There are three corporate venture capital funds in Japan-based employment services firm Recruit, each with different objectives, and then the company itself can invest or buy businesses.
Joe Saijo last year took over as president and managing director of Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP), which manages $215m in six funds invested in 100 portfolio companies, mainly in US and Japan. RSP is looking to “foster research and development to look at innovative tech and models which will become the next generation pillars of business in Recruit Holdings in the mid to long term,” Saijo said. The other CVCs in the company are Recruit Strategic Investment (RSI), which is effectively an extension of business development to look at Recruit’s “existing” business spaces other than human resources, and the HR Tech Fund (HRTF), which does the same thing but only in HR, he added. In addition, Recruit Holdings can buy its portfolio companies, such as its purchases of Quandoo and Hotspring.
Saijo joined RSP as a country manager in April 2013 before annual promotions to senior vice-president, director then president.
Previously, he had had similar roles at Japan-based electronics company Hitachi so Saijou said: “I have been in the strategic startup investment space for 10 years, including the notable IPO of Palo Alto Networks on the New York Stock Exchange in my previous company [Hitachi].”
For RSP, he said one of the greatest success was the investment in Boston, US-based DataRobot, which is the predictive analytics platform based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Saijou said: “We achieved great results in business by embracing their technology.”
Based in san Francisco, Saijou said his biggest challenges were occasionally suffering from the changes in headquarters’ direction and strategy, as well as personnel transfer. “This makes us hard to keep the original commitment we made for the company when we invested.”
And for such a rising star in the HR sector, Saijou was understandably concerned for others and said the CVC industry could benefit from better career development as startup investors and greater talent mobility between CVCs and VCs.
And he said skills need to be used or refreshed or they could be lost. “I was originally software engineer more than 10 years ago, but I cannot code any more as time flies so fast.”