🚫 OTAs Suck ✅ Building a Book Direct, Decentralized, Open-OTA ➜ 🚀 Operators Get Direct Bookings ✈️ Travelers Get Rewards for Booking Direct 💰 Anyone Who Refers Travelers Owns Them & the Revenue Stream They Generate.

🐥 I'm a startup founder, launching a direct booking travel platform for the AI agent era.

Why? Today, Online Travel Agent (OTA) commissions are draining 10's of billions of dollars out of the travel ecosystem. They enrich "Big Tech" and "Big Travel", at the expense of everyone else. I know because I helped them do it. For years I was a super-affiliate of Expedia and other big OTAs. I fed $100m+ in hotel bookings to the OTAs, generating $10m in commissions, but adding little of value to the ecosystem.

Now, I'm building a new travel distribution platform and protocol that enables travelers and their AI agents bypass the OTA middlemen and book direct.

👇 Want to be notified when we launch? Leave a comment in the featured post below titled "AI-powered community", or reach out and connect! 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Previously...

🐣 I co-founded a venture studio. We launched 3 notable ventures:
 
1️⃣ 3Genius International. Network of travel booking websites. $100M+ in bookings and $10M+ in gross profit.

2️⃣ Moola.com. Multiplayer game. Grew virally to 450k community members, $7.6M economy. PCWorld's “Best Places to Waste Time on the Web”.
 
3️⃣ Locationary. Local data and community platform. Rewarded users for crowdsourcing local business data (eg. like for Apple Maps). $4.5M in funding. Acquired by Apple.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

🧠 Current Interests: AI, community, machine learning, travel, fintech, loyalty rewards, web3 / tokens / blockchain, creator & influencer economy, social commerce, marketplaces, network effects.

Arlen Ritchie

We take your emotive conversations (therapy, coaching, talking to grandma) and turn them into daily actions and thoughts for you to understand your inner world better.

Founder

Sach Foods

Advisor

Uber

Equity Engineering lays the technical foundation to provide inclusive experiences to all users on the platform. The team’s work spans the entirety of the Uber experience from mobility to delivery, as well as newer marketplaces and ventures.

Head of Equity Engineering

Part of the Mobility organization (Go) focusing on building the next generation of mobility services and products. Transformed my innovation group to seed crystal the incubation and creation of the New Mobility Verticals group.

Product Portfolio included: Uber Hourly, m.uber.com, Uber Park, Uber Charter, Uber Concepts

Engineering Leader, Mobility

Same job, hopefully more impact, greater potential for good. 

Focused on Kiosk and abstracting the system to better understand how cities could benefit from a transportation OS that could capture, analyze and forecast all motion in cars, buses, two wheelers in real time.  

Incubated selective bets. Built Uber Charter from whiteboard to concept in 91 days.

Engineering Manager II, Innovation (Product Hybrid Role)

Built Uber’s first Innovation studio, starting with a single software engineer and growing the team to 20+ 

Incubated dozens of products including Eats Runners (a relay product for food delivery), Freight Support (automated support for truckers), Offline (an application for on-boarding drivers in places without internet), uView (an internal social community app) and Kiosk (Uber’s next gen shared computing platform). 

Formed  a world-class leadership team with functional  pods focused on software, firmware, hardware, product & design with talent from top tier institutions including Google, Facebook, Amazon Lab126. 

Expanded Kiosk into the Rides business successfully launching a ride hailing Kiosk in Toronto Airport. 

Launched the Asian @ Uber Employee Resource Group and served as the global co-chair for the past 3 years. Played a critical role in advocating for D&I at Uber by engaging Uber’s Executive Leadership Team & Board.

Engineering Manager, Innovation

Highfive

First hire of the customer success / growth organization that was responsible for taking Highfive to market, implementing a beta program, and developing foundations for a growth practice.

Growth + Customer Success, Lead

Autopilot HQ

I wanted to experience building a customer success function from the ground up and joined Autopilot to do just that. Built playbooks, processes, hired a team and defined clear delineations between Customer Success & Support.

Director of Customer Success

Yammer, Inc.

Joined Yammer’s Strategic Accounts team prior to Microsoft’s acquisition and helped develop the foundations of their customer success practice. I managed a portfolio of global accounts helping their teams imagine working in an entirely new way using Enterprise Social Networks. 
 
Notable Personal Accounts: 7-Eleven, TGI Fridays, AB-InBev, Diamler-Benz, Texas Health Resources

Senior Customer Success Manager - Global Accounts

Learning Revolution

Learning Revolution’s mission was to provide a private tutor experience for every student around the world by using a radical new approach to online education. I was part of the founding team with a specific focus on business development and sales.

Co-Founder

Booz Allen Hamilton

In the following two years, I transitioned to a more advisory role and guided various US Naval enterprises in strategic human capital management initiatives primarily focusing on global in-sourcing.

Human Capital Consultant

In my first year at Booz Allen, I participated in various Lean Six Sigma & cost modeling initiatives for the United States Navy.

Applied Economics Analyst

At hpy, we use AI to transform therapy and coaching conversations into new routines, helping therapists, coaches, and their clients turn insights into new habits.

When using hpy, therapists save time on notes while helping clients reach their goals faster. 

Prior to hpy, I led various Engineering & Innovation teams at Uber. 

Anurag Agarwalla

We just closed $100M in funding for hpy !

Just kidding. 

Our story isn’t just a capital one. It’s one of grit, hustle & most importantly, love. 

I never really liked the idea of raising capital simply because you fit a mold or know how to pitch a great story. 

It’s inefficient and wasteful. 

The millions of dollars burned through in the valley in the last decade could have been used to help those who need it most. 

You can make bets efficiently. Trust me, I did it at Uber and it worked. 

We believe in a different kind of business. One where fundamentals whether economic or humanistic matter. 

Last week at Behavioral Health Tech my better half Meera and my daughters decided to stop by to say hello. It was supposed to be for 30 minutes and ended up being 5 hours. The girls walked the floor, passed our stickers and even dropped the phrase #thefutureoftherapyisstillhuman. 

One of my personal goals with hpy is to show my kids that you can “win” through hard work, honesty, grit, vision and by being a decent human being. 

It’s not easy, but they’re watching and so are our customers and partners. It might take us longer to get the word out, but word gets around. 

We build software to help free mental health professionals from the exhausting admin labor (mental & emotional) of doing the job. 

Whether it’s something tiny like a letter to a clients employer that you’re just too exhausted to write, a treatment plan that you have put off for 2 months, or even a little lightweight consult / second opinion on a client you’ve been stuck on for months we do it all in pure natural language. We’ve seen clinicians unlock 100+ use cases on the platform and it’s growing daily. 

Ultimately we believe to build a lasting business our values must align with the values of our customers. 

To make that happen, it all starts with doing the work of being a decent human being. 

That is the legacy I wish to pass onto my daughters. 

If you’re a therapist reading this or know of a therapist who this might resonate with, please do share it and give our tool a try. 

Get started at www.thinkhpy.com

founder @hpy | The future of therapy is still human.

No alternative text description for this image

I am so excited to officially share what we've been working on for months: 

Meet the new hpy, where we believe the future of therapy is still human.

I started hpy to honor something simple: 

Burnout is real and I realized therapy works best when clinicians actually have tools that make their lives easier. The problem is the invisible work has gone completely unnoticed. Until now. 

hpy is an emotion-aware practice manager that does those invisible tasks - all powered by natural language - so therapists can stay present with their clients.

Say it, and hpy handles it:

Write letters (for teachers, PCPs, school teams) in your voice with proper clinical context.

Find local resources (IOP/PHP programs, community supports) matched to needs and constraints.

Make time visible: scan your calendar, flag who’s coming in, and show how much true free time you have this week.

Follow-through after sessions: draft outreach, paperwork, and reminders, clinician reviews, and then sends.

EHR-friendly outputs (SimplePractice, Jane, etc.), built for real-world workflows.

Under the hood: emotion signals to prioritize what matters, clinician-in-the-loop by design, short-snippet processing with deletion, and zero PII retention by default. Because safety and dignity aren’t features - they’re foundations.

If you’re curious about the science behind our approach, we just published a piece on expert-driven AI and DSPy-powered research.

 🔗 Read: https://lnkd.in/gmXm7Gr6

Let’s make responsible, clinician-centered AI the standard, not the exception. Know a therapist? Tag them because... 

The future of therapy is still human.

#Therapy #MentalHealth #DigitalHealth #AI #PracticeManagement #ClinicianTools

Open article: Closing The Mental Health Loop - hpy - Therapy is Human First by thinkhpy.com

Closing The Mental Health Loop - hpy - Therapy is Human First

I was nervous walking into my first Behavioral Health Tech conference.

It was hpy first big event, and honestly, we weren’t sure if it would be worth the budget. Would anyone stop by? Would people understand what we were building? As a tiny bootstrapped startup would the ROI be there? 

We went in cautiously optimistic, hopeful that the work we’ve poured our hearts into might connect with someone.

What happened completely changed how I see the behavioral health community. We were embraced. We felt heard, seen and welcomed. 

Behavioral health is different. Everyone here carries a story some told, some unfolding, some waiting quietly to be seen. And at Behavioral Health Tech, those stories were everywhere. Impact into action was the theme. 

In so many industries you can feel the layers the ones who’ve been around for years, the ones who’ve raised massive capital, the ones who actually have the capital. I expected that walking in. But BHT felt different. 

We walked in unsure if we belonged and left feeling deeply encouraged, reminded that behavioral health isn’t just a market. It's a purpose driven movement.

Solome Tibebu it took us years to finally meet IRL but you've built a legacy in BHT! Thank you for having us :) 

Sheetal Shah Jonathan Seltzer Amy Cosler Arundhati Parmar Carly Taylor Hannah Weisman, PhD Natasha Najmi-Kazmi Mario San Bartolome, MD, MBA, MRO,FASAM Tanya Carlson, MBA Joseph Tesoro Keonna R. Katie Vernoy Tiffany L. Reddick, LPC, BCC, CDWF, CGS Lucita Clondas, LICSW Marissa Batie-Collier, MSW, CSW, LMSW Stacy Rae Jay Agarwal Nikole Benders-Hadi, M.D. Erin Fogarty (She/Her) Carly Taylor Dr. Caroline Fenkel, LCSW Alison Cerezo, PhD jodie sweetin Tom Tracy 🏳️‍🌈 Itamar Kandel 

Amazing meeting you all plus so many others! Thank you for connecting! 

#thefutureoftherapyishuman

PS: Huge shoutout to the most epic team who made all this magic happen Kira Torre, MS, MFT Rachel Shapiro Michael Selepec Meera Agarwalla

#bht2026 here we come :)

India does entrepreneurship differently. 

This week I had the pleasure of attending one of our star Engineers weddings in India and it was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. 

First off, it was in a small town Salasaar which is a 4 hour journey by road from Jaipur. Not the easiest for my 7 & 9 year olds but they did amazing. 

Along the way, I bore witness to hundreds of micro entrepreneurs living in multi-generational families maintaining century old traditions all centered around family.

Our driver, Rahul, was one such entrepreneur. Only 22, he operates his own taxi fleet. His father and mother scraped whatever they had to invest in his first car. 

Working 7 days a week, he slowly was able to generate enough revenue to now own a fleet of 6 cars. All profitable, all in 4 years. No formal management training. 

When I asked him about his future plans, he said he wants to generate enough income so he can get married and build a separate quarters in his ancestrial home for a family of his own and then expand their family businesses into other verticals.

And this is no exception in our culture. It’s the norm.

Parents place bets on their kids. Not the mag 7. I’m thankful to have the support, love and confidence of my own family here at hpy. 

It was a blissful week and I did not worry about AGI and the impending doom because at the end of the day, these folks showed me that loosing a job is far less scary when you are able to build on your own with the love and support of those around you.

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Arlen Ritchie

Anurag Agarwalla

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