David Shull Missed a Ferry. Then He Found Travel’s Invisible Work.

The ferry had already gone. David Shull and his wife had not. On a trip to Greece in 2021, a schedule change slipped past them, replacing the first hours on a Greek island with six hours in a very hot parking lot. It was the kind of travel failure that becomes funny only after the sunburn fades. While waiting, Shull thought about his in-laws, who used a travel advisor. Maybe an advisor named Wendy would have caught the change. Maybe expertise was the difference between an island and an idling car.

He did what technically minded founders do when inconvenience refuses to stay anecdotal: he looked underneath it. The software behind travel advice, he discovered, was a cabinet of mismatched drawers. Customer records in one place. Itineraries in another. Supplier emails everywhere. Payments, commissions, forms, confirmation numbers and client preferences passing between tabs by copy and paste. Travel advisors sold judgment and reassurance, then paid for the privilege with clerical work.

Shull called Brian Reath and Katie Williams, colleagues from his years at Handshake. The earliest version of Tern began in that conversation, but the trio still lacked the piece founders regularly mistake for a detail: evidence that anyone wanted it. So they packed for an American Society of Travel Advisors conference and talked to advisors, agencies and suppliers. They heard an industry asking for fewer systems and less repetitive work. Tern started in 2022 and became their full-time work in 2023.

An apprenticeship in overlooked systems

There is a tidy temptation to call Tern a travel epiphany. Shull's path is messier and more instructive. Long before the ferry, he was already preoccupied with awkward systems. At Michigan Technological University, where he earned a computer science degree in 2015, he founded the Mobile Developers Club and led more than 25 members. He helped develop a barcode-scanning shopping app. He and classmate Kyle Johnston designed Picket Books, a peer-to-peer textbook rental idea that placed third in a 2012 university venture competition.

The projects changed, but the instinct stayed put: find a process people tolerate, map the friction and make a tool. In 2014, after an internship at Palantir, he joined Handshake as its first employee. The recruiting network was then an early Michigan startup trying to connect students, universities and employers. Shull moved through university partnerships and sales leadership, then crossed the Atlantic to launch the company's UK operation and lead expansion in Europe.

Handshake was useful preparation because it modernized an expert ecosystem without pretending the ecosystem was simple. Universities had policies. Employers had workflows. Students had stakes. Software had to coordinate them without flattening them. Travel presented a similar puzzle with nicer photography and more airport codes. Advisors, suppliers and travelers all needed the same trip to make sense, yet each approached it from a different desk.

The apprenticeship also supplied people. At Michigan Tech, Shull recruited a freshman named Brad Turner to make material for a student organization. When Handshake later hired Shull, he asked to bring Turner and another intern. Turner eventually returned to work with him at Tern as head of design. Brian Reath and Katie Williams came from the same Handshake chapter. The pattern looks less like networking than a long-running test of trust: do ambitious work together, notice who makes the room better, and call again when the next difficult system appears.

That continuity matters because vertical software is full of unglamorous detail. A team must care about the booking drawer, the date picker and the commission report with the same seriousness a traveler reserves for the hotel. Familiar collaborators can argue from a shared memory of what good work feels like. Shull's story is partly about spotting a market. It is also about keeping a small constellation of builders in view while their jobs, cities and industries change.

Shull's phrase, “invisible work,” is the hinge. A polished itinerary conceals the confirmations parsed, preferences remembered, quotes revised, payments recorded and commissions chased. None of this is trivial when it goes wrong. Very little of it is why an advisor entered travel. Tern's answer is vertical software: a CRM, itinerary builder, communications layer, payment workflow and reporting system designed around one profession rather than assembled from general-purpose tools.

The customer group is part of the product

The founder at a product launch is expected. The founder in the support thread is more revealing. Shull hosts Tern's Flight Path podcast with product and design colleagues, joins onboarding calls and is a regular presence in the company's Facebook community. Customers see features before they settle into marketing prose. The builders discuss what shipped, what broke and what remains awkward.

This is not decorative accessibility. It is a development method. Travel advisors carry edge cases for a living: a group with split payments, a supplier with peculiar terms, a client whose preferences sit halfway between a note and a rule. Generic software asks them to adapt. Tern's feedback loop tries to make the product absorb the complexity instead. Ship, listen, revise. The company can move quickly because the distance between complaint and builder is deliberately short.

Colleagues describe Shull as ambitious and empathetic. Customers point to his willingness to answer questions without condescension. The consistent detail is proximity. His engineering background lets him understand what can be built; his go-to-market years taught him that adoption begins before the demo. People use software when its makers have understood the day it is interrupting.

Two years after Shull, Reath and Williams first arrived at ASTA to ask questions, Shull and Tern returned to win the association's 2024 Entrepreneur of the Year award. The symmetry is charming, but the vote mattered for a practical reason: the people in the room were the people Tern had asked to trust a new operating system with their businesses.

Capital, copilots and a larger map

In May 2025, Tern announced a $13 million Series A led by Viewpoint Ventures and Haystack VC, with Upfront Ventures continuing its support. The round brought disclosed funding to $17 million. The spending plan followed the product thesis: deeper AI, broader payment capabilities, stronger onboarding, more education and seven-day support. At the time, more than 5,000 advisors and 1,000 agencies were using the platform.

The following month, Tern acquired Lucia, a marketplace where travel advisors could hire industry-trained freelancers called CoPilots. Shull had met Lucia founder Grace Van Hollebeke at Virtuoso Travel Week in 2023. They reconnected in 2025 and noticed the fit. Tern could organize the work; Lucia could supply capable hands when the work still needed a person. A week later, Shull texted about an acquisition.

The move added a useful wrinkle to the software founder's usual ambition. A customer's whole problem does not care whether the solution arrives as code or service. An advisor migrating records may need automation. An advisor preparing destination material may need judgment. By joining a platform with a trained labor network, Tern widened its definition of infrastructure.

AI that knows where to stop

Tern's recent product direction leans heavily into AI: importing trip content, drafting destination guides and packing lists, parsing emails, matching clients to supplier deals, reconciling commissions and building trips alongside an advisor. Shull's public argument is not that the advisor disappears. It is that a professional buried under 150 supplier and client emails should not have to open every message, extract every detail and update every record by hand.

The distinction is commercially shrewd and philosophically sound. Travel advice is made from context that is difficult to place in a field: the nervous traveler who needs reassurance, the family that values a slower morning, the anniversary that deserves a room with a particular view. Machines can move the confirmation number. The advisor understands why the trip matters.

Shull's career has repeatedly landed beside professionals whose expertise was trapped in administrative machinery. At Handshake, the work was university recruiting. At Tern, it is the business behind a journey. His aspiration is to build a holistic platform for travel advisors, a phrase broad enough to include software, services and whatever new chores appear when yesterday's chores vanish.

The ferry story survives because it contains the compact version of the company. A traveler misses a piece of information. An expert might have caught it. The expert, however, needs tools worthy of the responsibility. Shull went home from Greece and started asking what those tools should be. The parking lot was hot, the delay was long, and the question turned out to travel well.

There is also something pleasingly unfashionable in the route. Shull did not begin with a sweeping prediction about leisure or a plan to teach travelers a new habit. He began with the backstage crew, people already doing valuable work with inadequate equipment. Tern's progress suggests a durable founder's test: before inventing a customer, look for a capable professional waiting for the day to become less absurd.