This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL Inc.
In a 100-Year Life, How Do You Choose to Live?
What does it mean to live your life fully — at work and outside of it? Ryuta Hamamoto, co-founder and CEO of TIMEWELL Inc., has built his career and his company around one answer: go full throttle on everything. This first part of our interview traces the experiences that formed that philosophy.
Name: Ryuta Hamamoto Roles: Co-founder & CEO, TIMEWELL Inc. / Specially Appointed Associate Professor, Shinshu University / Co-Representative Director, ONE X General Incorporated Association / Lead, CHANGE by ONE JAPAN (corporate challenger support program) / Special CIO, Shiojiri City
Background: Originally from Okayama. Joined Panasonic as a new graduate, where he worked in sales for small and mid-sized businesses, managing orders in the tens of billions of yen. Subsequently led Panasonic's internal entrepreneurship program "Game Changer Catapult," worked on living platform strategy, led new business development in energy, and drove a cross-industry consortium for sustainable management. Received a Group President's Award in April 2022 for that work.
Founded ONE X in April 2020, launching programs including the Shiojiri City related-population expansion project "Shiojiri CxO Lab" and "Ota-ku SDGs Fukugyou" (a side-work-for-local-business project), winning the Work Story Award twice consecutively. Founded TIMEWELL Inc. in November 2022; went independent in January 2023.
Hobbies: music festivals and DJing. Has attended 30+ music festivals worldwide. Personal motto: "Create the moment when someone's eyes light up."
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"From Festival Guy to Building the World's #1 Platform for Challenge"
— Let's start with an introduction.
I'm Ryuta Hamamoto, co-founder and CEO of TIMEWELL Inc. Our vision is "building the world's #1 infrastructure for challenge." In parallel, I work in academia as a specially appointed associate professor at Shinshu University and as a visiting researcher at Musashino University's School of Entrepreneurship. I'm involved in growing local entrepreneurs and challengers.
I also co-founded ONE X, which promotes side-work-based regional contribution projects for people at large corporations. And I lead CHANGE by ONE JAPAN, a challenger support program we launched during COVID for employees at large companies who want to push beyond their corporate constraints.
My primary work is at TIMEWELL, though the titles do stack up a bit.
— Walk us through your career so far.
I'm from Okayama and studied at Okayama University. I joined Panasonic as a new graduate, drawn by the thinking of founder Konosuke Matsushita and a desire to compete on a global stage. I started in welding equipment sales, then moved to audio development for Toyota vehicles. Around 2016, at my manager's suggestion, I moved into leading Panasonic's internal new business creation program.
Corporate entrepreneurship wasn't yet a trend — we were relatively early. Between 2018 and 2019, I did a short-term placement in Silicon Valley working on new business concept development. From 2019 to 2020, I was at Panasonic Holdings' headquarters, leading data strategy for the group and working on ESG management strategy. Panasonic at that point was very much a P&L-driven company; ESG wasn't a priority. I initiated a cross-industry consortium to start changing that direction.
From 2020, I launched the CHANGE by ONE JAPAN challenger support program and various side-work projects. In 2021, I was appointed specially appointed associate professor at Shinshu University, adding the academic dimension. In 2022, I decided to go independent and founded TIMEWELL.
— What drove you to leave a role where, by your own account, you were doing highly meaningful work?
Konosuke Matsushita had a concept he called "employee entrepreneurship" — the idea that every employee should think and act like a business owner. I deeply agreed with that. But I realized that to truly embody it, I had to actually become one. That led me to TIMEWELL.
My motto is: full throttle on work and play both. I don't like the phrase "work-life balance" — it implies a trade-off. I want to go all-in on work, hobbies, family, all of it, simultaneously. The company name reflects that: TIMEWELL, as in time well spent.
Guided by Matsushita's Thinking: The Turning Points
— You were a serious swimmer before any of this. How did you encounter Konosuke Matsushita's ideas?
My parents met in a camping club and married through that — I grew up, genuinely, as a "festival kid." My father admired Saigo Takamori from the Meiji Restoration era, and named me Ryuta with the wish that I would "live boldly, like Saigo." I naturally became fascinated with the reformers of that period — Sakamoto Ryoma, Saigo Takamori. That spirit of challenge against established systems stayed with me.
I swam seriously from age 3 to 22 — nineteen consecutive years. I competed at the university national championships with good results. Swimming is mentally brutal; it comes down to hundredths of a second, and losing takes you to very dark places. That's when I first encountered Matsushita's writing.
It was introduced to me by a relative of my grandfather when I was in my second year of high school. He gave me three books: one on Yomei-gaku (a branch of Confucian thought), one by historian Masahiro Yasuoka, and one by Matsushita. I read all three.
— What did you take from Matsushita at that age?
His ideas were fresh to me. Phrases like "a flexible, honest mind" and "daily renewal." The "30 principles of selling." For a high school student grinding through swim training and mental setbacks, his thinking was a way to build mental resilience. When I became a sales professional after graduation, I returned to his writing again — this time as operational guidance. Looking back, Matsushita's philosophy has been present at nearly every major inflection point of my life. I still have his books in my living room.
— What experiences pushed you toward this kind of all-out approach?
Three turning points.
The first was in my third year of university. I was coming back from swim practice on a moped when a truck hit me. I lost consciousness instantly. When I came to, I thought my life was over. Surviving that — feeling the contingency of it — changed how I thought about purpose. I decided I wanted to use whatever time I had left to do something for other people.
The second was in my second year at work. The sales role was brutal — relentless quotas, harsh conditions — and I fell into a depression. A close friend looked at me and said, "Your eyes look like a dead fish." He took me out. He pulled me back. That experience showed me how much the people around us determine whether we can keep going. It's part of why I care so much about creating environments where people can thrive.
The third was in 2017, when I moved into new business development. I was accepted into a program run by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and a senior colleague invited me to work on new business in Silicon Valley. I hesitated. Then I ran into Taro Aso at an event — completely coincidentally — and he said, "If not now, when?" That settled it.
Around the same time, I organized an event where I hosted two innovation leaders: Wataru Baba, a Panasonic executive, and Hideshi Hamaguchi, who had been involved in Sony's turnaround. Hamaguchi's presentation was unlike anything I'd seen before. I decided I wanted to build things at that level.
Democratizing Challenge: Why TIMEWELL
— What made you decide to start TIMEWELL specifically?
Looking back, starting a company felt like a natural consequence of everything that came before. I'd been living by Matsushita's "employee entrepreneurship" principle for years — and I finally understood that I couldn't fully embody it without actually running something myself.
There's also a pattern I kept seeing through events and programs: the difference in opportunity between people who feel they can challenge things and those who don't is enormous. Lowering the threshold for that first attempt — so that more people can start, experience a small win, and build momentum from there — that's the core of what I want to do.
Matsushita's "water supply philosophy" is the right frame here. He believed that making electronics affordable and accessible to every household — things that had been luxuries — would genuinely improve people's lives. I want to do the same thing with "challenge." Make it accessible, not just for the well-positioned.
Events became the entry point. In my view, events are the minimum viable unit of business — planning, promotion, execution, all compressed into something manageable. Running events teaches people to build something, complete it, and learn from it. Democratizing events means democratizing the experience of creating something. That's how TIMEWELL started.
What comes through in Ryuta Hamamoto's story is that the all-or-nothing approach isn't a brand position — it's the actual shape of a life that has been through enough to know what matters. Every pivot in his career, every company he's founded, comes back to the same question: how do you help more people find out what they're capable of?
Part 2 will go deeper into TIMEWELL's services and where the company is heading.
TIMEWELL BASE — our community platform — is now available. Details on the services page.