Joi Ito

Joichi Ito (Japanese伊藤 穰 一Joichi Ito ) ( born June 19, 1966 in Kyoto ) is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur and investor for venture capital.

Life

Ito was born in 1966 in Kyoto / Japan 1969 and emigrated with his parents first to Canada and then to Michigan / USA. He is a goddaughter of Timothy Leary. At the age of 14, he returned to Japan, when his mother was president of Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. Japan.

Ito returned to America to attend Tufts University, where he met Pierre Omidyar, the later founder of eBay among others. He soon found that the curriculum was too rigid for him. He left Tufts and attended the University of Chicago as a physics student later. These he left, as he believes the program places more value on the training of practical engineers, as to make possible the teaching of physics to a intuites understanding of matter.

Joichi Ito is the founder and managing director of venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd.. Currently, he is also a board member of Creative Commons and Social Text, Vice President of International Business and Mobile Devices for Technorati, Chairman of Six Apart Japan, as well as a contributor of Metro blogging.

Ito has received much attention as an investor with a focus on Internet and technology companies. Here, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan were among other PSINet Japan, was founded.

Since 2011, Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge (Massachusetts ).