Here I can make work equal to daily life

＊This article was originally written in Japanese as an interview for a new member.

Hello! Ready for another story about our new member?

Today, we will introduce Kenji Hosaka.
He has started working at Atrae as a subcontractor and later become a regular employee. Now he is an important member of the growth of yenta.
We asked him what made him decide to officially join Atrae.

Biography of Hosaka

Born in Kanagawa in 1988. Although graduating from the business department at University, he started his career as an engineer. Also has experience of starting his own business. Now he has become a core member for yenta.

Student life far from an engineer

Being a purely liberal arts student that had nothing to do with PC nor programming, he’d never thought he would become an engineer in the future.

When he started job hunting, unlike his friends, he didn’t know what he wanted to do nor imagine himself working hard in a company day after day.

However, while applying to some companies starting from listed ones, he began to notice that he seemed to go well with companies in the IT industry.

All the companies he passed the first few interviews were IT-related.
That’s how he ended up starting his career as an engineer at a systems integrator.

Don’t want to make an effort only to have a good relationship inside the company

He could enjoy engineering and making a product better than he thought.
Creating something was simply fun and he became loving it.

On the other hand, he couldn’t fit into the culture of the company.
He had no interest in getting a higher position or the habit of always reading the boss’s face.

Meanwhile, he was asked personally to develop a service by his colleague.
It was so fun that he spends as much time as he could on the service, and tried his best to spend as little time as possible at the office.

That leaded him to shift to a freelancer.

Without meaningless internal rules or hanging out with members who had a different value, he could spend all his time into engineering.
Being able to work on services he has an interest in also lets him learn new technologies as well.

A service that represents me

Since becoming a freelancer, he took part in creating various services by order.

Alike a typical engineer, he began to have a will to make his own.

By then, he had started to work in another company, but he kept working on his own service with a friend and finally gained a chance to start a business himself.
An angel investor got interested in them by referral.

In Feb 2017, he launched a matching service with a friend to collect evaluation data of individuals.

He had always wanted to make a service that people would recognize with his name.
To achieve that, he spent all his time working on his business.

yenta changed his perspective about a company

It was spring in 2018, when Oka from yenta, an analogous service, approached him to work together.
Apparently the friend he started a business with had a connection with Oka from before.

That time they declined the offer since they wanted to challenge on their own.

However, they kept regular communication with Oka and gradually got caught in his passion and dream, ended up finding themselves agreeing to help yenta three days a week.

He reminds the members of Atrae to always greeted him cheerfully whenever he came to the office to work.

It was completely different from the companies he had seen and had an image of in the past.

After a few months of joining yenta, he was in the middle of some options.
To continue his own business, or to join other companies…

There were other companies that offered him a job too.
The people who approached him were all attractive that he was happy to work with.

Then why did he turned them down and joined Atrae?

Work became equal to life

Hosaka had always thought that work is something you try hard to finish early to make your own time.

But ever since he started his own business, work became equal to life for him.
He feared he would lose this way of working and living if he belonged to a company.

Is work doing something that you don’t want to do just for a living?
Isn’t there a way you can avoid that and work with what you like to do?

He reminded the time in Atrae.
In Atrae, everyone works proactively.
Members in yenta were always excited about their product.

Oka was always talking about his dream with sparkling eyes.

Atrae members were “working” in a way far from how he imagined in the past.

Here you don’t need to divide work and private life.
You can work on what you truly want to with members you can deeply trust.

That’s the reason Hosaka joined Atrae.

Working is part of your daily life

He says there’s no change in the impression of Atrae before and after he joined as a regular employee. No special episode either.

“Because working is the same as living daily life for me now, there isn’t a story to extract particularly. It’s fun everyday.
I don’t have a day thinking that ‘I don’t want to go work today…’ anymore! lol”

He gives a message to those who want to become an engineer or feels Atrae attractive,
“To those who want to attract the world with engineering and a great product, or those who want to grow as an engineer and as a business person,,,
let’s work together here!”