This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
TIMEWELL's stated vision is to build the world's #1 "challenge infrastructure" — a foundation that supports people who want to pursue their goals but are blocked by time constraints. The people building that vision come from very different backgrounds, united by a shared set of values: curiosity about technology, genuine care for the people around them, and a commitment to giving everything to both work and life.
This article introduces four of them.
General Manager Taro Hayashi: Connecting People and Regions Across All 47 Prefectures
Taro Hayashi, TIMEWELL's General Manager, has been traveling Japan's 47 prefectures as part of regional revitalization work. His mother instilled in him from childhood: "Give everything you have to even the smallest thing." Coming from a rural background in Aichi Prefecture, he has a firsthand understanding of information inequality between cities and regions — and has built his approach around working alongside local key players rather than arriving from outside with ready-made solutions.
In the Noto earthquake recovery project, he was drawn to the local community's determination to transform the area into something exciting rather than simply treating it as a place of tragedy. Hayashi's approach to his own life — trying to make every year the best one yet — brings a particular energy to regional work that doesn't fit neatly into a project plan.
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Principal Engineer Yoshiki Ando: From Robotics Research to Web Development
Yoshiki Ando is GM of TIMEWELL's Technology Division and Principal Engineer. His previous career: competitive robotics (2nd place at the RoboCup World Championship during university), ten years of IoT development at a major electronics manufacturer. His original vision was "an OS that controls an entire home" — connecting robots and appliances through shared software.
Web development was entirely new when he joined TIMEWELL. Within a year, he had acquired the skills and become the lead developer for TIMEWELL BASE. The environment that drew him: a small team where a designer and an engineer work in close partnership to ship a product, and where user feedback actually shapes what gets built next. His current direction: implementing social network features anchored to event participation history, building a platform where the physical and digital genuinely merge.
CTO Kazuki Naito: Building a Large-Scale Application with Two Engineers
Kazuki Naito, TIMEWELL's CTO, shipped TIMEWELL BASE — a large-scale application — in eight months with a two-person engineering team. Previously at an NTT Group company doing contract development, he joined TIMEWELL seeking direct proximity to customers and greater ownership over what he builds.
His engineering path started with a university fascination with software: "shapeless, and it can't break." He built his skills through volunteer-driven work before his professional career began. His application: build a single app that solves every problem connected to running an event, using AI to accelerate development.
Beyond the technical work, Naito runs monthly "talk sessions" where he listens to the concerns of TIMEWELL's assistant members — treating human connection as a core part of the job. He's also managed to design his work around time with his family, embodying the "TIMEWELL" way of working he's helping to build.
CEO Ryuta Hamamoto: Democratizing Challenge in the 100-Year Life Era
Ryuta Hamamoto, TIMEWELL's Representative Director and CEO, grew up in Okayama and spent 19 years focused on competitive swimming. He joined Panasonic after being moved by Konosuke Matsushita's philosophy of "employee entrepreneurship." After working in new business development and managing internal entrepreneurship programs, he chose independence — to genuinely embody the owner's perspective he'd been trying to cultivate from inside a large company.
The formative experiences: a traffic accident in university and a period of depression in his second year of full-time work. Both times, the people around him showed up. That history shaped a conviction: "live wholeheartedly for other people."
His framing for TIMEWELL draws on Matsushita's "water philosophy" — just as electrical appliances that were once luxury goods became everyday necessities through mass production, challenge and entrepreneurship should become accessible to everyone, not just the fortunate few. Events, in his view, are where challenge begins — the entry point where people take their first steps.
His vision for TIMEWELL BASE: a platform built on project-based human connection, where people who share interests find each other, build things together, and discover that challenge is something anyone can do.
Summary
Four people, four very different paths — all working toward the same thing. What connects them across different roles and backgrounds is visible in each interview:
- Work and life given equal intensity
- Technical capability paired with genuine care for people
- Dissatisfaction with the status quo paired with a concrete idea of what should exist instead
If you're looking for a new challenge or thinking about how you actually want to work, these stories offer both courage and practical examples to draw from.
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