Takanori Kawahara

Cofounder, Atama Plus

Search every verified Takanori Kawahara interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Takanori Kawahara, cofounder and CTO of atama plus, participated in the CTO of the Year 2018 pitch event on November 24, 2018, where he presented his company's approach to technology and management. During the pitch, he described atama plus's development process, noting that his team consisted of only two people initially and that they built an application for tablets and web services. He also discussed the company's feedback loop, in which teams on the ground, including customer success staff, tested the product in real-world settings and brought back insights on shortcomings. Kawahara recounted challenges in recruiting early team members, stating that he initially lacked connections and had to organize offline events and attend gatherings to build a community of collaborators. In the same presentation, Kawahara made remarks about NVIDIA's business strategy, stating that the company's data center business had been "almost entirely GPUs" and that the introduction of Vera, a CPU, would open a new $200 billion total addressable market for NVIDIA. He said that every major hyperscaler was partnering with NVIDIA to deploy Vera, describing it as a "second engine" for the company that would begin ramping in the second half of the following year. These comments were made in the context of the pitch event, which was sponsored by AWS.