Tomo Takada has spent his career crossing disciplines that are usually kept separate: business development, community building, design and engineering.
That range is the logic behind NGB: find the right opportunity, design the right product, build it quickly, and create the conditions for people to adopt it and keep returning.
Engineering in the U.S. Corporate and startup work in Japan. Products, teams and communities spanning both markets. NGB's cross-border view comes from operating inside both systems, not observing them from the outside.
The four capabilities on the NGB homepage are not separate service lines. They come from one career repeatedly moving between business, product, people and technology.
Strategy, partnerships, market entry, executive alignment and cross-border business creation.
Creating adoption and sustained participation around products rather than treating growth as an afterthought.
Design Thinking, customer discovery, rapid testing and UI/UX to turn ambiguity into something testable.
Hands-on product engineering with AI agents across mobile, backend, web, data, infrastructure and release operations.
Tomo began his career as an engineer at Ford and later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. Since then, he has worked with founders, executives and operators across Japan and the U.S. — turning relationships and local market knowledge into partnerships, market entry and execution.
At Yelp Japan, community was the market-entry engine. At LIVERUN, community became part of the product itself. The lesson is consistent: a working product is not enough. People need a reason to participate, contribute and return.
Cumulative participations across a consumer platform built and operated for years.
Leading the Tokyo studio at Moon Creative Lab — Mitsui & Co.'s venture studio — sharpened a practical approach to Design Thinking: move teams from ideas to experiments, customer discovery, rapid testing and viable businesses while working inside the realities of a large corporation.
Today, Tomo works hands-on across the full production stack — mobile, backend, web, data, infrastructure, commerce, releases and incident response — using AI agents as an execution layer. AI is not the product. It is the leverage.
The important claim is not “AI can code.” It is that AI can become part of a disciplined engineering organization when it is given context, roles, repeatable procedures and explicit human gates. Production, not prototypes.
NGB brings hands-on manufacturing and hardware engineering experience to situations where strategy alone is not enough. Tomo began his career in product development at Ford, working across design, manufacturing feasibility, suppliers, investment and product launch, and has also worked with industrial technologies including non-destructive testing and CNC machining. For private equity owners and management teams, that means NGB can engage not only on growth and strategy, but on the products, engineering processes and operating realities that determine whether a manufacturing turnaround actually works.
Clients work directly with the person responsible for the project. When additional specialist depth is needed, NGB builds the right team around the work rather than adding layers of account management.
NGB brings together business development, community building, design and AI-native engineering — from first opportunity through MVP, launch and scale.
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Tokyo / Japan + U.S. / English + Japanese