There was a time when Crunchyroll didn’t look like the giant media company people know today. Long before acquisitions, corporate offices, and global strategy decks, it felt like a scrappy startup run by people who genuinely loved anime. I still have some old photos from those early days. Small office. Folding tables. Random cables everywhere.

When people look at my career today, they usually see what’s on the surface. Media and Entertainment. Gaming. Cloud Architecture. Creative technology. A long list of projects over the years. The question I get most often is simple: How did you get started? The honest answer is not what most people expect. It started with

Anime is bigger today than it has ever been. It’s global now. Streaming platforms, collaborations with major brands, conventions around the world, and panels at events like SXSW talking about how anime became a worldwide cultural force. Seeing those conversations happening on stages like that is interesting. It shows how far the medium has come.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the space between loving anime and working in it. For many people, anime is passion first, the stories, the art, the worlds, the community. For others, it’s a profession, production schedules, pipelines, localization, delivery, and operations. And for a small number of us, it’s both. That in-between space