Cushing

girl learning programming at Cushing,” Rogers says, laughing.

Af ter Cushing, Rogers headed west again, to be closer to her family in Japan, San Francisco, and Hawai’i. She attended Pepperdine University, earning a business degree and eventually an MBA as well. In part due to her mom’s encouragement — “My mom is the Japanese, traditional Asian, like, ‘You must go and work for a big company’” — Rogers started her career at American Honda and then moved to Sony PlayStation, where she worked to Westernize games coming from Japan. “My parents were entrepreneurs in the video game industry in Japan. I understood the culture and felt I was at home when I landed in the industry,” she says.

Rogers’ father, Henk Rogers, is a Dutch-born American businessman who created the first ever role-playing game (RPG) in Japan, creating a new genre. He is also responsible for discovering Tetris and popularizing it in the rest of the world, starting with the Game Boy. In 2023, The Tetris Movie, a biopic based on the true story of Tetris coming out of the Iron Curtain, will debut on Apple+.

“I grew up very close to my father, and I always thought I’d want to follow in his footsteps,” says Rogers.

Part of that confidence was innate, but a portion came from Cushing, Rogers says. “I’ve always been an independent person. Growing up in Japan, I was the only person in my school of mixed race, and was picked on for being a foreigner, or gaijin. Even though I the tables turn around. Especially in those instances, I needed to stay true to myself and be who I am no matter what labels people want to put on me.”

Confidence in connecting with all kinds of people is one key to Rogers’ success, and she credits that to her time at Cushing. She loved Cushing’s strong international flavor and the chance to meet a diverse group of friends. “I didn’t hang out with just one set of friends. I connected with since, but that’s just an example of leveraging the alumni connection.”

A second Cushing overlap came a few years later. Rogers was a speaker at a Fast Company conference in Los Angeles. The headliner was John Cena ’95, who was a year ahead of her at Cushing. “Nobody’s surprised that he became who he is because he was that guy at Cushing — just so outgoing,” Rogers remembers. “I think he got the award for most school spirit. He was always a great guy.”

—MAYA ROGERS ’96

looked like everyone else and only spoke Japanese, they deemed that I was different. It was really hard, but that experience made me tough and made me be independent. I wasn’t going to let anybody bully me. That independence prepared me with the tools to go to boarding school to be on my own. I never second-guessed my decision.”

In the video game industry, where a female CEO is quite unusual, Rogers does sometimes come up against challenges. “When I first became CEO, people would almost not believe me because I looked young and I was a female. But as soon as they see me in action, they quickly see that I am the CEO, and everyone,” she says. “That probably prepared me for being a minority in the video game industry,” she says.

Rogers has Cushing contacts wherever she goes and loves to build those connections. In 2010, she and her family planned a vacation to Bhutan, whose monarch, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck ’99, is also a Cushing alumnus. Although King Jigme and Rogers did not cross paths while at Cushing, Rogers knew that they had mutual friends. She took a chance and blindly reached out, winning an invite to visit him at his palace. “It was really a Cushing connection,” she says. “We’ve kept in touch here and there

Rogers is passionate about her nonprofit work. She sits on the boards of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Red Cross, as well as nonprofits that specifically address women’s causes including the Women’s Fund of Hawai‘i and the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children. She has also used her leadership capital to co-found Blue Startups, Hawai’i’s first venture accelerator, which has invested in over 100 startup companies and celebrated its first company going public in 2022.

Willingness to push and try new things might, in part, grow out of one regret from Rogers’ time at Cushing — not trying ice hockey. The girls’ team had just formed during her time here. “It would have been the perfect time for me to try a new sport, but I decided to pursue volleyball and basketball instead. I think [you should] do everything you can,” she advises. “Don’t limit ourselves. As women, we tend to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ We take the back seat, but we shouldn’t. And there’s no reason to.”

Future Entrepreneur: Rachel Sommers in 2007