Ted Zhang began with a pleasingly backwards idea. A traveler had money. A hotel had a room. Why should the traveler do all the searching? Perhaps the hotel ought to look for the money. His early attempt at a reverse-auction hotel business ran into an awkward discovery: Priceline was already working on similar territory. The engineer had found a problem worth considering, and some rather substantial company considering it.
What followed would occupy him for more than two decades. Zhang turned toward the machinery behind a booking: the separate systems that must exchange information before a room can actually be sold. A customer sees a price and a button. Somewhere behind that button, businesses have to agree about what is available. It is a less glamorous place to build a company. It is also a place where glamour contributes very little.
That shift gives his career its particular shape. Zhang has made a business out of helping other businesses cooperate, while arguing that they should retain their own systems. His preferred future has room for many independent participants. The interesting question is how to make their independence practical, rather than simply expensive.
A return ticket to Shanghai
Before DerbySoft, Zhang worked in Silicon Valley. His earlier roles included information technology work at Oak Technology, a vice presidency at InfoBuilder and management of MarketDerby. He studied computer science at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, now known as South Dakota Mines; his education also includes a bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing. The route into travel ran through engineering.
In December 2002, Zhang and Feng Ou returned to Shanghai to launch DerbySoft after recognizing a shortage of technology options for Chinese hoteliers. Ou became the company’s chief technology officer. The partnership joined technical experience to a fairly specific commercial problem: hotels needed ways to reach the growing range of businesses selling their rooms online.
There is something instructive about the scale of that original choice. A booking website asks travelers to choose it. A connectivity business must persuade companies that already have customers, systems and commercial relationships to let it help. The sale depends on whether it can make those existing arrangements work better. A clever idea has to survive contact with somebody else’s software.
The cost of one more handshake
DerbySoft’s milestones show the work accumulating. A major connectivity product arrived in 2006. In 2008, the company connected Hilton’s central reservation system to Booking.com. By 2011, it was processing 700,000 room nights a month and had established a business headquarters in Dallas. Its reported monthly volume reached five million room nights in 2016. These are dated milestones, rather than a claim about today’s traffic.
Zhang’s explanation of the underlying problem is easier to follow than the industry’s vocabulary. Hotels want more partners. Each additional connection takes work to build and maintain. Smaller distributors can become difficult to justify if their transactions cannot cover that effort. A network can offer choice on paper while the cost of joining quietly narrows the guest list.
He calls his alternative a Global Data Network. Travel companies keep their individual systems and connect through the internet. The appeal rests on the cost of the next relationship: can another partner be added without another awkward engineering project? For Zhang, reducing that cost is a way to make cooperation available to more of the industry.
There is a commercial argument beneath the technical one. A hotel may want to work with a specialist seller that contributes a modest number of bookings. A seller may have a useful audience without the scale to command a custom integration. Making the connection economical gives both sides a reason to proceed. The machinery changes who can afford to do business together.
A salesman for fewer complications
By 2017, Zhang was applying the same reasoning to hotel marketing. He argued that spending on metasearch should be treated as a cost of sale, rather than a fixed pot that disappears at an arbitrary point in the month. If a channel keeps bringing profitable bookings, shutting it down because a budget line has been exhausted makes an odd sort of thrift.
The practical tone matters. His public discussions move readily between architecture and the hotelier’s bill. A system has to carry information; it also has to justify the expense of carrying it. The person running a property has little reason to admire an elegant connection that adds another chore to the working day.
In a 2020 conversation with AWS executive David Peller, Zhang described a goal of making an additional hotel partner possible without incremental operating cost. He also put stability alongside flexibility and emphasized security, scalability and transparency. The ambition is broad, but the measures are stubbornly operational. The new arrangement ought to be cheaper to run, understandable to the customer and dependable once switched on.
“Make the travel business easier.”
Ted Zhang · AWS conversation, 2020
The CEO who still takes a walk
There is a human version of this problem inside a growing company. Zhang describes himself as people-oriented and talks about eating lunch with colleagues and walking in a park with them. Conversation is part of how he leads. The informality is useful: a title can make it surprisingly difficult for an employee to tell a chief executive something he needs to hear.
He also uses strategy maps and the balanced scorecard to connect departmental work with the company’s direction. In his account, enthusiasm alone cannot sustain everyone’s daily effort over twenty years. Work needs a visible relationship to customers, finances, processes and the capabilities of the team. An employee should be able to see what a task is for.
That combination is more revealing than either habit on its own. The walk makes room for a conversation. The map gives the conversation somewhere to go. A company that connects other people’s businesses has its own internal connections to maintain, and the chief executive cannot personally translate every decision for every colleague.
A hotel company takes to the air
On April 11, 2024, DerbySoft announced its acquisition of PKFARE, a travel marketplace with air and hotel inventory. The companies said they would share selected technology resources and corporate functions while retaining independent operations. The deal moved Zhang’s company farther into travel commerce beyond its hotel beginnings.
The next year gave that expansion a concrete expression. In June 2025, DerbySoft launched a flight technology business, with Ryanair as a direct partner. Jason Sui, a PKFARE co-founder, took the divisional CEO role for flights. Hotel distribution experience was being applied to another part of the journey, with a specialist leader responsible for the new business.
The Ryanair agreement came with a condition that neatly illustrates the limits of the word connection: full price transparency. Travelers booking through DerbySoft’s online travel agency partners were to receive flight updates directly and have access to their myRyanair accounts without the airline’s customer verification step. Moving an offer between systems was only part of the arrangement. The terms of the relationship mattered too.
Zhang had already outlined an appetite for a broader group of travel businesses. His vision included companies keeping their brands and independence while sharing technological support. Read alongside the PKFARE purchase, the idea suggests an extension of his original preference: bring the parts into a working relationship without requiring every part to become identical.
An AI conversation with its feet on the ground
In September 2025, Zhang joined Fliggy strategy executive Yanmin Shi at the TravelDaily Conference to discuss artificial intelligence. He acknowledged that general-purpose models would change how travelers reach travel businesses. He was less persuaded that a new entrance automatically meant a wholly rebuilt industry. Service capability, he argued, would continue to matter.
That distinction fits his career. A more conversational search tool may help someone describe the trip they want. The offer still needs to be fulfilled. Room information, airline content and the businesses responsible for delivery remain part of the experience. A fluent answer has limited charm when it cannot be turned into an actual reservation.
His position leaves space for technological change without treating the existing industry as scenery. Companies that know how to provide service still have something to contribute. For a founder who has spent years connecting established participants, that is a consistent view of where the work lies: improve the relationships underneath the experience as the experience itself changes.
“Traffic is just an entry point.”
Ted Zhang · TravelDaily Conference, 2025
A new owner, a familiar preference
June 2026 brought another change in the company’s own relationships. Constellation Software confirmed that Juniper Group, an operating group of Vela Software, had completed the acquisition of a majority interest in DerbySoft’s parent company, including PKFARE. Zhang remained chief executive. DerbySoft would continue operating independently under its existing leadership.
His explanation for the deal returned to autonomy and time. He welcomed the buyer’s willingness to let companies operate independently, and its long-term approach. The language echoed the structure he had advocated for travel systems: individual businesses retaining their identities while gaining something useful from a wider group. This time DerbySoft itself was joining the larger arrangement.
It would be tidy to treat an acquisition as the final punctuation mark in a founder’s story. Zhang’s continuing role makes the next sentence more interesting. He now has to pursue the company’s plans within a new ownership structure, while preserving the customer relationships on which those plans depend. The promise of independence acquires practical meaning in everyday decisions.
For all the movement from Shanghai to Dallas, hotels to flights, founder ownership to majority acquisition, the recurring question is small enough to fit behind a booking button. What will make the next business relationship easier to establish and easier to keep? Zhang has spent a working life returning to it. The traveler, with any luck, can get on with choosing a room.