Opera Came to Japan
I already forgot when they established their Tokyo office, but I can still very clearly remember the good & old days of this very characteristic software startup because it was actually my first software company where I worked as an account manager. I can’t believe more than 10 years already passed after I left there. Now, let’s start revieing what they (we) achived in the early 2000s.
With WILLCOM & KDDI
The device, “KYO-PON” was made by KYOCERA and sold by Japanese operator, WILLCOM in 2004. It was the first device sold in Japan with Opera Browser which supports HTML rendering. In that era, people here are typically only viewing compact-HTML websites from the mobile devices so that device was kind of disruptive at that stage. KYO-PON had micro-ITRON OS. TRON operating system was not very popular choice for the mobile device but KYOCERA was somehow using it.
Write Once Run Anywhere..?
Although that tagline is popular for the decades, actually make broswer running on multiple OS turned out to be a lot of hustle in terms of quality assurance (and also bug-fixing). Opera delivered “Opera for BREW” for Jpaanese big MNO, KDDI. That deal generated rougly $3 Million per year in the busiest years but required to have some big QA engineer team on the ground.
It was a good growing opportunity for me to some extent!
Work in Norwegian Software Company
It was always my biggest pleasure to go to Norway and make friends there. The people were friendly and the nature was awesome. Really beautiful country but somehow things there were very expensive.. Yes, Oslo is known as the most expensive city to live in! At that time, Opera already had more than 300 employees globally. The management there did not have good reputation actually. When I was visiting the headquarter, some people said that their salary is even cheaper than Oslo bus drivers so it is definitely impossible to hire good QA engineers 🙂 I could not confirm if it is true or false but it was probably true, I guess.
In front of former Opera headquarter in Oslo.
What I learned There
One of my colleague decided to leave the company and on that departure day, in front of the whole office members, he said “I love this people but I think the leadership of the company is wrong!”. It was kind of a shocking experience for me when I was only 27 or 28 YO. I was probably agreeing that leaving colleague. On the other hand, I was thining how I could manage this difficult business assuming if I was a board member. Opera completely failed and eventually acquired by some Chinese private equity. I am quite sure that with good leadership, maybe Opera could have better future by acquireing more share on this desktop browser market. (embedded browser license business was good in terms of revenue but from long-term viewpoint, getting more user must have enabled longer life of the entire company by increasing valuation.
Who to work with is very important
I am a bit sorry for this obvious conclusion, but still my biggest key take-out is this! Founder of Opera was trying to work with his old friends so those friends are taking very important roles in the company. For example, CCO did not have much experience in commercial terms and CMO did not have good marketing expereince.. like that 🙂
It happens even in Facebook so people says the friend of Sandberg is occupying important positions there. Nonetheless, the overall performance is not such bad so far so she happens to have “good” firneds maybe.
Especially in Opera’s Swedish office, they had many great developers, I remember. I was always enjoying working with those smart guys. They were aso kind and friendly. Afterall, here is what I got from my days in Opera Software 🙂
BizDev Expereicne
Handled the contrac with more than 1M EURO value after developing the deal. Gave me good confidence.
Language
I started speaking English everyday. My first experience of global organization gave me a lot of choice later on.
Computer Science
Learning about computer was a lot of fun. Embedded software eco-system gave me a lot of basic but important knowledge.
That is pretty much it!
After my departure, I heard that one of their ex-JP country manager was about to getting sued for the harassment by ex-employee and the company was forced to pay some settlement.. (led by legal team in Oslo) That might be something I could not experience if I was working in a typical Japanese public established big corporates.
In the tech startups, I can see more “wild” world therefore both of the wild beautiful things like passionate engineers, friendly foreigners, etc & wild dirty things..! Maybe better for me because that is the “real” world.