Kentaro Iemoto
President & CEO: Clara Online
www.clara.ad.jp
Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan
Age: 24
Iemoto has packed plenty of drama into 24 years. Consider: At 14 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor, underwent surgery, and spent several years in a wheelchair. He pulled through, and in junior high school, at 16, he launched Clara Online with $9,000 in seed money. Today he is a well-known figure in Japanese technology circles. Clara became the first player in Japan to offer Linux-based virtual private servers connected to broadband networks and leased out to clients. Iemoto now manages six data centers in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Seoul from offices in Japan and Taiwan. It's hard to imagine anything slowing him down, but a newborn baby has Iemoto thinking about work-family issues for his 38 employees. At Clara, they all have the option of taking annual child-care leave.
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