Remote Lands is a New York-based ultra-luxury travel company focused exclusively on Asia. Founded in 2006 by Catherine Heald and Jay Tindall, it designs bespoke, privately guided journeys across more than two dozen Asian countries for celebrities, Fortune 500 executives and other ultra-high-net-worth travelers - coining the term 'travel designer' and running the celebrated Aman Jet Expeditions on a custom 19-seat Airbus.
BJIT is a global software development and IT outsourcing company founded in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2001, built as a bridge between Japanese engineering discipline and Bangladeshi talent. With 750+ engineers across eight offices in Japan, the USA, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Thailand and Bangladesh, BJIT delivers dedicated offshore teams, custom software, QA automation, DevOps, AI, IoT, blockchain and mechanical engineering to more than 50 Fortune 500 clients including Sony, Panasonic, BMW, Qualcomm and Dassault Systemes.
Keigo Okumura is Vice President of Marketing at ServiceNow Japan, bringing over two decades of marketing leadership across enterprise technology giants including Oracle, Adobe, Dell Technologies, and Citrix. Based in Japan, he oversees marketing strategy for ServiceNow's Japan region, helping drive the AI-powered workflow platform's expansion in one of the world's most demanding enterprise markets. His career arc - from systems engineer at Hitachi Solutions to VP at a $13B+ cloud company - reflects a rare blend of technical grounding and strategic marketing acumen.
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Akbar JM is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of BJIT Group, Bangladesh's largest IT consulting firm. He built BJIT from a 10-person startup in 2001 into a global technology company with 800+ engineers, offices across 8 countries, and clients including Google, Sony, Panasonic, and Qualcomm. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Akbar JM has bridged Bangladesh and Japan's technology ecosystems for over two decades, combining Japanese quality standards with Bangladeshi engineering talent to deliver software development, AI, IoT, and cloud services to Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
Takeshi Numoto is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, appointed in October 2023 after his predecessor Chris Capossela's 32-year tenure. A University of Tokyo law graduate and Stanford MBA, Numoto joined Microsoft in 1997 after serving as a trade negotiator for Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he has been the architect behind the marketing strategies that powered the explosive growth of Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, and now leads all worldwide marketing for the company's AI-driven Copilot era — overseeing brand, advertising, product marketing, events, and communications globally.
Alex Yeh is the Founder and CEO of GMI Cloud, a GPU-native AI cloud infrastructure company he built from Bitcoin mining data centers into a global AI infrastructure leader in just 30 days. GMI Cloud — one of only 6 NVIDIA Reference Platform Partners worldwide — raised $82M in Series A funding in 2024 and is behind a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan. Yeh's mission: make building AI applications as simple as building a website on Shopify.
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
WHILL designs and manufactures intelligent personal electric vehicles - sleek power chairs and an autonomous mobility service - that reframe the wheelchair as a piece of consumer technology. Founded in 2012 by three Japanese engineers from Nissan, Sony and Olympus, the company sells the Model C2 and Model F directly to consumers and operates an autonomous fleet service at airports including Haneda, Narita and Winnipeg.
ZEALS is a Tokyo-born, San Francisco-expanded conversational commerce company building AI-powered chat experiences on LINE, Instagram, and Messenger. Its 'Chat Commerce' platform pairs human conversation designers with generative AI to turn ad clicks and DMs into measurable revenue for global enterprises like Toyota, Shiseido, and Dyson.
Steve Satoru Naito is the Co-founder and CEO of Anyplace, the San Francisco-based platform redefining long-term rentals for remote workers and digital nomads. Armed with a one-way ticket from Tokyo and $5,000, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015 speaking minimal English, turned a failed first startup into a learning opportunity, and built Anyplace into a $35M+ funded company offering fully-equipped, work-ready furnished apartments across major US cities and Tokyo. Named to Forbes Japan's 30 Under 30 in 2018, Naito is on a mission to give professionals the freedom to live and work anywhere without sacrificing productivity.
Yoshi Yokokawa is the co-founder and CEO of Alpaca, the San Mateo-based API-first brokerage infrastructure company that powers over 300 global fintech partners across 45 countries. A former Lehman Brothers analyst and forex trader turned repeat entrepreneur, Yoshi built Alpaca from a YC W19 startup into a $1.15 billion unicorn after raising a $150 million Series D in January 2026. His vision: a 'Global Financial OS' that makes investing borderless, accessible, and developer-native.
Felix Kjellberg, known online as PewDiePie, is a Swedish creator who spent a decade as YouTube's most-subscribed individual and then quietly walked away from the algorithm. He now lives in Japan with his wife Marzia and their son Bjorn, posting irregular videos about parenting, Linux, self-hosted AI, and life off the publishing treadmill.
Julien Nguyen is a French-educated General Partner at IT-Farm Corporation, a Tokyo-and-Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with ~$100M under management across seven funds. A serial entrepreneur who founded four startups before pivoting to venture capital, he holds 21 US patents and was an early investor in Zoom (Series A), Wish, and Treasure Data. Based in Menlo Park, California, he bridges the US and Japanese technology ecosystems, helping global startups expand into Japan and Asia while backing transformative technologies in digital health, IoT, robotics, and AI.
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Tom Goodrich is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Corner Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm spun out of DAG Ventures in 2018. With more than three decades of investing and private equity experience, Goodrich leads Corner's biotech investment portfolio - including notable exits like Armo Biosciences (acquired by Eli Lilly) and Arresto Biosciences (acquired by Gilead Sciences). Before Corner Ventures, he co-founded DAG Ventures in 2004 and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich in 1991, and earlier in his career worked at Bechtel Investments, served as a consultant to Bank of America's chairman, and helped build Dimensional Corporate Finance with backing from Xerox. He holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The Subaru Solterra is the Japanese automaker's first fully electric SUV, co-developed with Toyota on the e-TNGA platform. Now entering its 2026 model year, it brings standard all-wheel drive, up to 288 miles of range, a 74.7 kWh battery, and access to the Tesla Supercharger network via a native NACS port - all wrapped in Subaru's adventure-ready ethos.
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a writer, software entrepreneur, and strategic advisor at Stripe who spent two decades bootstrapping software companies in Japan before becoming one of the internet's most influential voices on fintech, career development, and software business strategy. He writes Bits about Money, a deep-dive newsletter on the plumbing of financial systems, hosts the Complex Systems podcast, and co-led VaccinateCA - America's shadow COVID vaccine location infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives. With 4.7 million words published since 2006, his essays on salary negotiation, software marketing, and financial infrastructure have shaped how a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs think about building and getting paid.