A new journey in 2025

For the past (nearly) seven years, I've been privileged to work at Tripla, a startup turned multinational public company that is doing great work in the travel and hospitality industry.

When I joined, I was the 3rd or 4th (I forget which) hire for the Engineering team. At that time, we were all full-stack and full-everything engineers and were there to build the product and the team to help Tripla grow.

At that time, our main focus was on our Chatbot, and much of the work revolved around that.

These days, Tripla has a team of over 100 people, and is an industry leader, with a whole suite of products:

• Book : For making hotel reservations.
• Pay: For accepting card and QR code payments.
• Connect: CRM and marketing for hotels.
• Bot: Our OG AI-powered Chatbot.
• Guide: Helping guests use the services a hotel offers.
• Link: Connecting to OTAs and other hotel Site and Channel Managers.
• Boost: Meta-Search integration, like Google Hotel Ads.

Looking back on that time

I'm very proud of my work at Tripla, in building and designing features and components that make up parts of these core products to this day.

In those early days, contributions like building our integration with Japan's largest site controller, creating our standalone site controller, and our initial integration with Google Hotel Ads particularly stand out as fond memories for me.

I think the most rewarding part of my work, however, was in growing and nurturing the team.

I moved from a primarily engineering role to an SRE / architect position and started work on building out Tripla's Platform team, eventually becoming "Platform Leader".

Right around this time, as we were preparing for our IPO, I was hard at work making sure we met the security and audit compliance requirements for the successful public listing.

Our Platform team is also a critical part of Tripla's post-merger integration plans, where we work to integrate the teams, tools, processes, and platforms of companies that Tripla acquired after the IPO. The Tripla family grew a lot after going public, now operating all over Eastern, Central, and Southeast Asia.

I was also Tripla's "Chief Karaoke Officer", and I do hope that tradition continues into the future. Fostering bonds of friendship and camaraderie between teams and people of different backgrounds is something that's very important to me and I think it was part of what made Tripla such a great place to work.

Change is difficult, but necessary for growth

Today, I posted my farewell message, a Japanese company tradition where you reflect on your time at the company and thank your coworkers for their hard work and support over the years.

It hasn't been an easy decision to make, but I think that it's time for me to move on and seek new opportunities to learn and grow. I want to improve my leadership skills and help other startups replicate Tripla’s success.

I feel this is especially important in Japan, where "startup culture" is kind of new, and it's a good opportunity to hopefully curb some of the more toxic aspects of US-style startup life.

Embracing the benefits and expanding on the good parts of a system, while adapting them to local circumstances, is a very Japanese way of driving improvement.

I'm going to miss my team so much. I was very lucky to be able to hire and work with a group of warm, talented, and kind people.

I'm also very thankful for the support and example of the excellent leadership team at Tripla. Kaku, Kazu, and Lake have been inspirations and I will carry their lessons of respect, kindness, humility, and trust forward with me forever.

What is happening next

From January 2025, I'll be taking on a new position as an Engineering Manager at a business-to-business startup. I will be leading the team responsible for looking after the platform reliability, security, and quality.

I'm joining a small but dedicated team of friendly and open people and I can't wait to get started and to learn and grow in my new position.

I'm also not neglecting my work with my own venture, Arkilon Ltd. I'm getting ready to formally release the products I have been working on in my spare time for the past several years, Barkeeper and FacetScore.

2025 is going to bring new challenges, new opportunities for growth, and a whole lot of interesting fun. I'm so excited.