Naoki Shibata
Investor
Naoki Shibata
Investor
Sunnyvale, California
Overview
Work Experience
Unemployed
2023 - Current
After selling one business in 2022 and winding down another in 2023, decided to take a short break. Here are my priorities: 1) Mastering diaper change for our newborn baby girl Goal: 2x diaper changes per day + responsible for her bath time 2) Dedicated Uber driver for our 2 boys Goal: Responsible for their afternoon rides 3) Improving my golf game Goal: Average score to be below 80 & worst score to be 85. (HDCP <10 consistently) 4) Finding my next move Goal: Meeting as many old and new friends as possible
Angel Investor & Advisor to CEOs
2016
Angel investing and advisory to dozens of startups and public companies in the US and Japan
Co-founder
2011 - 2023
SearchMan helps app developers to make their apps easy to discover through AppStore search, as well as increasing new app installs through keyword-targeted ads. - First developer-facing product SearchMan SEO tracks 650K apps x 1M keywords everyday. Being used by hundreds of thousands of app developers. - Second product SearchMan Ads enable app developers to buy ads by using our unique keyword targeting, Quickly grown revenue to $100k/mo within 3 months. - Third product SearchMan API allows developers to access any data in the App Store and Play Store. Business closed in February 2023.
Co-founder & CEO
2011 - 2023
AppGrooves provides the best coupons for everyday purchases made on your favorite apps, all 100% verified to guarantee savings. - Millions of new visitors per month - Hundreds of commerce brands (who provide coupons) - Thousands of new coupons per month Founded in 2012, pivoted from SearchMan to AppGrooves in 2018, raised $6m in total (from 500 Startups, angel investors as well as VCs in Silicon Valley.), hired 30+ employees & contractors. Business closed in February 2023.
Founder & Author
2016 - 2022
Started blogging in Japanese about “Helping you to read financial statements” as a hobby (to maintain my Japanese writing skill). Given the immediate traction, started charging $10/mo on note.com (Substack or OnlyFans equivalent in Japan). - Grown the audience to 65k+ followers with thousands of paid subscribers - Published a few best-seller books (50k+ prints sold) - Hired 30+ contractors remotely in Japan to keep up with Acquired by Iid, Inc (TSE: 6038) in June 2022. Books published: MBAより簡単で英語より大切な決算を読む習慣 (July 2017) https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4822255271 テクノロジーの地政学 (November 2018) https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4822255964 決算資料からビジネスの仕組みが見えてくる (June 2018) https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/49095460497550019&sr=8-1
Visiting Scholar
2009 - 2011
Invited as a visiting scholar at Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. Other than Social Network Analysis and Link Mining, started implementing Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
Assistant Professor
2009 - 2011
Assistant Professor at Innovation Policy Research Center, Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering. Focusing on Social Network Analysis and Link Mining, applying emerging topic detection from citation network of academic papers and patents. As of November 2010, 13 peer-reviewed journal papers and 17 peer-reviewed presentations at international conferences. For more detail, see http://shibataism.com/publications/.
Executive Officer (Product Management & Software Engineering)
2006 - 2011
Product Management and Software Engineering for new services. In May 2009, appointed as an Executive Officer (the youngest one). Since July 2009, almost on leave because of his stay at Stanford. - Rakuten APIs (webservice): Initiated concept, convinced managements and then managed and led engineering team to launch APIs which enables developers search from 50M+ items in the largest EC marketplace and 60k+ hotels in the largest online hotel booking sites. After the initial launch, iterated adding new features every two weeks. Finally, Rakuten APIs are the most frequently used APIs in Japan. - Contents-match-based affiliate system: As a product manager and engineer, invented algorithms to match ads against the contents in the page, wrote 3 patents, managed engineers, and launched successfully. - Automatic catalog generation for EC: Developed and implemented algorithms to create well-normalized catalog for EC automatically from 50M+ items in the EC marketplace. Then launched as a service named Rakuten Products (alpha) by himself.