Liftoff is a platform for mobile app marketing and retargeting. Using post-installation user data, they aim to achieve user acquisition and retention on a cost per action basis. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company teams up with the world's leading app publishers and brands from their offices in locations such as Tokyo, New York, London, Paris and Singapore to develop their business.

Kota Amano is the Country Manager at Liftoff Mobile K.K. and is in charge of the company’s Japanese and Korean branches. He contributed to the expansion of media distribution networks at Overture and Yahoo!. He then participated in the launch of InMobi in Japan and worked at Criteo before taking his current position in 2017. We asked him about his career trajectory and Liftoff's organizational culture that supports the company's growth.

In this interview, I would mainly like to ask you about your career, and the organizational culture that fosters Liftoff's growth. First of all, could you introduce yourself?

I am the current Country Manager for Liftoff Mobile Corporation, where I oversee our Japanese and Korean businesses. Liftoff is a performance-based mobile app marketing and retargeting platform. Our headquarters are in Palo Alto, CA. We are a foreign company that is at the heart of the culture of the tech industry, and have taken a marketing position specialized in mobile apps.

The classic road for country managers in this industry is a career taking them to foreign companies. In my case, however, my career started off completely differently. I often tell my younger colleagues that my career is like the tale of the "straw millionaire (warashibe choja)".

I'm curious as to what kind of career this has taken you on. Did you have an interest in the field of online advertising when you graduated?

When I was a student, I was originally looking for a job as a web designer. However, there are few companies that hire people with no experience in web production. Amidst of all this, I was hired by a flip phone venture company. Looking back, it probably was a challenging hiring decision. At the office, it was just the president, office workers and temporary staff, and I had to do all the planning, accounting and contractual work myself. I learned a lot from this.

One day, the director asked me to start doing some sales work as well. At the time, I honestly wasn't keen on wearing a suit and working as a salesperson. However, after meeting a top salesperson who looked cool in his suit and worked dashingly, I had a more positive impression of the sales profession. Our next client was Overture, a leading search-driven advertising company, and a pioneer in ad technology. The company had already grown big when I met them, but I thought that mobile phones were a field that would develop in the future. Then, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to change careers.

What awaited me after my job change was a culture shock, but in a good way. I was transitioning from a domestic company to the Japanese subsidiary of a foreign company based in California, so naturally, the corporate culture was completely different. There is a lot of jargon in the meetings, and the discussions that take place are high level ones. The first thing I wanted to do was learn about Overture's corporate culture and their way of working in order to make them mine, while delivering results.

At that time Overture Japan merged with Yahoo Japan. I was in the midst of the post-merger integration (PMI) whirlwind, and was doing my best to expand the distribution media network. I was able to meet people from different backgrounds and was inspired by a lot of new cultures. We have a strong alumni organization at Yahoo, and in addition to that, we have made and continue to develop strong connections with former colleagues. I think our industry is such that changing jobs is sort of like changing departments in an entire industry. Of course, some of my colleagues are joining rival companies, but I see it as a relationship where we work hard and aim at growing this industry together.

I get the sense that you enjoy change and continue to value your relationships with your colleagues. Could you also tell us about what led you to move to InMobi?

In 2008, when the iPhone first came out in Japan, I witnessed a truly memorable scene. Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, who was working with us on the offer of Yahoo!BB, gathered the employees in Yahoo and vigorously said: “The future will be the iPhone. We're going to do everything we can to propel the shift to smartphones”. I was fortunate enough to see this speech happen in front of my eyes, and I felt his enthusiasm and wanted to be at the forefront of these changing times.

I then had a chance to join InMobi, an Indian smartphone advertising venture, and participate in the launch of their business in Japan. We started out in an apartment building, and it was very inspiring to see the smartphone advertising industry in its first moments. Then I joined Criteo, a retargeting advertising company based in France. There, I managed both the distribution network and sales departments and developed strategic partnerships with key publishers.

You were appointed as the Country Manager for Liftoff Mobile Corporation in 2017. What made you choose this career?

I have been invited to join new companies several times. However, when I was thinking about what the next step in my career should be, I realized I wanted to take on a more holistic role, like that of a country manager that several of my senior colleagues took on. So I registered with an agent and was introduced to Liftoff.

Prior to joining the company, I had the opportunity to talk with Marc Hale, who oversees the Asia-Pacific business. What he told me, then, was that Liftoff is strategically very focused on the Japanese market. I was also impressed by the fact that he hadn't decided on a business plan for Japan, and that he wanted to find the right person to be the country manager in order to, then, work with him to develop a plan. This “person’s”  charm was also characterized by the fact that they purposefully chose to be a Country Manager at Liftoff as a career. I then had the opportunity to develop my own strategy for Japan and present it to our founder, Mark Ellis, and the idea of me taking on this job became more and more of a reality.

(Read Part 2)

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Misato Matsuo
Japan Interviewer's Association certified interviewer and writer
Content Manager at Flier Inc.

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