Founder
Hisashi Hirajo
Founder and CEO, Lifescape Co., Ltd. Entrepreneur, strategist, engineer, marketer
Writing and media
Making free work ordinary
After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering at Kyushu University, I joined an IT company in Fukuoka. What I found there were senior colleagues who looked, quite literally, like they had given up on their own lives.
None of them were at fault. They worked in order to live, and living had worn them down. The cause was obvious to me.
The company, as an institution, was crushing human potential.
That experience set the direction of my life. I chose to stop relying on organizations and to live freely on my own terms.
The gap I found as a freelancer
In 2001 I went independent and started working as a freelance engineer in Tokyo. One thing became clear very quickly.
With the right skills, an individual can deal with a company as an equal.
That much was true.
But there was nowhere for the two sides to meet. So I decided to build that infrastructure myself.
Launching @SOHO
In 2004 I released @SOHO. The word crowdsourcing did not exist yet, and job boards were all anyone had. Into that gap I launched Japan's first membership based business matching site.
- A place to offer and take on work freely
- Relationships built on skill and intent rather than headcount
- Ground on which an individual can face a company as an equal
It was something other than crowdsourcing. It was a platform for changing how people work.
Book
The Life Strategy Handbook for IT Engineers (Japanese)
The business thinking and mindset that turn technical skill into a life worth living
A practical life strategy for working IT engineers. It covers the mindset for living independently of any single employer, whether you change jobs or go solo, and the business logic behind money, sales strategy, winning new clients and building a business model.
Written by the developer of the job portal @SOHO, drawing on his own experience.
The current challenge: the one person unicorn
I am pursuing a new model of work that I call the one person unicorn. The goal is to create value on the scale of 10 billion yen a year, as a single person.
In the traditional model, growth meant hiring. With AI and technology used to their full extent, a very small operation can now produce very large value.
Maximize value without adding people.
Through this challenge I want to offer a working model for a society in which you can work as yourself, without belonging to a company.