Shin Nagakura, managing director of Transcosmos Investments, was a founding member of the Japan-based industrial group’s corporate venturing office in California’s Silicon Valley.
He has more than 15 years of experience in investments, business development, and sales and marketing in the US and Japan and said his brief was to “identify, analyse, recommend and execute possible investments and alliance deals which would have a strategic fit with TransCosmos Japan and its portfolio companies”.
His hundreds of investments and joint venture projects include Junglee (sold to Amazon), Multiply (acquired by Naspers), RealNetworks, mySimon (sold to Cnet), AskJeeves and Coremetrics (bought by IBM). He is currently on the board of Merlin Information Systems in the UK, Become and Pheedo.
Prior to Transcosmos, Nagakura served with Recruit Company. He graduated from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan with bachelor’s degree in international studies in 1986.