Masanobu Hirano

Mr. Hirano is a Venture Partner at Mitsui Ventures with a focus on information and Web technology investments. He came to Mitsui Ventures from Novell, where he served as Vice President of Asia Pacific Strategic Alliance. His previous management experiences include CEO of Red Hat Japan and GM of its North Asian operation at Red Hat Inc, CEO of its Japanese entity at Hyperion, recently acquired by Oracle, a board of directors and head of its software division at ASCII, and CEO of Venture Com, Japan. Mr. Hirano also served to Open Source Development Labs as Director of Asia. He started his carrier at IBM as an engineer on computer platform technology, and also was one of the first journalists on Japan's best known IT magazine, Nikkei Computer. He holds a Bachelor in Physics from Tokyo’s Sophia University. He is the author of "The Great Journey to Commoditization of Linux and Open Source" (Nikkei BP Creative).