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 in 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 ($6,300 USD) as initial capital and no employees. But from there, we’ve grown step by step, bringing together people, capital, and knowledge.
People
Now GLOBIS is an accredited university awarding MBA degrees across campuses in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, and Fukuoka. We’re rapidly expanding overseas, bringing everything from executive training to MBA courses to business leaders in China, Singapore, and Thailand and the USA.
Capital
Our venture capital firm, GLOBIS Capital Partners, started with just 5 million USD in 1996, but now has approximately 1 billion USD in total capital management. 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 a 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 innovateーwhat we at GLOBIS call “Technovate”ー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.
The vision to create ecosystems of people, capital, and knowledge drives us as an institution, but it’s also the dream we pass on to our students, corporate partners, and global network of thought leaders.
