Venture Republic

If you're passionate about tech and travel, read more about Venture Republic

Courses

Course 6: EECS

Course 9: Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Course 14: Economics

Course 15: Management

Course 18: Mathematics

Course 21: HASS

Location

Tokyo

Host Type

Industry

Since 2013, Venture Republic is a tech company that operates LineTravel.jp (a travel engine similar to Expedia), Trip101 (website specilizing in travel guides), and Hotel.jp (hotel review service). The company boasts 27 million monthly visitors and is constantly expanding.

Students will benefit if they know the following programming languages: ASP, Ruby, PHP, JAVA, HTML5, CSS3.

Specific field: front-end and back-end programming; network; UI, software development, coding and IOT.

Student Story|Christina Liao, MechE, '20

Christina Liao, MechE, '20

For technical tasks, we had a lot of say in what we wanted to work on. Interns were never forced to work on a task that they were not interested in and worked together with the engineers to find tasks that were both interesting and of value to the company.

Christina with her co-workers and the Venture Republic mascot

Venture Republic is a company that oversees several travel sites. The Tokyo office where I interned maintains LINE.TRAVEL.jp, a meta-search site for flights, hotels, and tours. Interns on the Systems Team were not assigned a single large project for the summer. Instead, we got to choose from a pool of smaller technical tasks to take on based on our skills and interests.

The three main tasks that I completed were:

•Researching migration language targets for the LINE.TRAVEL.jp tours webpage, which was previously using the very outdated VBScript. My recommendation to migrate to Node.js was ultimately adopted as the finalized plan.

•Learning how to set up a autoscaling and load-balanced application on AWS

•Designing a prototype of an interactive map view for hotel listings

Fitting this many tasks into 10 weeks required learning quickly on the job, which is a useful skill in the fast-paced development environments often found in tech companies.

Student Story|Cori Drysdale, CS/Data (6-14) '19

Cori Drysdale, CS/Data (6-14) '19

Through Venture Republic and MIT-Japan, I gained incredibly useful experience in both the tech and finance worlds, learning both iOS development and about VC investments. I gained a more international viewpoint, and sharpened my communication skills in both Japanese and English.

Cori working on iOS development

Venture Republic runs the travel meta-search web engines travel.jp and hotel.jp, and is also a venture capital firm investing in travel-related start-ups. While interning here, I researched blockchain, produced accounting tools, and developed an app to submit and view feedback on company events. I also helped produce growth data visualizations for a funded start-up’s pitch which won the pitch competition at the Web in Travel Japan and North Asia 2018 conference.

Student Story|Katie Sedlar, MEng, EECS, '17

Katie Sedlar, MEng, EECS, '17

"I learned a lot about programming, especially how to interface with databases. I also learned how much I like work in a tech company, as compared with research at a university. This definitely made me reconsider how I felt about my future career path."

Katie and friends on a nice day out

I worked on four projects while at Venture Republic. My first project was to write a script that automatically generated page templates fornew web pages on Travel.jp. This would remove a lot of tedious and repetitive work.

My second project was to write a bot that would report Google Analytics data via the Slack app. I only worked on part of this project, due to some issues hooking up the program with the Slack API.

My third project was to redesign part of the company website, vrg.jp. Venture Republic wanted the site to be brighter, more intuitive to use, and updated with new information.

My final project was to make a web scraper. It would gather large amounts of public data from the articles on retrip.jp, a competitor site, and store it in a database. Later, others would analyze that data to find what articles did better than others.