Eiko Hashiba, Consultant of Woman for Work-Life Balancing

Eiko Hashiba, Consultant of Woman for Work-Life Balancing 

COURTESY OF VISASQ

EIKO HASHIBA

Founder and CEO, VisasQ 

If you are a woman who has to choose between children and decides to stop being a career woman, that's how this Japanese woman feels. Eiko Hashiba is one of those who experienced a similar incident. In 2001, Hashiba, a fresh graduate armed with an economics degree from the University of Tokyo, landed a plum investment banking job at Goldman Sachs Japan. Yet only a year later, at 2002, she left banking job at Goldman Sachs Japan at age 23 to have a child. She decided to quit after realizing that she couldn’t juggle caring for a newborn with the demands of investment banking, with its stresses and long hours.

“I had my baby at an early stage in my career and I wanted some kind of work I could continue no matter what,” Hashiba said in an interview. VisasQ is “a service that boosts a person’s ability to work.”

Ten years later, that question was still on her mind when she co-founded VisasQ Inc., which provides expert advice and consulting services not unlike those of McKinsey & Co. The difference, its advisers don’t work in-house: they’re outside consultants.

That work-life balance question factored in her 2012 founding of VisasQ, which dubs itself a global “professional knowledge sharing platform” that matches up independent experts for temporary assignments with companies—ranging from a single hour of advice to consulting for a major project.

“Being able to continue working regardless of a person’s stage in life was the driving force in VisasQ’s vision of connecting knowledge, by going beyond organizations, generations and geography,” Hashiba says.

VisasQ Inc. The Consultant That Boosts A Person’s Ability To Work

Eiko Hashiba is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of VQ, a leading global expert network service headquartered in Japan. Before founding VQ, Hashiba spent five years as an investment professional at Unison Capital, one of Japan's leading buyout funds. Before that, she had worked in Goldman Sachs Japan's Investment Banking Division and in L’Oréal K.K. as a Controller. Hashiba holds a BA in Economics from the University of Tokyo, and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Hashiba became a U.S. certified public accountant and in 2003 joined L’Oréal as a controller in Tokyo. Hashiba then got an M.B.A. from MIT. From 2007, she worked at Japanese buyout firm Unison Capital until starting VisasQ. Listing in 2020 in Tokyo, VisasQ’s share price has quadrupled, giving it a $471 million market capitalization—and Hashiba’s stake is reportedly worth over $240 million. In August, VisasQ announced it would acquire U.S.-based expert network firm Coleman Research Group. The $102 million deal, expected to close in November, will triple VisaQ’s transaction volume to almost ¥9 billion, and potentially add over 260,000 experts in 190 countries to its network. “Being a woman doesn’t mean that there’s a limit to your abilities,” Hashiba says. “It’s nothing more than a label.” 

If you are interested about others Women Empowered figures, you can visit Memories Interactive. Or maybe you are interested in playing games like me with strong female characters, you can download the game here if you are an iOS user or here if you are an Android user.