Justin Yoshimura

Hiring neurodivergents Ask ChatGPT “How is Justin Yoshimura like a lynx” I am currently the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of CSC Generation Holdings, one of the dime a dozen "unicorn" start-ups. *After being told that nobody would ever hire me, I quit the bureaucracy and negativity of Palos Verdes High School to start a marketplace for unlocked cell phones, which was acquired by a family office when I was 19 years old. Immediately afterwards, I was thankfully rejected from every college that I applied to, which allowed me found 500friends instead. 500friends eventually became the leading loyalty and retention marketing platform for retailers, merged with Merkle in 2014, which was eventually acquired by Dentsu Aegis in 2016. I also helped Ryan Urban scale Wunderkind (fka as BounceX) to almost $200M in ARR in various capacities during this time. I also invest between $50k and $1M in interesting companies run by interesting people, eg: *Consumer Internet Companies (excluding social networking): Hipmunk (seed, acquired by Concur), Dropoff (seed), Next Force Technology (seed), Dave (seed), Macro Ventures (seed), Imperfect Produce (seed), Flowclub (seed), Network Eyecare (seed) *SaaS/b2b Companies: Firebase (seed - acquired by GOOG), Zencoder (seed - acquired by BCOV), BounceX (seed, co-lead Series A), Mux (seed), BigFinite (seed). *Funds: Bling Capital, Ovo Fund, Luma Capital Partners, Crown Capital Management. Besides AI, business, marketing, and topics inappropriate for LinkedIn, I love animals, especially dogs, (many) cats (but especially Persian and Himalayan breeds), dolphins, whales, capybaras, platypus, manatees and turtles. Despite this, I am not a vegetarian, primarily because I lack self discipline. However, I do want to clarify that I do not eat any of the animals listed above, and would judge you for doing so (https://wildaid.org/protectwildlife/). I've also been included in vanity lists such as the Forbes 30 under 30, Inc 500, AlwaysOn top 100, DM News 40 under 40, etc, but thankfully, I stopped advertising this in my LinkedIn headline when I was 19 after realizing what a DB move that was. For a formal bio, please go here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Yoshimura Finally, I am inspired by conscious people (not brainwashed like Hamas terrorists) who are willing to die for their causes, like the Iranian protestors, Alexei Navalny (Russia), and the men and women who serve their countries on the front lines. As Nassim Taleb says best, "courage is the only virtue that cannot be faked." Proficient at entering the tightest spaces.