My name is Nobuhiro Seki. Many call me “Nob” as it is easier to pronounce. Born and raised in Tokyo, I am a Japanese Japanese having lived in New York since May last year. In all my past career is heavily related to the tech.

I went to a college in Tokyo and my major was Metallurgy. If you know me today, you cannot get it. But I actually studied the rusting mechanism on the stainless steel and created hundreds of experimental sensors to measure the degree of the rusting of the stainless steel in highly humid atmosphere.

My first job, however, was totally different from my study. I ended up becoming an editor covering the information technology, from the emergence of the Internet to the end of the dot-com bubble. When I was at college (by the way, I repeated twice so I spent 6 years there), I had spent so much time on the online communication service and the non-commercial Internet (World-wide Web was not used).

Through my experience, I wanted more people to know and use the online service. Being a tech journalist was a way to evangelize how exciting the online service would be. Through the activities, I luckily made friends of many enthusiasts and evangelists. Many of them triggered my career changes. One of my biggest assets in my life.

First visit to the U.S.

Many revolutionary things happened in the U.S., especially in the “Silicon Valley”, so it is natural that I needed to come to San Francisco Bay Area. My first business trip to the U.S., which was my first trip to the U.S. as well, was to participate in Netscape’s first developer conference in San Francisco in March 1996. Co-founded by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, Netscape was one of the companies that led the dot-com bubble.

Even though I had requested the press access to the conference from Tokyo, at the venue (Moscone Center in San Francisco) Netscape’s PR Director at first kept telling me (and other tech editors) to buy the full conference ticket ($1,995 or so). I kept negotiating with the Director (she was doing Yoga at the entrance) for 30 minutes or so, and I finally got the press pass with the press access. I learned negotiation is an important skill in this country.

By the way, a week before this Netscape conference, I had an opportunity of meeting and talking with Steve Jobs at Oracle’s conference. He came to the conference to introduce NeXT’s WebObjects software and I talked with him for several minutes exclusively, as no press people approached him. Instead, quite a few attendees wanted to get photographed with him, and I took quite a few photos for these people during the talk with him.

Staying in San Jose, CA

I came to the San Francisco Bay Area very often for further reports in the Internet industry in 1996 and 1997, and the company finally decided to send me to the bay area for several months. The company leased some apartments in San Jose, CA, and I stayed at one of them in H1 1998.

On a weekend in November 1998, I happened to stay in a hotel in Santa Clara, CA, and there was a rumor that AOL would acquire Netscape, and Netscape’s PR confirmed that they would have a joint press conference call at 5am (Pacific Time) on Monday, and the rumor was confirmed.

From then, I was more interested in this “capitalism” aspect — why dynamic, drastic changes like this can happen, instead of the technology itself. My major interest had been the technology. Through my editorial activities in the Silicon Valley, I met countless founders and executives who went to the business school, so I got more interested in the business school rather than the Internet technology.

Coming to Pittsburgh, PA

In summer 2000, I moved to Pittsburgh, PA, to attend the business school at Carnegie Mellon University. I was 30 years old.

At first, I had hard time explaining in my second language what I understood, but I was getting used to it. Classes in the first year were not tough. Of course there were some difficulties in articulating things in English, but the solution is universal and it does not matter if it is explained in perfect English or broken one.

In March 2001, a friend of the class and I came out with a business idea and decided to work on the idea.

During the summer 2001, we joined The Entrepreneurship Summer School at London Business School and developed this business idea.

What we founded was a multiplayer mobile role-playing location-based game platform. We named it “SyncWorld”. The game platform relied on the infrastructure of the mobile phone that is capable of access to the Internet.

You may be surprised, but in 2001, there were only a couple of mobile phones with the cam feature, and all of them were sold only in Japan. In the U.S., no mobile phones had the cam or even the Internet email.

We came back to Pittsburgh in August 2001 for the first week of the business school, but flied back to London for the final pitches in front of investors on September 10, 2001. We arrived in London in the early morning on September 11 and took a class from Guy Kawasaki in the morning. After the class was over, a classmate came back in the classroom and said “a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

Working on the business plan

The second year at the business school was totally different from the first year. Classes like “Internet Marketing” were completely full in the first year, but in 2001 many of such classes were cancelled due to extremely low interest from the students.

But it was good for me to concentrate on the business plan. The co-founder already lost the interest in the business, so I was solely working on the business plan for the almost entire second year. Very few people took classes in Entrepreneurship, and not so many business plans were presented in the class. But I spent all my energy on writing and revising the business plan.

I participated in several business plan competitions, school-wide, Pittsburgh-wide, etc. Finally Entrepreneurship Center of Carnegie Mellon decided to send our plan to represent the school to some business plan competitions.

The school’s subsidization of the trips to the competitions was great, but the most precious resources were professors’ time and commitments to me (our plan). Almost everyday, I was working on the business plan in a room of Entrepreneurship Center and had private lectures from Professor S. Thomas Emerson, a successful entrepreneur who made three IPOs for his co-founded companies, and Professor Thomas Hajduk, Director of Center for Business Communication. I called both “Tom”. It was sometimes confusing.

Three of us spent fun time during the trips to the competitions as well as preparation for the competitions, for more than half a year. A series of the experiences there is another big asset to my career in the U.S.

Here is the deck used for the business plan competitions as well as investors back in 2001 and 2002. I needed to explain why people would use the cell phone for email & web browsing in almost any occasions (and most American judges concluded Americans would never use the cell phone in ways like that).

It might be too early. I’ve learned that timing is critically important. Too early is as bad as too late.

We could spend 15 minutes for the presentation followed by Q&A for 25 minutes. That was the common format of the business plan competition. Today, we needed to make the story more concise… Likewise, this blogging post also ended up being much longer than I had expected.

So, the story is to be continued tomorrow …

(Click to read Part 2)