【Profile】Piotr Kucharski
I was born in Lublin, Poland 2 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the restored independence of Poland. In these times, life was difficult in Poland so my family relocated. First we moved to South Africa, and later when I was 6 years old to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the United States.
Throughout my life, I have been influenced by Japanese culture in many ways. My home town had a sister city relationship with Tondabayashi in Osaka. I participated in karate, watched Japanese cartoons and played Japanese video games as a child.
In high school, I was lucky enough to participate in a home stay program. I lived in Takasaki, Gunma for 5 months with 3 different Japanese families and went to a Japanese high school. This experience encouraged me to apply to University in Japan and so I joined Waseda University’s School of International Liberal Studies.
During university I was considering many different careers, but I ultimately decided that I wanted to become a software engineer.
I was able to take many courses in programming and computer science due to Waseda University's Open Kamoku program.
My Career
During university I interned at a company called OK Wave for about 2 years.
I enjoyed my time here, but I wanted to work at a start up, not a publicly traded corporation.
Next I joined a company called Sherpa as an engineering intern. The company only had 3 employees: the CEO, my friend who I referred and I.
Ultimately, I found it difficult to find the kind of job I was looking for in Japan as a new university graduate and I decided to return to the United States.
I spent some more time studying math and computer science before I moved to San Francisco, California to participate in a coding bootcamp called App Academy.
During this program I improved my skills and met many interesting people. After finishing the course I began working as a web developer for a company called Gfycat in Mountain View, California.
Finally I had achieved my dream of working for an exciting start up. I met many wonderful people at this company and most of them went on to have very impressive careers. One currently works for Google, two for Meta, two for Apple and one for OpenAI.
After Gfycat, I started working for a company called Streamlabs in San Francisco, California. Streamlabs was focused on helping live streamers monetize their content. I found working at Streamlabs to be very exciting. At first I worked as a full stack engineer on the PHP service and my first project was a partnership between Gfycat and Streamlabs. When viewers donate money, they could pick a gif to play on the stream.
Afterwards, I started working on our streaming software which was an open source project to create a modern UI for OBS using Electron. It was my first time using Electron and building desktop applications for Windows. For about a year I was the PM and Tech Lead for a team of 5 people to build real time augmented reality face filters (like snapchat) for live streamers.
Streamlabs was acquired by Logitech in 2019 for about 100 million dollars. It was my first time experiencing a successful exit as an engineer. During the time of the acquisition, I was in contact with the CEO of Locari, Inc. I was referred by my good friend who inspired me to become a software engineer and who worked with me at Sherpa and OK Wave.
At Locari, I worked on various projects in our Ruby on Rails codebase. I was responsible for improving our Instagram integration, updating our payment system for content creators and I developed several green field applications. After 4 years, Locari was acquired by FISM, Inc and I wanted to find a company which better fit my ambitions.
I started working as a senior software engineer for a company called Spacely, Inc. which makes 3D digital twins of real estate listings in Japan. This was my first introduction to the real estate industry. Once again, the tech stack was Ruby on Rails. At Spacely, I helped migrate our search backend from Algolia to Elastic while optimizing our search indexing logic. I was able to achieve a 10x performance improvement and a 5x cost reduction on this project. After that, I worked on an Instagram API integration which was released as a new paid product offering.
Finally I found myself interested in working for Estie, Inc.
Why I chose estie
I was first introduced to estie by a recruiter in 2023. I met many of the leaders of Estie during my interviews and I had a good impression of Estie. It seemed to me that Estie is a professional company which is making great progress towards becoming a big success in the real estate industry. During this time, I was very focused on securing career progression to Senior Engineer and I ultimately decided to go with Spacely over Estie.
I spent about one and a half years at Spacely learning many things about real estate in Japan and building my skills as an engineer. During this time I sometimes wondered what it would be like if I had chosen estie instead.
I spoke with the leadership of estie and I was happy to hear that they were still interested in working together. I joined estie, Inc. this April.
Previously, I was worried that it might be difficult for me in estie because I had the impression that everyone was very strict and serious. After I spoke with some members of estie, I realized that estie is a company like the start ups in Silicon Valley that I enjoyed working at so much.
Of course, in order to be successful, you must be determined and motivated, but I found that the company culture of estie is a lot less uptight than my first impression. On my team, everyone’s opinion is valued and I feel that we are working together towards a common goal. Many of my coworkers are accomplished engineers who went to great schools and participated in competitive programming competitions. I can tell that there are many driven, intelligent people here and they inspire me to improve my skills as well.
I was also very surprised to see that estie is very aware of the challenges of growing a start up. Our onboarding material references Conway's Law which states that any software produced by an organization will end up duplicating the structure of the organization that made it. With the awareness of this, Estie creates small, focused teams which work together to build cohesive products.
I haven’t felt this excited about my work in many years. I feel like I’m working together with the other 4 members of my team to create a new product while we are simultaneously discovering the needs of our users. Each member is playing a crucial role and we are making progress every day.
Currently, my team is building a new product to help companies in the real estate industry discover the owners of various real estates. There is a publicly available register of all real estate events for a given geographical region. We are currently working to collect and digitize this data and make it available to our customers with many enhancements. I have learned many things about the problem space of real estate in Japan and the many different categories of real estate events.
In addition, I am enjoying the process of learning a new web framework (nest.js) and I am enjoying building software in full stack Typescript. It is my first time using GraphQL and it is a great learning experience for me.
