Tripology was originally founded in July 2006 as 1Trip3. In January 2007, the company received a Venture Capital investment from Ascend Venture Group, and shortly thereafter the company changed its name to Tripology.
Tripology.com launched for travel agents in March 2007 and launched a basic trip request product for consumers in May 2007. In June 2007, Tripology officially launched for consumers, enabling travelers to submit detailed trip requests to specialized travel agents that matched their specifications.
About the Tripology Team
Chinedu Echeruo, CEO and co-founder, also is the Chief Executive and founder of HopStop.com, a site often referred to as "the MapQuest for urban transit systems." Mr. Echeruo holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS from Syracuse University. The idea for Tripology grew out of his difficulty in planning a vacation to Ghana. He realized quickly through conversations with both travel agents and consumers alike, that it was difficult for consumers to find the right travel agent for trips like his to Africa, and equally as hard for travel agents to find qualified leads.
Brett Krasnove, VP of Product Development, met Mr. Echeruo in 2005 and in 2006 started helping Mr. Echeruo with his fledgling company. Mr. Krasnove is an avid traveler, and has used travel agents to plan a trip to Burgundy in France, his honeymoon through Greece and Turkey, and his first-anniversary trip through Italy. While he feels lucky that he received word-of-mouth referrals for the agents he used, he has also found through focus grouping that many travelers often cannot find a good referral source for a travel agent, and end up struggling to plan trips themselves. Mr. Krasnove holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, as well as a BS in Engineering from the University of Michigan, and has built and managed the development of online products for Small World, Sporting News, Associated Press and Reuters.
Adriano de Rose, Senior Developer, has over eight years of software development experience, beginning his career at Morgan Stanley before joining the internet startup Small World (later sold to Sporting News), where he worked with Mr. Krasnove for several years. At Sporting News, Mr. de Rose was in charge of e-commerce and real-time stats application development. Mr. de Rose holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Dartmouth College.
Chris Viejo, Client Relationship Manager, has worked in customer service for Penguin Computing as well as sales for natural products companies. Ms. Viejo loves to travel, especially to Spain, where some of her relatives reside. She holds a BA from the University of Maryland.
Board of Directors
Charles Crockett, Director is a founding Partner of Ascend Venture Group. Prior to the formation of Ascend, Mr. Crockett was a Director of The Beacon Group, a New York-based private investment and advisory firm. Prior to the formation of The Beacon Group, Mr. Crockett spent approximately three years at Goldman Sachs in the Structured Finance Group. Mr. Crockett received a Juris Doctor degree from Stanford Law School and a Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
