mercari
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Ren Ito and the Art of Changing Course
He trained for law, spent years in diplomacy and helped take Mercari abroad. At Sakana AI, Ren Ito brings that habit of crossing borders to a new question: how should Japan build its own future in AI?
James Kawas Keeps Finding the Work Inside Other People’s Closets
Before Flyp became a toolkit for thousands of resellers, Kawas learned the secondhand trade by trying to sell a PlayStation 3, skipping class to send business emails and building a marketplace in two days.
Thomas Rivas
Thomas Rivas is the founder and CEO of Vendoo, a software platform that helps online resellers list and manage inventory across marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari and Facebook. He started selling online as a high schooler in 2007, kept selling through college at the University of Maryland, and turned the tedium of posting the same item to a dozen sites into a company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Vendoo has grown to roughly 50-60 employees, reached profitability, and has been used to create tens of millions of listings.