“Taihei Kobayashi has gone from sleeping on the streets of Tokyo to heading a technology startup whose market value topped $1 billion.
His rags-to-riches story is among the most remarkable to emerge from a small-cap stock boom that’s minting fortunes in Japan. Kobayashi’s company, which helps startups and other firms to design and create new businesses and products, went public in July and its shares have since more than tripled.
It’s an outcome that few could have imagined two decades ago. As Kobayashi tells it, his parents kicked him out at 17 when he quit a prestigious high school to focus on his band. He played music during the day and mostly slept outdoors, using cardboard boxes to keep warm during freezing winter nights. He was homeless for a year and a half.
A series of encounters got him off the streets and eventually into a job as a software engineer. He was one of the core members in establishing the predecessor to the company now known as Sun* Inc., pronounced Sun Asterisk, in Vietnam in 2012. He’s now Sun*’s chief executive officer.
‘The winters were cold,’ Kobayashi, 37, said of his 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 wouldn’t accept his decision to drop out of high school. They had made financial plans to allow him to get a university education, he said. Attempts to contact Kobayashi’s parents were unsuccessful.
‘They told me to leave, so I left, and that was that,’ he said. ‘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 said. ‘I slept anywhere I could,’ he said. ‘About 80% of the time it was somewhere outside.’
Yushi Fukagawa, a close friend since Kobayashi’s school days who currently works at Sun*, recalls the time the entrepreneur became homeless.
‘I didn’t think too much of it’ Fukagawa said. But ‘my parents seemed worried.’
At 19, a manager of a live-music club took pity on Kobayashi, offering 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 made some money trading music records online. Then he came across a job advertisement that didn’t require any qualifications or experience. All you had to do was take a test, it said.”
View the whole story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/he-went-from-homeless-musician-to-ceo-of-a-1-billion-company