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In 2013, Takaya won the WiT Japan Startup of the Year award for his proposal of Relux
FREMONT, CA: The people who chose Relux — a membership-based accommodation booking service – as the inaugural WIT champion were also skeptical of this victory as the concerns about scalability and execution were highlighted. Despite that, Takaya had clearly scaled up enough which made one of Japan's three main mobile carriers, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, buy the company in 2017. Takaya went on to raise 4.5 million dollars in finance, after a 3.1 million dollars investment from Recruit Holdings.
Takaya has now shifted his focus from inbound to outbound travel with his new company, Reiwa Travel, which promises to revolutionize the way vacation packages are developed and operated. Even his fans think this is a daring step in the midst of a pandemic, and Takaya himself calls the road ahead difficult. But it's not difficult enough for those with deep pockets. Reiwa Travel has received a 20 million dollars investment from backers.
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He believes that in 30 years' time, people will look back at the current scenario and consider it as the perfect opportunity to establish an international travel firm. The demographics have been reset, making investment in this area difficult for competitors. On the customer side, hotels and airlines are having difficulty finding enough clients. Takaya claims that his second try at entrepreneurship was far more successful than his first.
The second enterprise has to be bigger than the first, with a bigger ambition. And in order to do so, they needed to increase the investment. In addition, he realized that the CEO's job must be focused on four points. Human resources, the product, the third topic is money. The fourth category is governance. Many successful CEOs do not begin by focusing on the product. They don't have time to focus on products, but he realized that hiring a CFO early on would allow him to devote more time to product development.
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