HIROSHI MIKITANI

Hiroshi Mikitani was born in Kobe in 1965. He studied at Hitotsubashi University, then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1993.

He took a stable, prestigious job at the Industrial Bank of Japan. Then in 1995 the Kobe earthquake hit, killing his aunt and uncle and destroying much of his hometown.

It shook something loose. Life felt too short to spend at a bank, so he quit to start his own company.

In 1997 he launched Rakuten Ichiba, an online mall that let small Japanese shops sell to the whole country. That mall became the foundation of everything Rakuten is today.

Rakuten is the empire. It started as an online shopping mall and kept expanding into anything with a customer.

There is Rakuten Card and Rakuten Bank in finance, Rakuten Securities in investing, and Rakuten Mobile in telecom. Mikitani went on a global buying spree too.

He bought the e-reader company Kobo in 2011, the messaging app Viber in 2014 for around $900 million, and the cashback site Ebates, now Rakuten Rewards, also in 2014 for roughly $1 billion. The riskiest move was Rakuten Mobile, launched in 2020, which spent enormous money building a phone network from scratch and dragged the whole group into losses.

Mikitani thinks like a builder who also happens to invest. Through Rakuten he has taken big strategic stakes in companies he wanted to learn from or partner with.

He put $100 million into Pinterest in 2012, well before it was famous. He poured around $300 million into the ride-hailing company Lyft and took a board seat.

His approach to running and backing companies leans on a couple of famous rules. One is that tiny daily improvements compound into huge gains.

Another is that every time a company grows several times over, everything that worked before breaks and has to be rebuilt.

The founding bet is the win. In 1997 Mikitani started Rakuten Ichiba with a tiny team and just a handful of merchants.

The conventional wisdom in Japan was that people would not shop online and that small shops could not sell nationwide. He proved that wrong.

Rakuten grew into one of Japan's most valuable internet companies, with a card business, a bank, and tens of millions of members in its loyalty ecosystem. He turned a simple idea, give small merchants a storefront on the internet, into a company that reshaped how Japan shops.

Rakuten Mobile is the bet that keeps hurting. Mikitani launched it in 2020 to become Japan's fourth big carrier, building a cheap, software-driven network.

The cost was staggering. The mobile arm racked up huge losses year after year and forced Rakuten to raise money and pile on debt to keep it alive.

The stock suffered. The Lyft investment was another sore spot, ending in losses and his exit from the board in 2020.

The lesson is that Mikitani's biggest strength, his willingness to make enormous bets, is also his biggest risk.

Mikitani preaches relentless, tiny improvement. His most quoted line is that if you get just 0.1 percent better every day, you end up 44 percent better in a year.

He also warns leaders about growth itself. His rule of 3 and 10 says that every time a company multiplies in size by three or ten, everything that used to work breaks and must be rebuilt.

And he believes in empowerment over cutthroat competition, arguing that business should lift up merchants, customers, and staff together rather than grind them down.

Hiroshi Mikitani grew up in an academic family. His father, Ryoichi Mikitani, was a respected economics professor who spent time at universities in the United States, so young Hiroshi lived in America as a kid and picked up English early.

That international upbringing helps explain his obsession years later with making Rakuten an English-speaking company. He is married and keeps his immediate family largely out of the spotlight, preferring to be public about business and sports rather than his private life.

Mikitani studied at Hitotsubashi University in Japan, one of the country's top schools for business and economics. He then crossed the Pacific for an MBA at Harvard Business School, finishing in 1993.

Harvard mattered for him. It exposed him to a more global, entrepreneurial way of thinking than the safe corporate path most of his peers took, and it planted the idea that he could build something of his own.

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