About

I'm Hisashi. I have run my own company for twenty years, and in all that time the person writing the code has been me.

The largest thing I built is @SOHO, a marketplace where Japanese companies hire freelancers. It has 300,000 members. It has no engineering team. I write the features, I answer the support mail, and I get up when the server does something at three in the morning.

In 2011 I put the entire business online and gave the Japanese language a word for what I was doing: running a company from anywhere but home. Nobody in Japan was using the idea then. The usual reaction was that I was on holiday and lying about it.

So in April 2012 I took the argument as far as it goes. I flew Moscow, Oslo, Tromsø, and then to Longyearbyen on Svalbard, at 78 degrees north. It is the northernmost town on earth, the polar bears outnumber the people, and the internet arrives by satellite. I worked a normal week there. Nothing broke.

That was the point. If the work holds up at the top of the world, the location was never the thing holding anyone back. I have not had a fixed office since. The platform is in Japan and the work is wherever I am, and it has been through Asia, the United States, Europe, Kosovo, Cairo and a long list of places in between.

No debt and no investors, so every decision is mine. Not listed, because the version of success that comes with a stock price also comes with a set of chains I did not want. One person, because twenty years in I still think one person with good tools can do what a department does.

That is also where the apps come from. Every one of them started as something I needed before lunch, on a day when running everything myself was costing me an hour I did not have.