Yosuke Iwai, President and CEO of Arara Inc.

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■ Profile

He founded CYBIRD Inc. in 1998 and became its senior managing director. He was involved in all aspects of mobile content service planning, mobile commerce, and overseas business. The company went public in 2000. After that, focusing on gift cards, which were becoming popular overseas, he founded Repica Inc. (now Arara Inc.) in 2006 and became its representative director and president. The company operates a SaaS-based B2B2C business centered on cashless services and messaging services. It was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers in November last year.

President Iwai says he has wanted to become a president since he was a child. He has honed his business sense by actively engaging with society since his student days, and has always acted with an awareness of the cutting edge of the times.
Looking back at his career, we can see that he has a flexible approach to difficult situations and an eagerness to continue creating new services.

I was born and raised in Osaka, a city with many businessmen, and from an early age I loved reading biographies of successful people, and vaguely dreamed of becoming a company president in the future. Every time my father took me out to eat, he would ask me how much the restaurant's sales were, so I still have this strange habit of calculating the sales when I enter a restaurant. (laughs)

■An active student life

Immediately after entering university, I joined an events club and from my first year onwards, I started selling party tickets and hosting my own events. At the time, marketing targeting university students was booming, so I started a student company with some friends and did a variety of businesses, including research, publishing free papers and staffing. It was the height of the bubble economy, so any money I earned was quickly gone as I went out partying every night (laughs).
In my fourth year, I was debating whether to get a job or continue in the business, but at the time it was a seller's market and everyone around me seemed to be having fun looking for work, so I decided to get a job. The average age of employees was under 25, and I was attracted to the environment where young people were thriving, so I joined Recruit Cosmos at the time.
I was assigned to the Public Relations Office, which was right in the middle of the Recruit Scandal, so I was getting phone calls about the case every day and it was quite a busy job.

■Continue to read ahead and act

After the bubble burst, I was transferred to what was then Recruit Building Management along with some of Recruit Cosmos' distressed properties, and then I was invited by a senior colleague to move to a marketing company in Osaka. The Internet was just starting to take off around that time, and having always been interested in computer communications, I began to think that I wanted to do some kind of Internet-related business. I gathered information from friends attending an electronics technical college and held Internet study sessions with a friend who had run a business with me during my student days, and at the age of 28, I started a company called Paradise Web. There, I ran a website called "Hello" where users could create their own personal pages, but when the number of members exceeded 5000, the server stopped working and I was forced to reluctantly close the site.

Meanwhile, more and more people were starting to own mobile phones, and we thought that they might soon be able to access the Internet from mobile phones, so we started planning services for mobile phones.
When I heard that NTT Docomo was going to launch i-mode, I set up a company called Cybird, based on Paradise Web, in 1998 to start a service for i-mode. We started out as Japan's first mobile content provider.

■Continue to create new services in a flexible manner

Having originally operated "Hello," we wanted to provide a communication service again, so we began developing content to recreate it on i-mode.

However, due to an incident that occurred with a service offered by NTT, the content was discontinued midway through development. Still, they didn't give up, and switched to a PHS version and released it, which became a hit. Starting with wave information for surfers, i-mode developed a series of services, including ringtones, games, and fortune-telling, and went public in December 2000, the shortest time at the time.

After that, we launched various businesses such as mobile commerce and media collaborations, and eventually began overseas business. During that time, we learned about gift cards in the US, which were hardly used in Japan at the time, and saw great potential in them. This prompted us to launch Repica in 2006 and start an electronic money business. We then launched new businesses such as messaging and data security services, and in 2010, in line with the spread of smartphones, we established a subsidiary, Arara, which develops AR smartphone apps. We merged with Repica in 2016, and now operate all of our services together under the company name Arara.

■ Second listing

As the times changed, demand for cashless payments increased, and the number of users of Arara's cashless services also increased significantly, leading to Arara being listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers in 2020, 14 years after the company was founded. It had been 20 years since Cybird went public, and our second listing was a really long and difficult process (laughs).

■ Arara's strength is product development capabilities

Our company philosophy is to "provide innovative services through ideas and technology, and create a convenient, fun, and happy society for everyone," and we are actively focusing on product development that incorporates new technologies. IT itself is constantly evolving, so we believe that if we stop development, the product is as good as finished. In any case, we value being greedy and keeping up with technological advances.

■What kind of people do you want to work with?

We've been operating with the same corporate philosophy since the company was founded, so I'd like to work with people who share that philosophy. Also, I'd like to work with people who can think for themselves and act. I'd like someone who doesn't just sit around and do things because they're told to, but who questions things and thinks, "Maybe we could do this better," and can put those ideas into action.

■ Future outlook

The cashless service business has been growing at a tremendous pace recently, so I would like to further strengthen that area. With a vision of "Going beyond cashless," I am working while imagining a society where cash will no longer be used. I would like to realize a cashless service that is safe, secure, and accessible to everyone.

■Message

I hope you continue to put your ideas into action. When you have an idea, act immediately. If you don't act immediately when you want to do something, your desire to do it will fade and you'll forget what you wanted to do. Another thing is to be exposed to various stimuli. You can't take action without information, so I hope you keep your antenna up and keep up with the latest information.

Student Newspaper WEB January 28, 2021 Interview by Nao Suzuki, 4th year student at International Christian University