[Why I Joined Teracy] Teracy’s potential: what it means to meet companions 

Nice to meet you, I’m SHU, in charge of Growth.
I entered university during COVID-19 in 2021, took a total of two years off,
and recently left university at 22.

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Until I entered university, my sense of how big the world is and the range of values within it was truly limited compared to now. From there, I met many people and ways of living, and this is the story of how I joined the Teracy team.

I hope this article helps convey Teracy’s appeal. Please give it a read!

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I’ve never been particularly good at making best friends or very close buddies.

In class, I fit in with both the mischievous group and the quiet group and could communicate fairly well. But I struggled to make friends I could truly call best friends.

Even when hanging out, I felt afraid to bare myself, and everything stayed kind of fuzzy.

🏫

That changed dramatically when I entered university during the pandemic.

I enrolled at a university in Kyoto and was supposed to move into a newly built international dorm. But construction was delayed, so I lived in a shared house for six months. There, 14 residents with diverse backgrounds, including foreigners, lived together.

There was a student on a gap year from the United States trying out black soybean farming, a doctor temporarily back from medical work in Myanmar, someone hired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs taking Ukrainian language training online, a student from Tokyo taking classes remotely because they loved Kyoto, a stretching trainer—truly a colorful lineup.

For someone like me, who had only ever been involved continuously with people in limited communities like school, life there felt very fresh.

Every day, we played games and watched movies on a big screen, used a desk as a ping-pong table, and peeked at seniors attending job-hunting events and online sessions.

Most residents did classes or work remotely, and at whatever time they liked, they would come down to the first-floor living room, gather around the table, and work together.

Although I could hardly go to campus for classes or club activities, spending time with wonderful housemates didn’t make me feel lonely—instead, I was wrapped in the comfort of knowing someone was always there.

Looking back now, that was exactly what Teracy is realizing online.

Late at night, I talked with seniors in life who had rich experiences, and my values slowly loosened.

As a result, I gained companions I could casually exchange words with anytime.

🗺️

At the timing of becoming a second-year student, I took a leave of absence and traveled the world twice. The first was Southeast Asia; the second was India and Europe.

In Southeast Asia, I touched the hidden sides of society I’d never known and met travelers living freely. In Malaysia in particular, I shared meals with all sorts of people and glimpsed diverse ways of life: an education professional who loved Initial D, a family who helped pay and showed me around town, and the indigenous Orang Asli people who helped with insect collecting in the jungle.

On the road, like during the share house days, I could talk openly about the future with travelers of different backgrounds. That environment felt comfortable.

I wonder where they are and what they’re doing now.

(on the banks of the Mekong River)

✈️

On a domestic flight abroad with no other Japanese aboard, I happened to sit next to student entrepreneurs around my age and, for the first time, learned about the world of startups.

It was a huge turning point for me.

After returning to Japan, to “keep traveling while earning,” I started working fully remotely as a marketing intern at a Tokyo app development startup.

But I felt that just text and regular meetings over a screen made it hard to close the distance, so I ended up going to Tokyo to meet in person.

Communication only through Slack and online meeting tools gave me location freedom at the time, but it also left a certain lack and an indescribable sense of loneliness.

🌏

After coming back from my second trip, what filled my heart was the desire to “connect this experience to the next.”

From that feeling, I started a new organization together with international students.

Leveraging my experience, I planned and ran events in Kyoto city where international students, Japanese students, business owners, government, and freelancers could interact flatly across positions.

Seeing people with different languages and cultures connect with smiles—that was my greatest joy.

Meanwhile, with global challenges in mind, I simultaneously worked on building business ideas, doing sales agency work, and launching a sole proprietorship, expanding my own possibilities.

📱

In the fall of 2024, people around me started posting about Teracy, and as I watched my timeline thinking “it’s kind of buzzing,” one post caught my eye. I casually hit “like”—that was the first step.

Emo, CEO of Teracy, Inc., Post

(Teracy asks for advice to help more people try the app. They invite DMs for brief interviews and link to the Teracy site.)

That became my first chance to try Teracy. I had been creating places to meet people “flatly” in-person, but with Teracy I felt the possibility of it becoming the infrastructure to realize that online, and my heart raced.

A few days later, an internship recruitment post from Teracy flowed onto my timeline again.

Emo, CEO of Teracy, Inc., Post

(Teracy is hiring. They seek 1 entrepreneurial engineer (their third) with stock options, plus 3 interns. Interested candidates are invited to DM.)

Before I knew it, I sent a DM without hesitation.

From there, days flew by as I ran headlong. Before I knew it, I was working full-time after starting as an intern. And before I knew it, I was going together to San Francisco.

🗽

Teracy’s team now is a remote team of mixed Japanese and overseas members. Each person works from a distance while realizing their own “authentic life.”

My role is to spread Teracy and increase the number of people who can keep rich connections without being bound by location. And from the Growth position, to refine the product and make the experience even better.

In an era where productivity and efficiency are pursued to the extreme, Teracy preserves those while also providing the margin of “purposeless small talk,” “the comforting sense of companions being near,” and “gentle connection and updates.”

If you want to make remote life even a little better, please give it a try.

As a personal wish, I dream of Teracy becoming a platform where people meet “companions in life.” Encounters with companions undeniably have the power to greatly change your life.

For those moving forward, supporting each other. Teracy is such a place.