Matthew Skyrm’s .Plan in Japan

Last week I met with Maki Miyamoto from ITmedia, a Japanese tech news site, to talk about my new job at Sony running eyeVio. We ended up mostly talking about my career and background — she quickly picked up on my otaku (geek) tendencies and ended up asking all kinds of detailed questions about my hobbies and how I became the way I am.

The article is fun-spirited and declares me as a silicon valley “American Otaku” who went from Yahoo! to Sony in Japan. The article chronicles various steps of my life and career as a geek including how I used to run a BBS in high school, loved playing Street Fighter II, came up with the original idea for Kick.com while listening to RHCP on one of the first MP3 players in 1999, and more relevant to my current position — how I look at building globally viable Internet services.

The end result is this article which was posted on Monday. My name in Japanese katakana characters is マシュー スカルム. You can also see the poorly translated version from Google here.

“American Otaku (geek)”

“Mac Geek, Mr. Skyrm, says he spends 75% of his time with either his Mac or mobile phone”

As this was my first real news article in Japan, I was curious to see the reaction. ITmedia doesn’t offer commenting but I found a few comments elsewhere. To my surprise, they were quite positive.

A delicious user, futa23, posted a note basically saying he would like more people like me to come to Japan.

And a newsing comment page (thanks to my friend Toshi@Yahoo! for finding this) also had some positive vibes from their community with ’sergio’ saying he didn’t know much about eyeVio but felt I have something good to say.

UPDATE 6/23/08:

My very kind friend Jed Schmidt, founder of Langwidget, translated the article into English. Going from English -> Japanese translation -> Journalist -> Article -> English makes for a good game of telephone and lots of stuff ends up a little bit “off”, but overall the high level ideas are all there.

“Not much reason to be in Silicon Valley” – An American “geek”, from Yahoo to Sony

American and self-proclaimed geek Matthew Skyrm recently left Yahoo in Silicon Valley, venturing here to Japan to run Sony’s “eyeVio” video sharing site, with a desire “to create a world-class Internet service.”

“I want to create a world-class Internet service,” says 33-year-old (note: I am actually 32) American Matthew Skyrm, who left his employer Yahoo last year, venturing here to Japan. He has been in charge of Sony’s “eyeVio” video sharing site since last march. Having started his own company in Silicon Valley, Skyrm has returned to work in Japan after a two-year hiatus. “It was very important to leave my home country and get a different perspective, so that I could create a service embraced by millions of people,” cites Skyrm, regarding his venture out of Silicon Valley.

Once a computer and gaming geek

Skyrm was a computer and gaming geek in his teens. As a high school student, he set up a BBS that attracted more than a hundred geek friends from countries around the world, including Russia, Germany, and Israel.

His favorite game was Street Fighter II. At 19-years-old in 1994, Skyrm worked part-time to help run an ecommerce site at a company that imported and sold games from Japan, saying that most of his income ended up being spent on games. In 1996, he dropped out of college to work at an Internet marketing company, and in 1999, he moved to a Web site design and consulting
company, where he was responsible for setting Web sites for clients such as the American Automobile Association.

Starting a company in Silicon Valley

“I was fascinated by the Internet even more than computers and gaming,” says Skyrm, who launched kick.com in Silicon Valley in 1999. Kick.com was a music site that allowed users to share playlists and artist information for the music they listened to.

Back then, he liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to listen to them often on the first MP3 player on the market, sold by Diamond Multimedia. He started kick.com as a convenient way for busy people to find information about concerts and new CDs.

Skyrm thought that once listening to music on an MP3 player became mainstream, so would the combination of computers and music to share music information over the Internet. He raised about $7M from several companies who shared his vision, reaching over 500,000 unique users per month.

Unfortunately, profits did not follow. He put ads on the site, and moved to a model where kick.com earned revenue by providing its functionality on other sites, but now recognizes that “the iPod hadn’t even gone on sale yet. We were too early, and weren’t well understood by advertisers.” He eventually decided to sell kick.com.

“I heard iMode is awesome”

After shopping kick.com around to multiple companies, Skyrm decided in 2002 to sell to the highest bidder, Sony America, and entered the company soon after. He then realized that he wanted to work in Sony Japan, after hearing about NTT Docomo’s iMode.

“iMode was famous in Silicon Valley for being an awesome Japanese service. After looking into iMode myself, I got the feeling that it could change everything,” says Skyrm.

But as for Japanese Internet services at the time, Skyrm said he “didn’t know much aside from other American services that had been localized, such as Yahoo Japan.”

In 2004, Skyrm moved from Sony America to Sony Japan. Using ideas from kick.com, he worked on Utatomo, a mobile site that allowed users to recommend music and swap playlists with others.

After having a child, Skyrm returned to Silicon Valley in 2005. He started work at Yahoo as the manager of Yahoo Messenger, focusing on the direction of the service, including its functionality, design, and localization.

“Not much reason to be in Silicon Valley”

But even while at Yahoo, he started thinking that he “wanted to get more international work experience.” Says Skyrm, “Silicon Valley is a place where people gather from all over the world, and my background is being raised in a multi-national family with a French mother and American father.”

He also started feeling that “there is less and less reason for being in Silicon Valley,” since the spread of communication tools such as blogging, social networking services, and messaging, meant that information could be shared anywhere.

Around that time, he received another invitation from Sony to work on an Internet service. He had other choices, such as starting another company in Silicon Valley or staying at Yahoo and being posted in another country, but he decided on Japan.

“Our challenge is to build a world-class service. Think of things like Yahoo and the iPod, which are embraced by millions of people. To create such a service, it was very important to leave my home country and get a different perspective. And I missed Japan,” said Skyrm, adding “Sony has a lot of overseas revenue, and is an international company with a foreign president. I thought returning to Sony would be the best choice for getting international experience.”

“Niconico video comments are smart”

Skyrm returned to Sony last year, and in March took charge of the “eyeVio” video sharing service, with 1M unique users and 15M page views per month. Says Skyrm, “I want to take advantage of Sony’s assets, to differentiate from YouTube and Niconico video.”

He believes he can use video quality to differentiate from competing sites, noting that “eyeVio’s motto is ‘my life, your emotion,’ and an important part of sharing emotion is video quality.” He plans to add functionality to upload HiVision-quality movies.

Skyrm feels that Japanese Internet services “are built with a great understanding of their users, adding “Niconico video comments are being used in a very smart way.”

Says Skyrm, “since producers and consumers overlap, allowing services created for personal benefit to reach users. Niconico video is the same way. But that’s not enough to remove barriers against user growth. We’re going to design eyeVio from the perspective of many different kinds of users.”