Hi, my name is Takayuki Hoshino, and I am the CEO of Your myster, Inc. I started this business 4 years ago, and became a CEO, but it was a long journey to get to this point.

I spent my university life in Keio University, and I was the captain of the tennis club. I think I had a pretty fulfilling university life, but during my fourth year in university, I got a major life-threatening illness. My life completely changed from that point of life, and I had to get a series of treatments. I was in between life or death for a while but I endured as best as I could, and recovered from this illness. Shortly after, I got accepted by Rakuten and started working there. I had countless valuable experiences at Rakuten, and I started my own company, Your myster 4 years ago. →Know more about Takayuki Hoshino

I really put my effort into the tennis club activities during college. Honestly, I was only thinking about winning the tennis matches and getting popular among girls. I pretty much enjoyed my youth, and they are all great memories to me. As I mentioned previously, I got a major life-threatening illness during my fourth year in college.  Getting the treatments and wandering between life and death was absolutely terrifying, and I never ever felt this scared in my life. Fortunately, I got better from this illness, but this experience completely changed my way of thinking towards life. After experiencing the deadly illness, I realized I have no time to waste, and immediately started changing my actions. During the treatment process, I read a lot of books and encountered new perspectives, and it led me to see myself from a different perspective. I thought of what I really wanted to do for my future and decided to be more proactive in every action. Soon after I was discharged from hospital, I started participating in the part time job at the House of Representatives in order to deepen my understanding about Japanese politics, because I always wanted to become a politician since I was a little kid. 

What you wish you have done during college and why? 

I definitely urge college students to study English and to access all kinds of information available in English because most of the news featured in Japan are not provided timely and translated multiple times which creates a certain level of bias even before you encounter the news. You may feel like the latest news is brought to you, but it actually is not the latest if you get the information in Japanese. Actually, the latest news is broadcasted in English if you watch news in the U.S., U.K. or China.

Knowing what is going on in the rest of the world and executing a business or working will certainly make you strive to become a better professional. You will realize how behind Japan is behind in the global competition. Learning English and being able to input the world’s latest information in English have broadened my horizons, so I strongly recommend students to start learning English and pay attention to the latest news in English while you are still a student. 

Another important thing to do during college is to play hard. Honestly, you will look like a fool if you are still playing too hard even after you start taking on the world as a professional. So, play hard when you are still a student because there are things that you can do only as a student. It is a privilege of a student to study and play hard.

IQ x EQ x AQ

I think there are 3 important abilities in the working field; IQ, EQ and AQ. IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is a measure of a person’s ability to think logically and use information to improve things. EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) is important in order to work as a member of a team, and it is a measurement of how well a person can control his/her emotion. Last but not least, AQ (Adversity Quotient) is a measure of how mentally strong a person is when he/she is facing difficulties in the working field and how well a person can handle the situation. Most important thing is to be good at all these three aspects. In addition, you have to believe in yourself in a work setting. There are times when you just have to convince yourself and say to yourself that “I can do this”. It takes time to be able to show your full potential and capabilities, so it is important to trust yourself and always seek for opportunities to grow. It is also meaningful to set a 3 to 4 years time limit before you reach your goal, so you can stay alert and become professional.

Find Your Own Role Model

It is important to find a role model in order to grow as a person. I personally think the quality of one’s community is built upon one’s ability. Also, if the role model is not experienced enough or not at a certain level as a working adult, it is not going to help you to grow as a person. It is impossible to work by yourself and improve yourself, so I recommend finding your role model who is suitable for your level.

When I was working at Rakuten, there were many role models not only inside the company but also outside of the company including my customers. There were opportunities to work with CEOs who manage companies worth 10 billion yen EV (Enterprise Value), and they all had great impacts on me. Especially when I was working at the headquarter in Tokyo, my bosses were all the top management team like president and vice-president of the company, and I was always amazed by how they worked. Most of the board members graduated from prestigious universities inside and outside of Japan, so there were always lessons to learn from them. 

What I learned from them was that it is of course important to have an outstanding ability in a certain field, but it is more important to be a businessman who is outstanding in every field. In other words, it is crucial to be someone who has an ability to grasp the true nature of matters and take actions. 

Thinking back to when I was working at Rakuten, I learned that board members’ scope of work changes constantly, and it even changes quicker in bigger companies. In order to work in those kinds of high-ranking positions, so-called business revitalization ability is required. It’s the ability to look into the core of problems and to plan carefully in order to take the next action for revitalization of the business. I learned a lot about this ability from my role models while working at Rakuten. Also, they all had sophisticated communication skills as their foundation, and that is what made me think board members of Rakuten are the professionals of what they do. 

Be equipped with Executive’s Point of View

It is important to think about business from an executive's point of view. The point is to have an executive’s point of view but not an entrepreneurial mindset. Employees who work in executive positions are always involved in management of a company, and they see things from the executive's point of view and reflect their thoughts upon the company's business management. This is how business works, and you can not do things that are against executives’ thoughts or ideas because once you go against them, the business will lose its consistency. In other words, it is very significant to understand what exactly executives have to say about business. Employees who can think from the executive's point of view are the kind of people who are clearly aware of the company's goal or intention, and understanding them can lead one to a great career success. If people who are in marketing positions only think about the company’s business from a marketing point of view, it is hard to understand the bigger picture of the company. Each department of the company has to understand one another, and you need to have finance literacy in today’s business field regardless of your position. I am sure that if the business has consistency, the business will grow. In order to have consistency in business, it is crucial to understand the framework of human resource, products and money regardless of your job or position.

What You Can Gain from Challenges

Younger people tend to think that most of the business will be successful. The reality is most of them won’t be successful. First of all, there is no way that all the businesses will be successful. The key is to fully understand that the business field is a tough world and continue making efforts to improve your business at the same time. It is also important to note that even if you don’t succeed after a challenge, you will definitely gain some valuable lessons and knowledge for your career as a return. I think learning from those lessons is the most valuable thing to form your successful career in the future. 

Maximize the amount of information intake

Become a person who can process massive amounts of information. As I previously mentioned, the world’s latest news is always in English. I think doing business while understanding the world’s situation by using English ability really helps one to grow as a person. In my case, my horizons were expanded greatly since I started to take in information in English, and this helped me to adapt to changes in the business field. Always reading the world’s latest news from your own point of view will be a great asset and will help you to take the correct approaches to new changes. That being said, we all need to take in fresh information and be prepared for the changes of the world. 

Separate Work and Private Life

Work is something you spend the most time in your life, so if you are not happy about your work, your life won’t be a happy one. If you are not happy, you can not make people around you happy either, so I always try to be someone who can earn close people’s support. The first important thing to do is to cherish your own family. The key is to work when it’s time to work and rest when it’s time to rest. Having all “Spirit, Technique and Body” in good condition is essential in the working field, and if one of them gets unstable, it will definitely affect your work negatively. That’s why it is important not to work blindly, but to think about your workload at the same time to maintain the balance between work and private life. 

Percentage of success is very important in the business field. One has to keep thinking about how to increase the percentage of success as a businessman. I think “thinking as hard as you can to succeed within the time limit” is the key to being a successful businessman. 

Adjusting to the culture

You need the skill to adapt to the Japanese culture in order to work in Japan. It is because Japan is the country that does not change much. Of course, global people with a high skill set are always valuable to the companies, but there are many cases where global people struggle to adapt to the culture. The company, especially the board members have to understand the importance of global point of views and cultural diversity in order to make the corporate culture global. It can be easily predicted that there are going to be more opportunities for foreign national employees and bilingual employees in the near future, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Japanese companies’ corporate culture will become more global. Some of the companies won’t be able to adapt to the corporate cultural shift, and there are going to be cultural gaps between the global employees and the company. Currently, the working style is rapidly changing because of the outbreak of COVID-19, but I assume Japanese companies’ old-fashioned corporate culture will not change easily. Even in such a global company like Rakuten, Japanese employees manage business in Japan and foreign national employees manage business outside of Japan. That’s why it is important to understand the corporate culture before you start working at a company. Corporate side has to adapt to diversity but foreign national employees also have to adapt to the Japanese corporate culture at the same time. 

I am a CEO, so I basically look for people who agree with our vision and are willing to work with us. I also train my employees and make long-term corporate strategies in order to raise funds. Your myster is at its growth stage as a company, so the situation changes every single day. As it’s written in the corporate mission, we are working as a team to be the most supported and a representative company of Japan. As a CEO, it is extremely important to determine the right person for the right place and to manage the person in order to make the team better. It is also important to give proper feedback to each one of the team members because no one can improve themselves without any advice from others’ point of views. While I do that, I carefully look at everyone’s work as a team and as an individual, and also try to be as tolerant as I can toward my employees' mistakes.  

Working Environment at Your mystar

We value “teamwork” as a company so our office is designed for all the teams to gather and work on the same floor.

Currently, we can’t go to the office due to the COVID-19 situation, and everyone is working remotely now. In order to keep the sense of “teamwork” even under the situation, we have a general meeting on Zoom once a week where all the employees participate. We also have an online regular corporate meeting on the last business day every month since the outbreak of COVID-19 where every member of the company including internship members participates. The whole point of this monthly meeting is to share the corporate-wide updates so everyone can be on the same page during this difficult time. 

The weekly and monthly meetings are for macro-communication purposes and we constantly have individual 1on1 meetings as well for micro-communication purposes. We always value both macro and micro communication to maintain and update the sense of “teamwork”within the company while the number of employees is rapidly growing.

Core value at Your mystar

“HAPPY TRIANGLE” is on the top and most well-described value among Your mystar’s corporate values. This value accurately expresses our corporate work. We operate a platform business and there are always 3 main stakeholders in the business; craftsmen or sellers who provide service, customers or buyers who use service and us. Your mystar functions as the platformer between the two parties. In Japan, sellers often unconditionally show exaggerated respect to their customers. In our company, we believe that all the 3 parties should be equal since three parties are partners.. In other words, we always try to build an equilateral triangle relationship where all of those 3 players keep exactly the same distance from each other. 

We call this equal relationship among the 3 players in the business, “HAPPY TRIANGLE” and aim to make the TRIANGLE bigger everyday.

Growth at Your mystar

Growth by our definition starts from “encountering something you can not do”. The process of one’s growth begins from understanding your own “strength” and recognizing your “difference” from other people. No one is perfect at everything so the key is to work as a team within the company. The definition of “growth” in our dictionary is that every member takes advantage of their strength to achieve successful results.