When Yu Sasamoto joined Twitter Inc as head of Japan in 2014, he looked at the revenue figures for the country and thought, “This is a little bit small.”
Before coming to the company, Sasamoto had worked as an executive at MTV and Microsoft. It was in 2011, when Japan suffered a huge earthquake, that he really started paying more attention to the company. Twitter was one of the only ways he and many others could communicate amid mass confusion and damaged infrastructure, and afterward, Twitter’s popularity grew. So it was a surprise when he learned that revenue was lagging other countries.