Our Team
Misako Cook
Founder & CEO
CEO and co-founder of Lei Systems LLC, where we help organizations align strategy, product, and execution—especially where business and technology struggle to meet.
Over the past two decades, I’ve worked across the full lifecycle of building and running complex systems: as a software engineer, product leader, engineering director, and later as a technical program manager at Amazon, before becoming a co-founder. I’ve led teams through large-scale delivery challenges, cross-border collaboration, and moments where execution—not vision—was the real constraint.
Lei Systems was founded in 2025 when we returned to the U.S., as the continuation of UP&UP Corporation, a company I co-founded in Japan in 2016. Across both, my work has centered on one problem: organizations fail not because people lack talent, but because priorities, incentives, and communication fall out of alignment.
My role is to surface what truly matters, connect the dots across silos, and help leaders make decisions that teams can actually execute. Agile methods are often part of the solution—but never the point. The point is clarity, trust, and sustained delivery of real business value.
Having grown up in Japan and spent most of my adult life working in the U.S., I bring a cross-cultural perspective that helps leadership teams navigate complexity with both rigor and respect.
I build companies, teams, and systems that work—not just in theory, but under real-world constraints.
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Christopher Cook
Founder & Principal Engineer
Founder of Lei Systems, formerly known as Up&Up in Japan, where we combine deep technical architecture with product-focused leadership to build systems—and teams—that last.
With a career spanning startups to Fortune 100 companies, I’ve led the design and implementation of robust, future-proof solutions across hardware, mechanical systems, firmware, cloud infrastructure, and mobile platforms. My work consistently emphasizes adaptability, scalability, and thoughtful engineering over short-term fixes.
Grounded in Agile practices and test-driven development, I take pride not only in what I build, but in how it’s built—through mentorship, collaboration, and a relentless commitment to quality. I believe the best systems are elegant under the hood, resilient in the real world, and empowering for the people who create them.
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