We built the system we needed, then shared it

She is the founder of Well Bali, a real estate investment, design, and development firm she launched in 2019. What began as a boutique property operation in Canggu grew into a full development platform, with Nada leading the design and delivery of more than twenty villas across Bali, concentrated in the Bingin and Uluwatu area. Well Bali became known for folding wellness and surf-lifestyle concepts into luxury villa product rather than treating them as amenities bolted on afterward.

Running that portfolio day to day is what led to her next company. Managing twenty-plus villas exposed the operational gap between owning beautiful property and running it profitably, and Nada founded Santara to close it, building a property management business shaped by an owner-operator's view of what actually breaks at scale.

She also serves as Managing Member and Board Chair of Aircierge AI, an AI operations platform for short-term rental hosts across Southeast Asia, and directs its Vietnam operations from Da Nang.

A lifelong surfer, Nada has spoken publicly about surfing as the throughline of her life and the reason she built where she did.

He came up through the engineering services world, at Axon Active and later Hitachi Digital Services, building systems for other companies and watching, up close, which ones earned a place in someone's routine and which became one more thing to manage. Over dozens of products since, the question he keeps returning to is not what a system can do, but what it can take off someone's plate.

Design, to him, is the work of deciding — talking to the people who will actually use the thing until the real problem separates itself from the one they first described, then cutting everything that does not earn its place. Most of the value, he argues, is in what gets left out. He holds a particular view about the result: the best software is invisible. Someone wakes up, the day is already sorted, and nobody spares a thought for the thing that sorted it. Software that demands attention, however elegant, has already failed part of its job.

Leading a technical team, in his framing, is mostly about protecting that standard when it would be easier not to. A feature people rely on daily is a promise — it has to work on the morning nobody is watching it. That means clear boundaries, honest scope, and the discipline to say no to work that would be impressive but unearned.

At Santara he applies this to short-term rental operators, people who lose their mornings not to hard problems but to coordination. The company replaces four apps and a lost hour with one brief before the day begins, and the team runs eleven villas of their own, so most of what they solve are problems they had first.

He began in real estate development and spent his early career at large institutions, including Bain Capital, General Electric, and Olympus, where he worked in Tokyo as part of a group advising the board of directors. That mix of private equity, industrial operating scale, and cross-border governance gave him an early view of how large organizations actually make capital decisions.

He went on to attend Harvard Business School's OPM program, where he connected with the network around Clayton Christensen and joined Rose Park Advisors, the investment firm Christensen founded to apply his theory of disruptive innovation to public and private markets.

Working alongside Christensen was the formative chapter of Skelley's career. He worked directly on the portfolio and on sourcing, helping identify and evaluate candidates for the fund's private investments, screening companies not on conventional financial metrics but against Christensen's framework: whether a business was attacking an incumbent from below, serving customers the market had overlooked, and building a cost structure the incumbent could not follow. It was a discipline of pattern recognition rather than spreadsheet forecasting, and it trained Skelley to look for industries where the incumbent's greatest strength was quietly becoming its constraint. He was at the firm during the period it held Coupang, a concentrated private bet on a then-unproven Korean e-commerce company that went on to become one of the region's largest companies, worth tens of billions of dollars.

He applied that same lens to real estate, an industry that had gone largely untouched by technology, and spun out to found iFunding, one of the first real estate crowdfunding platforms in the world. iFunding opened private real estate investment to a class of investors previously shut out of it. He exited the business in 2017.

Since then, Skelley has spent his time in Southeast Asia advising early-stage founders on strategy, capital formation, and go-to-market. He currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Advisors at Santara, working with founder Nada Fadhila Utami and the board as the company builds a property management platform out of an owner-operator's playbook. He lives in Southeast Asia.