Yuji Ueda and the company built to let people leave

A financial specialist went to a Gaiax retreat and came back with a decision his employer had probably not budgeted for. Having spent time thinking about his life, he concluded that he ought to be doing something else. He resigned. The investor who had sent him was displeased, Yuji Ueda recalled, and resolved not to send anyone else.

There are less expensive ways to organize a staff outing. But the episode gets close to the peculiar bargain Ueda offers at Gaiax, the Japanese internet company he founded in 1999. Ask people seriously what they want to do with their lives and you must be prepared for an inconvenient answer. Sometimes the answer includes leaving.

Ueda kept asking. He wanted people whose own ambitions supplied the energy for their work. A company could provide money, colleagues and practical help. It could hardly lend someone a reason to care. His response was to build arrangements that gave people more room to act, including room beyond the organization he ran.

A hamburger stand before a public company

Long before he was responsible for a listed business, Ueda was trying different sorts of work. From high school through university, he estimates that he experienced 20 to 30 kinds of jobs. He sold English learning materials on commission. He also tried running a hamburger stand. The experiments helped him recognize an appetite for making decisions himself.

He graduated from Doshisha University in 1997 with a degree in economics, already intending to become an entrepreneur. His first employer, Venture Link, appealed to him partly because it welcomed people who planned to become independent. Watching small restaurant businesses become much larger companies changed his sense of what a new enterprise could attempt.

That first job lasted about a year and a half. It left him with an enduring piece of career advice: look beyond the founder when choosing a company. Meet the employees. A persuasive chief executive is one thing; a room containing several people you would like to learn from tells you rather more about the work you might actually do.

The invitation that stayed closed until January

One early experiment had a small, clever restriction. In December 1998, before starting Gaiax, Ueda built an online New Year greeting service in about two days. Friends could send one another a message, but the linked greeting would remain closed until January 1. Recipients were encouraged to reply or send greetings of their own. By New Year, participation had reached roughly 20,000 to 30,000 users.

For Ueda, the attraction was the chain reaction between people. A message from a friend carried an appeal that a corporate mailing struggled to match. The service spread because the invitation itself created another occasion to connect.

He followed that interest into personal homepage services, where people could describe their tastes and interests and discover strangers with something in common. As the service grew, business partnerships required a company. Gaiax was established in March 1999. A private fascination with how people find one another had acquired articles of incorporation.

Keeping the idea, changing the business

The internet did not reward the company with an uninterrupted upward line. Gaiax expanded its community services overseas, then encountered the collapse of the internet bubble. Ueda and his colleagues shifted toward helping corporate clients build and operate online communities. Systems, servers, customer support and moderation became part of the work.

The shift required selling an unfamiliar idea to established businesses. Later, competitive pressure prompted further changes, including cloud services and recurring operational support. On July 12, 2005, Gaiax listed on the Nagoya Stock Exchange. Ueda was 30.

The sequence matters because his career can otherwise look like a procession of fashionable internet labels. The business has passed through web communities, social media, the sharing economy and work with decentralized organizations. The recurring interest is easier to recognize than the vocabulary: give individuals a way to communicate, understand one another and do something together. The product and the customer can change while that question remains useful.

How much company does a company need?

The practical expression of that interest inside Gaiax is its carve-out option. A team running an existing business can choose to incorporate it as a separate company. The members can obtain an ownership stake, including stock options that allow their combined ordinary shareholding to reach as much as 50 percent.

In Ueda’s explanation of the arrangement, Gaiax initially holds two-thirds of the new company’s shares but refrains from exercising management voting rights. The business team makes the decisions and can seek outside investment. Ownership gives the parent a financial interest; operating authority gives the people doing the work a reason to think like founders.

He also acknowledges the untidy part. Inexperienced teams get into trouble, and some businesses fail. Gaiax can offer support without promising another investment. Freedom carries the responsibility of finding the next source of capital. An arrangement designed to release ambition still has to survive invoices.

The quarterly question gets personal

There is a smaller version of this transfer of responsibility in Gaiax’s milestone sessions. Once a quarter, members consider their life goals, the work they intend to undertake and the results they expect to produce. They propose compensation connected to those results and discuss their plans with team leaders or management.

The emphasis falls on making expectations clear beforehand. A vague promise to work faster invites an argument later. A defined result gives everyone something more useful to discuss. The process asks people to connect the life they want with the work they are prepared to own.

It is a demanding form of latitude. Being invited to make a plan does not relieve someone of having to explain it. Ueda’s own reason for wanting others to have this authority is disarmingly personal: he enjoys the freedom of making decisions as a founder and wants colleagues to experience that satisfaction too. He treats the pleasure of agency as something worth sharing.

“Efficiency is love.”

Ueda’s motto, translated from Japanese; a phrase he credits to Yukio Funai.

The stranger in the spare seat

Ueda’s interest in the sharing economy reaches outside a business plan. He has hosted travelers through Couchsurfing, a service built around people welcoming strangers into their homes. His official profile places his workplace in Shonan and Hayama. An account of Gaiax’s culture describes his own house as a place where members can stay, work together and receive mentoring.

That is a fairly literal test of a belief in connecting people. It is easy to approve of openness in a presentation; at home, someone may use the kitchen. The same account describes board games and shared activities as ways of keeping people close in an organization where working remotely is ordinary.

His motto supplies a clue to how he joins the personal and practical. He credits the phrase to the business thinker Yukio Funai. Caring about people, in Ueda’s interpretation, includes paying attention to how well arrangements work. Warm intentions can still produce wasted time, crossed messages and frustration. The systems deserve attention because the people affected by them do.

Gaiax’s sharing businesses apply the connection idea to experiences, accommodation and other exchanges between individuals. Ueda has served as a representative director of Japan’s Sharing Economy Association since January 2016. The role takes him beyond starting services into the work of helping an industry develop.

A studio still needs someone with a reason

When Ueda explains Gaiax’s startup studio, he uses the analogy of a film studio. Specialists assemble around a project, contribute their skills and move on to another. A business needs financial, design, legal and technical capabilities at different moments. Shared expertise can make those capabilities available without every founder having to build the whole apparatus alone.

There is one ingredient he says the studio cannot supply: the founder’s commitment to a problem. The person who feels compelled to solve it has to be there. Communication skills and analytical ability help turn that commitment into something others can join. His ambition is to make that process repeatable while leaving the underlying motivation personal.

The arrangement has earned recognition beyond Gaiax. The company received an Emerging Excellence Award in the inaugural ZeroDX Awards in 2024, with its flat structure and carve-out approach among the practices recognized. In August 2025, it announced its participation as an award recipient at an event marking the establishment of the RenDanHeYi Japan research center.

The experiment continues in less ceremonial documents, too. In March 2026, Gaiax announced an investment by Locotabi’s management and an agreement that would put the business outside its consolidated group from the second quarter. It also set out a plan to bring the aini experience business together with Locotabi. Corporate boundaries remain something Ueda is willing to redraw.

That retreat participant’s resignation was an awkward result for an employer. For Ueda’s larger project, it was also evidence that the question had been taken seriously. He has spent years arranging a company around what people might choose when given room. The answer can be an idea, a new business, a different life. Occasionally, it is a goodbye.