Biography
Gen Fukunaga is the Japanese-American entrepreneur who founded Funimation, the company that brought Dragon Ball to American television and later built one of the largest English-language anime distribution businesses in the world [1]. Born March 22, 1962, in Itami, Hyogo, he was raised in West Lafayette, Indiana, and trained as an engineer, earning two degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University before an MBA from Columbia Business School [1][2]. After stints as an engineer at IBM, a consultant at Andersen Consulting, and a product manager at Tandem Computers, he started Funimation in 1994, after his uncle, Toei Company producer Nagafumi Hori, helped him secure the U.S. rights to Dragon Ball [1]. He convinced the Cocanougher family, coworkers of his, to put their feed-mill business into the new venture, a gamble that paid off over the following decades [1]. Fukunaga stayed on as president and later chairman through Funimation's 2005 sale to Navarre, a 2011 buyback, and its 2017 acquisition by Sony Pictures Television, before stepping back around 2019 [1][2]. Speaking at Columbia Business School in October 2023, he explained his retirement plainly: after cashing out twice, he said, he simply didn't need to keep working [3].
After cashing out twice in the company, I really didn't need to work for a living anymore!