Hi, thank you for reading our blog. I’m Masaki Ogawa, co-founder of 24karat. We hope it helps you to get new insights and leads to interest to our team. As the first blog for me, I’ll try to remember and write about when and how Seth and I met and why we are driving our own company as 24karat.
It was January of 2017 when Seth joined my previous company as Head of Product. At that time, my team and I worked on digitalization of offline data of the company as business incubation team and the initiative, so called project HAWK was one of strategic items for the company as so many do to drive digital transformation. we made some progress by finding small successful cases which were already realized by some sales and clients, having referred to the methodology written in a book of “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries.
One day, there was a chance for presentation about our activities. That was the first contact of Seth and me, and from there Seth has surprised me by showing highly matured product-oriented approach based on his deep experiences. He involved engineers at the early stage (there was no full-stack engineer before he joined!) so that we could think both of user experience and technical solution to be valuable as much as possible. Moreover, he was never afraid of challenging existing legacies which sometime tend to be heavy bottlenecks. I realized product-oriented thinking with deep understanding users and technology must be core for quick and scalable successes.
As one of our biggest achievements as a team, we launched an ad-tech product which helps data holders to leverage the value, and advertisers to realize precise marketing. Going back to 6 month from launching, neither of Seth and I had couldn’t find the last piece realize the idea regardless of tons of works around database and business studies but we strongly believed the value when we saw demo in a business trip to the US headquarter. (Actually it was my strongest motivation to join the company from 8 years ago.) We changed a flight to go back to Japan and took one to West coast to meet with companies in SanFrancisco as many as possible there. One of companies deeply expressed us, one with “Transparency” as philosophy, The Trade Desk. A clear path to do innovative work without heavy development suddenly appeared. We made a contract with them by asking global CLO directly, and convinced a few clients for testing right after our business trip.
There were a lot of obstacles to realize our vision, dream there but it ended up with only a couple of months to start the first test after we found the solution. It was tremendously fast. So many people no matter external and internal collaborated for creating and scaling it up successfully, and it now has become one of core products in the company. I’ve really felt people who have strong vision, and leadership with right skill sets like Seth can change the landscape so quickly even if it is small at the beginning and it often attracts talents, and even other companies in the market. We’ll not stop learning and bring to do something new and valuable and that is why we are naming 24karat. If you hate being bored, please make a contact to us. Let’s change something from now on to excite the world!
Thanks, Masaki
