Joi Ito
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joichi Ito (伊藤穰一 Itō Jōichi, born 1966), more commonly known as Joi Ito, is a Japanese-born, American-educated activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the chairman of the board of Creative Commons and the chairman of Six Apart Japan. He is on the board of Technorati, Digital Garage [1], WITNESS [2], Pia Corporation [3], Socialtext and iCommons [4]. He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October of 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In April of 2005, he was named to the board of the Open Source Initiative. In August of 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation.
Ito has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains a blog, a wiki, an IRC channel and contributes to the Tokyo Metroblogging. Early on, Joi was involved in running a nightclub in Japan, bringing industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan.
Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan, and moved to Michigan in the United States at the age of four with his family. At 14, he returned to Japan when his mother became President of the Japanese subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Ito returned to the U.S. to attend Tufts University near Boston as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay. Finding his course work too rigid and believing that "learning computer science in school was stupid", Ito dropped out of Tufts to later attend the University of Chicago as a physics student. He again dropped out on discovering, in his opinion, the program at Chicago to be to more oriented towards producing practical engineers than teaching physics with a goal toward intuitive understanding of the science. He stayed in Chicago for a year after dropping out of college working as a nighclub disk jockey, working regularly at the Limelight and occasionally spinning records at the Smart Bar.
He is attempting, again, to educate himself and is studying at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy [5] as a Doctorate of Business Administration candidate focusing on the sharing economy. Ito is currently a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center [6].
Ito is also a vocal advocate of emergent democracy and the sharing economy.
Ito currently lives in Chiba Prefecture, Japan with his partner Mizuka.
Ito's sister is Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist studying media technology use.
Cornelius (musician) is Ito's second cousin.
Ito is Timothy Leary's godson.
