Moving forward, Hibino got a job at a systems software development company. For the first few months he was in charge of developing simple pieces of custom software and doing IT related tasks such as network configuration. The company he worked for had been using a software development sub-contractor to develop a comprehensive piece of custom sales management system software for a client, but the subcontractor had created a sloppy and useless piece of work putting the company in a horrible predicament.
Because a company can’t survive selling unusable software to clients, Hibino learned both the existing source code and the skills needed to fix, complete, and then implement the large scale system into the client’s offices in a short few months. Thanks to this amazing performance, Hibino was promoted to one of the top positions in the company in under a year.
And even though he’d been a professional software developer for a relatively short time, because he consistently managed and produced results on several successful projects and created his own software development framework tool they were able to shift all development to in-house only. He went on to develop and successfully implement quite a few custom ERPs for both American and Japanese companies.
One example of his development prowess was a custom $300,000 dollar sales management system for the American branch of a trading company that he developed using his skills, a person only three months into their career (or Hibino included, 1.5 people) and had the software tested, debugged, and into actual use in just 3 month from start to finish.
Once he got to this point in his career he’d earned the right to head to the office when he woke up (he’s a night owl, so don’t confuse this with laziness please, he’d often work until 4 a.m.), he’d take a taxi home (on the company, and also because there were often no trains at that hour), and even though it was Tokyo, land of the suit and tie and proper haircut and manners and formality and need to write massively long bios, he’d roll into work and even meet clients in shorts and sandals and his trademark long hair. (Trust us on this, in Japan, this is pretty much unheard of.) Still under 30, he made the same salary as the president of the company, decided what days he’d get off, and used the company car to move his band equipment to shows.
In other words, he’d created what he thought his ideal work / music life universe was thanks to his skills.
So did he enjoy that and milk it for all it was worth? Sadly, not as much as he thought he would. As he approached 30, he got worried that being able to do anything he wanted any time he wanted and call all the shots might turn him into a person he didn’t want to become or respect. He started feeling that living a life only concerned about his own personal dreams and desires was an empty life, and that a person needed to be making a contribution to society somehow. And he started seriously trying to figure out how best to do that.
He decided his way was to go start a company in the U.S., a place that he felt at the time had even more room for growth in both the work and music he was interested in than he would in Japan.
When he was working out the details of setting up a corporation in the United States, an IT company, a Consulting firm and an Accounting firm decided to join up to create a piece of packaged software for the Japanese market and approached Hibino personally with the offer to be the head developer, which he accepted.
He wanted to make sure the company he had helped grow was able to survive without him so he hired and trained developers so the company could go on, and he left half of the payment for the project (about $300,000) as running costs for the company he was leaving, and took the other half to start his own corporation in the U.S.
