[Client Interview] Liftoff Country Manager Part 2: Organizational Culture and Business Growth

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.

(Read part 1 of the interview here)

What do you enjoy most about being a country manager, Mr. Amano?

One of my most important tasks is to maximize the business impact of the Japanese branch by conciliating our headquarters’ goals with the situation in Japan. If I deem necessary to localize a strategy to Japan's unique settings, I will then need to make a strong proposal to our headquarters to explain why we need it. In addition, when considering the scalability of the business from a medium to long-term perspective, there will naturally be cases where it is better for the Japanese branch to follow our home country's strategy. In such a case, it will be necessary to cover the situation with our internal operations in Japan.

For example, if we decide that implementing a common global system in Japan will allow us to keep up with future updates and ensure higher performance for our clients, we will follow that direction. Simultaneously, we will fill in the technical gaps by ourselves.

Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, but what I've seen and heard at InMobi and Criteo has come in very handy.

What is Liftoff's organizational culture and atmosphere like?

Each company I've worked for has been great, but Liftoff is an amazingly generous company that cares deeply about its employees. As a matter of fact, our score on the site Glassdoor, where employees can anonymously review a company, is quite high and we get very good feedback from our former employees. Our founders carefully select and hire people they feel they want to work with and support them so they can maximize their abilities. This is the kind of organizational culture that is rooted in our company.

I was the 60th person to join Liftoff globally. When you join, you get a few weeks of Silicon Valley training. What struck me there was the opportunity to go for a walk and talk with various members for an hour each. So, we relaxed and talked to each other about our work and personal lives under the warm sun of California. They were interested in my background and would ask me questions about the business situation in Japan. Sometimes, they would give me advice on how to gain more experience in “this” or “that” in the future. This kind of organizational culture of openness, transparency and psychological safety is what captivated me the most.

Liftoff’s members have a great variety of backgrounds. They are brilliant people who have made their careers at Google, Facebook, etc. Building a face-to-face relationship with them on top of being exposed to the culture at the basis of the tech industry has been a great asset. I would definitely like to share the warmth of this kind of environment with students looking for a job.

What do you think are the factors supporting Liftoff's growth in Japan?

Right now, we are five members in Japan and Korea, excluding myself. One of our strengths, as a company specializing in the mobile domain, is being able to engage in global business with a small group of talented people. Mobile apps, which are our main battleground, are a borderless realm. It's usually easy for our foreign clients to advertise in Japan, and we can help them expand their business through cooperation with our business partners from a relatively wide range of countries and regions. We are also recognized as global members of Liftoff, and feel connected and able to collaborate with branches in different countries, which motivates our members and encourages them to demonstrate their skills.

What kind of world does Liftoff envision in the future? Can you tell us about your own vision as well?

The Covid-19 crisis has given people in Japan more time to play games and shop online. Our industry as a whole is seeing positive developments, and our vision and mission is to boost the industry as a whole according to this trend.

Recently, and for me personally, I have been increasingly thinking about the role of Country Manager itself. Liftoff's company motto is "Humility," and I want to keep that very thing in mind. I want to continue to improve myself as a country manager so that I can expand the Japanese and Korean market and develop our business on a larger scale.

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

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