My journey as an entrepreneur started a few years before I founded GLOBIS. I was sitting on the lawn of Harvard Business School in front of the Charles River with a notebook on my lap. There on the page, I drew three overlapping circles with a word inside each: people, capital, and knowledge.
I thought, “This is the ecosystem I should create for societies.”
Just two years later, in 1992, I quit a steady job at Sumitomo Corporation to start a business school. GLOBIS didn’t start big. It didn’t have endless capital or angel investors. I used my tiny apartment as an office and rented a small classroom in Shibuya, Tokyo, with only 800,000 yen (about $8,000 USD at the time) as initial capital and no employees. But from there, we’ve grown step by step, bringing together people, capital, and knowledge.
People
GLOBIS University is an accredited university awarding MBA degrees across campuses in Japan. We’re rapidly expanding overseas, bringing everything from executive training to MBA courses to business leaders from locations in China, Singapore, Thailand, the USA, Belgium, and The Philippines.
Capital
Our venture capital firm, GLOBIS Capital Partners, started with just $5 million USD in 1996, and has now invested over $1.3 billion USD in startups. It has become the No. 1 venture capital firm in Japan.
Knowledge
We’ve published a top-selling series of textbooks, established the online publication GLOBIS Insights, and launched the online learning platform GLOBIS Unlimited.
We began with the goal of establishing the No. 1 MBA program in Asia. However, regional boundaries are becoming less and less important. The ability to merge technology and innovation-what we at GLOBIS call “Technovate”-will be a crucial skill for future business leaders. To empower leaders in this new era, we now aim to become the No. 1 MBA program in a Technovate world.
At the occasion of GLOBIS’s 30th anniversary in 2022, we decided to position GLOBIS as a “social contribution company” following our founding principle of “contributing to societies through business.”
In addition to social contributions through business activities such as MBA programs, corporate education, and venture capital, GLOBIS will strive to improve the state of Japan and the world through G1 and KIBOW, as well as revitalize the city of Mito and Ibaraki Prefecture through initiatives such as the Ibaraki Robots, LuckyFM, and LuckyFes.
