both of his on paper, in priority order. Whether the bet pays off will be decided by time and investor patience. But the method — naming the rule you are most likely to break, so you know when you are breaking it — is worth stealing regardless.
Tactic: Write your decision rules in ranked order, share them with your team, and when you override the top one, say so explicitly and set the conditions under which you'd reverse.
M
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Mikitani Approach
Where his playbook departed from the default — and what it cost.
| Conventional wisdom | Mikitani's approach | Cost or caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Control the storefront to control the experience. | Let merchants design their own shops; be a bazaar. | Weak control of listings and pricing integrity. |
| Culture change starts with values. | Culture change starts with the language everyone speaks. | Creates a new hierarchy of fluency. |
| Research before you launch. | Launch to learn; act in order to think. | Public mistakes, as with Kobo in 2012. |
| Build the network, then the ecosystem. | Build the ecosystem, then the network. | Seven straight years of group net losses. |
| Influence the establishment from inside. | Leave publicly; found a rival body. | Burns goodwill with peers. |
His own codification of these ideas runs through Marketplace 3.0, his 2013 English-language manifesto on borderless business, and Business-Do, the 2018 collection of 89 principles that reads like an internal operating manual made public. Publishers Weekly found the earlier book "self-congratulatory at times" and in need of editing. It is still the best primary source on how he thinks.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Hiroshi Mikitani, Wired, 2013My point is you don't need to kill the human factor. You can amplify the human factor by using information technology.
— Hiroshi Mikitani, on EnglishnizationEnglish is not an advantage anymore — it is a requirement.
— Hiroshi Mikitani, Business-DoAll concepts are relative. Never believe in the absolute. No one single way of thinking is perfect.
— Hiroshi Mikitani, Harvard Business School, Leading with AI conferenceIf you asked AI 27 years ago, Should I start an internet marketplace? It would probably say no. Should I start this crazy new mobile company in Japan? It would probably say no.
— Hiroshi Mikitani, World Economic ForumI believe speed is essential to success in business. But what I have been forced to realize is that when I insist on speed, I have to accept that will come with another element that does not make me as happy – mistakes.
Maxims
- Price for the first yes. Cut the cost of trying by an order of magnitude, then move to a model that grows only when your customers grow.
- Bazaar, not vending machine. Decide whether you serve your sellers or compete with them, and never let the answer drift.
- Glue first, empire second. A shared identity and a shared reward currency turn acquisitions into an ecosystem.
- Embarrass the present. Set one target large enough to make today's plan obviously inadequate, then measure it monthly.
- Change the medium, change the culture. The language people work in shapes who feels entitled to speak.
- Mandates need money. A capability requirement without paid training reads as a threat, not an investment.
- Act, then think — then systemize. Fast experiments are worthless unless the winners become defaults everywhere.
- Fit beats synergy. If the other side doesn't see the same future, no spreadsheet will save the deal.
- The name on the door owns the shelf. A marketplace is judged by its worst listing, not its stated principles.
- Know which rule you'll break. Rank your decision rules in writing, so you recognize the moment you override the first one.
