Yuki Mochizuki sold Rejob for ¥1.98 billion and went looking for something money could not choose for him: his next useful problem. There were researchers to visit, countries to see, people to meet. An acquisition supplies a satisfying ending to a company story. A founder, inconveniently, still has to decide what to do on Monday.
For Mochizuki, the question had already outgrown the business. He wanted to build internationally, and eventually to bring together people whose ambitions reached beyond commerce. That remains the stated purpose behind Xvolve, where he is also presented as Yuki Charles Mochi. The name changes slightly between introductions. The appetite for another beginning is easier to recognise.
His career has moved through recruitment, conversations and dating. In each, somebody needs to find somebody else. The technology varies; the awkward human business of making contact persists. It is a useful thread through a story that otherwise threatens to escape into a very large mission statement.
An education at the doorstep
Mochizuki studied economics at Keio University. During his third year, he decided to become an entrepreneur and spent a year meeting 100 business leaders. Before he had much of a company, he had made a considerable investment in asking people about theirs. A lecture theatre has its uses. So does a hundredth conversation.
His student business began in an apartment, with one yen in capital. The first work was selling internet connections door to door. The detail deserves to survive the later transaction figures: there was a period when making progress meant persuading someone to keep a door open long enough to hear an offer.
He recalls days of roughly 300 knocks that might yield a single order. Later came experiments with businesses of his own, including advertising on umbrellas. An umbrella is at least an honest advertising medium: it makes no promise to appear only when the weather is pleasant.
These beginnings give his subsequent interests a practical texture. He had to put an offer in front of people. He had to discover whether they wanted it. The founder who would later speak about changing society first worked at the scale of an individual conversation and an individual sale.
The capital of his first student business. A beginning, rather than a measure of what it would become.
Rejob gives the ambition a balance sheet
Rejob’s corporate establishment came in November 2009. It developed a specialised recruiting service, giving employers and job seekers a place to find one another. By October 2012, the service announced that membership had passed 70,000. Its offer included a hiring-based payment model, advisers, free scouting messages and automatic matching.
Those details make the business easier to understand than the phrase “internet company.” Employers needed applicants. Applicants needed opportunities. Rejob organised the meeting and the information around it. The product had a specific job to do, with a customer on either side of the transaction.
The figures disclosed when ZIGExN agreed to buy Rejob show the scale it reached. Revenue rose from ¥182 million in the year ended September 2011 to ¥421 million in 2012 and ¥895 million in 2013. These are figures for Rejob itself; they give a precise view of one company’s growth.
In September 2014, ZIGExN announced that it would acquire all Rejob shares from Mochizuki for ¥1.98 billion. The transaction made his departure concrete. An enterprise begun through small experiments had become something another company wanted to own.
There is a temptation to let a sale price explain everything before it. It cannot. The number records what was agreed at the end of that ownership chapter. It does not reproduce the uncertainty of choosing an early product, finding customers or deciding when to leave. Those decisions still had to be made without the benefit of the final page.
A passport before a product
Xvolve’s beginnings preceded the Rejob exit. Mochizuki established it in San Francisco in 2012, placing his international ambition alongside the Japanese business he already had. His later travel gave that ambition more particular faces and places.
After selling Rejob, he visited researchers in Japan, exploring work in fields including robotics, energy and space. He then based himself in Berlin and travelled through more than 30 countries. He met entrepreneurs, engineers and academics while considering what he should attempt next.
His description of the value of that journey is appealingly concrete. When imagining a product, he could begin to picture the person who might use it in another country. The word “global” had acquired a little resistance. It now contained people with lives that did not resemble his own.
Travel, in this account, was part of choosing the work. There is room to question any founder’s enormous ambitions; the itinerary at least shows a willingness to leave familiar ground while forming them. A map offers borders. Conversations supply the complications.
The business of being heard
By 2016, one answer had taken the form of BeHeard. Its premise was that people wanted someone to listen. The service connected users with listeners for conversations, with an initial focus on English-speaking markets. At the time, Mochizuki described a prototype moving into beta testing.
The idea followed naturally from a period spent meeting people. It also extended the recurring pattern in his work: identify a desired encounter, then build a service around making it possible. A recruiting site brings an employer closer to an applicant. A conversation service helps a speaker find a willing listener.
His professional biography also lists experiments such as an expatriate concierge, expert group conversations and a chat-based property service. Read together, these projects suggest an interest in the friction around introductions. Knowing what you need is often easier than knowing whom to ask.
“Create businesses that define the 21st century”
Yuki Charles Mochi’s stated short-term goal at Xvolve
That stated goal is much wider than any single app. It leaves a revealing tension in the story: the ambition concerns an entire century, while a useful product must earn somebody’s attention today. The small encounter remains the place where the large idea gets tested.
The colleagues who chose the question
Xvolve’s people help explain how Mochizuki’s mission becomes a working organisation. COO Kimi Izawa describes arriving after ventures of his own and looking for others who shared his desire to have a broader impact. Conversations with Mochizuki and the team helped persuade him to join.
Izawa’s account includes the less glamorous side of new products: making leaflets, delivering food and interviewing people in the street. There is a family resemblance to the founder’s early selling. A business can possess an extravagant purpose and still require somebody to distribute the paper.
Akiho Koide came through a different route, with experience in NGO work and housing support. She wanted to address the structures behind inequality and found Xvolve’s proposed path persuasive. Her work has included product management and responsibility for design.
These are distinct reasons for joining, rather than copies of a founder’s biography. They matter because Mochizuki’s longer ambition depends on gathering people across disciplines. The organisation already asks him to do a smaller version of that: make room for different experiences around a shared direction.
Xvolve’s recruiting materials emphasise giving people responsibility early. The proposition has something of his student beginnings in it. Work starts before a person has acquired a reassuringly complete résumé. Customers, colleagues and consequences then provide an education of their own.
That arrangement also puts a practical demand on the founder. He has to translate an expansive goal into work another person can own. A young colleague cannot operate a century. A product, a customer interview or a business budget is a more manageable assignment, and gives the mission something tangible to answer for.
Another sale, and a question still open
A new transaction entered the record in 2026. In April, jig.jp announced an agreement to acquire all 50,000 shares of Bachelor Date from Mochizuki. The share consideration was ¥3.48 billion, with approximately ¥3 million in advisory fees separately disclosed. Subsequent shareholder materials report the acquisition in April.
Bachelor Date offers a dating experience built around arranging a meeting, generally dispensing with the familiar preliminary rounds of likes and messages. Here again is an introduction made into a product. The acquirer described plans to apply its marketing, operating knowledge and engineering resources to the business.
Mochizuki’s stated longer goal remains broader: build capital and influence through business, then gather people from different fields to pursue societal change. Politics, science, philosophy, the environment and the arts all appear in his description of that future organisation.
It is an ambition to be judged by what follows. For now, the documented career contains businesses built, shares sold, colleagues recruited and a succession of attempts to help people find one another. The one-yen beginning makes a good anecdote. The more revealing habit is his willingness to reach another beginning and ask who might be waiting on the other side.
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