Joi Ito

Joichi "Joi" Ito (伊藤 穰一) is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology.

He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School.

Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan.

Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons (where he served as CEO), The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation.

Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.

One of the few Japanese using modems before networking deregulation reached Japan, in 1985, Ito had found The Source and the original MUD by his teens (and by 26, was working on his own MUD).

Ito returned to the United States to attend Tufts University as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay.

As he deemed his course work too rigid and believed that learning computer science in school was "stupid", Ito dropped out of Tufts to work briefly for Ovonics.

Ovshinsky encouraged him to return to school.

Ito enrolled at the University of Chicago in physics but later dropped out as the program was overly oriented towards producing practical engineers rather than teaching an intuitive understanding of physics.

In the fall of 1985, Ito became the first student to register for a pioneering program of online courses, offered by Connected Education, Inc., for undergraduate credit from The New School for Social Research.

Ito also attended Hitotsubashi University, according to his essay in Japanese.

Ito also served as a board member of Energy Conversion Devices from 1995 to 2000.

Ito is a venture capitalist and angel investor and was an early stage investor in Kickstarter, Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, Wikia, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate, Fotopedia, Diffbot, Formlabs, 3Dsolve and other Internet companies.

A vocal advocate of emergent democracy and the sharing economy, Ito is a doctoral candidate in Business Administration focusing on the sharing economy at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University.

In 1999, he served as the Associate to Mr. Mount (the executive producer) on the film The Indian Runner.

He is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co., Ltd. In October 2004, he was named to the board of ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004.

In August 2005, he joined the board of the Mozilla Foundation and served until April 2016.

He served on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) from March 2005 until April 2007.

He was a founding board member of Expression College for Digital Arts as well as the Zero One Art and Technology Network.

Ito was the Chairman of Creative Commons from December 2006 until 2012.

He is on the board of Digital Garage, Culture Convenience Club (CCC), Tucows, and EPIC, and is on the advisory boards of Creative Commons and WITNESS.

From Keio University, Ito earned a PhD in Media and Governance in 2018.

His dissertation was titled The Practice of Change.

Ito is one of Timothy Leary's godsons—a close, nontraditional familial relationship that Leary reportedly developed for a few of his friends' children.

Ito's sister, Mizuko Ito, is a cultural anthropologist, studying media technology use, and the musician Cornelius is his second cousin.

Ito currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Mizuka Ito (née Kurogane).

Ito became a disc jockey working in nightclubs in Chicago such as the Limelight and Smart Bar, also working with Metasystems Design Group to start a virtual community in Tokyo.

Later, Ito ran a nightclub in Roppongi, Japan, called XY Relax, with help from Joe Shanahan of Metro Chicago/Smart Bar.

He helped bring industrial music from Chicago (Wax Trax) and later the rave scene, managing a DJ team and visual artists, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan.

Following the exposure of his personal and professional financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019.

Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan.

His family moved to Canada and then to the United States, when Ito was about three, to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where his father became a research scientist and his mother a secretary for Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., now Ovonics.

The founder of his mother's company, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, was impressed with young Ito, whom he thought of almost as his son.

Ovshinsky mentored the boy's interests in technology and social movements, and when Ito was 13, gave him work with scientists, saying, "He was not a child in the conventional sense."

Ito and his sister Mizuko Ito, called Mimi, spent summers in Japan with their grandmother, who taught them about traditional Japanese culture.

At age 14, he returned to Japan, when his mother was promoted to president of Energy Conversion Devices Japan.

He studied at the Nishimachi International School and, for high school, the American School in Japan in Tokyo.

In that phase of his life, Ito also learned "street language, street smarts, and computers."