Entrepreneurship Archives - Hawaii Business Magazine

Hawai‘i’s Young Pragmatists Are Choosing Trades Over College and Making Six Figures

Cynthia Wessendorf — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 07:00:08 +0000

Kylie Umebayashi’s parents were not happy when she told them she wanted to be a hairstylist.

In their minds, she’d been set up for a traditional college experience, leading to a stable government job. But in hers, a desk job was unappealing. She loved working with hair and knew she had the talent and drive to build a serious career in the beauty industry.

But the criticism was intense, complete with warnings that she would bring shame to the family. To appease them, she did everything, at full speed.

After graduating from Kaimuki Christian School, Umebayashi earned an associate degree in cosmetology at Honolulu Community College while training at Marsha Nadalin Salon in Kāhala, where she had worked since she was 15. She also got licensed as a cosmetologist.

She then jumped into business administration at UH Mānoa, packing her schedule with 18 hours of credits each semester, and 12 hours each summer, while continuing to work at the salon. The academic marathon ended with a bachelor’s degree in 2020.

“I wanted to be done with school,” she says. “I was motivated to never step foot in a classroom ever again.”

Kylie Umebayashi is an independent hairstylist at Oasis Salon in Kaimukī. Her associate degree in cosmetology has paid off more than her bachelor’s. | Photo: Jeff Sanner

Her instinct to pursue the trades and specialty skills is shared by many Gen Zers across the country, who are flocking to traditional apprenticeships and trade schools. In Hawai‘i, the trend is less pronounced, but the opportunities are immense. Employers in construction, manufacturing, health care, clean energy and other sectors are eager to hire skilled employees – and they earn higher salaries and carry less debt than many people with four-year degrees.

For Umebayashi, the financial payoff came quickly. At the salon, she worked early mornings to late nights on commission, breaking six figures in annual earnings. She put some of that money into a reduced-priced “workforce” unit at a new high-rise condo in Kaka‘ako, which she was offered in a housing lottery.

In January, at age 27, she became a self-employed stylist, renting space at Oasis Salon in Kaimukī. She says her current pace is less frenetic and better for her work-life balance, but she doesn’t let herself become satisfied or complacent.

“It’s not wise when you’re in your 20s to feel comfortable,” she says. “You should feel uncomfortable, you should take risks. … I thought I would be a millionaire at 25, so I feel like I’m behind. I’ve always had a fire under me.”

Umebayashi is paying off her mortgage as aggressively as possible. Even good debt troubles her, and she takes a very “full throttle, unconventional” approach to investing in hopes of being debt-free and financially secure. She also plans to open a salon of her own.

Despite her restlessness, she realizes she’s in a pretty good spot. She says she sees many of her peers burdened with student loans and struggling to find jobs, with no clear paths forward.

“Our education system makes it seem like college is this great promise to a good life and a good future, but often it can be the opposite,” she says. “You start behind other people who don’t take on debt.”

More money, less debt

From a career perspective, Umebayashi’s skepticism about the benefits of a traditional college experience is not off-base, particularly in Hawai‘i where four-year degrees lead to less income and opportunity than in any other state.

Five years after graduating, only 43% of four-year college graduates in Hawai‘i have jobs that typically require bachelor’s degrees – the lowest percentage in the U.S. – according to a 2024 report from the Strada Education Foundation. Maryland had the highest percentage, at 60%.

And jobs that pay a living wage are scarce. Matt Stevens, a data scientist and executive director of Hawai‘i Workforce Funders Collaborative, says: “We’re 50th in the nation as to how much you can expect to earn at every educational attainment level, adjusted for cost of living. And when you get to the four-year degree, it’s actually off-the-charts low. We’re a statistical outlier.”

The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations estimates, in uncannily precise terms, that 377,760 jobs will open in Hawai‘i between 2020 and 2030. But less than a third, or 120,290 job openings, are projected to pay at least a “living wage” of $56,841 for a single adult with no children, according to “From Crisis to Opportunity,” a report published in January by the Hawai‘i Workforce Funders Collaborative. The MIT living wage calculator recently upped that amount to $62,234.

The nonprofit collaborative calls attention to the problem of low-quality jobs and advocates for better jobs with better pay. In the process, it brings business, government, nonprofit and educational leaders together to figure out how to do that.

Community colleges in the UH system have responded with a dizzying array of short-term training and credentialing programs alongside core humanities classes and two-year degree programs. Many are new programs developed with input from employers.

“The fact is that a high school diploma is no longer enough. Students have to do something post-graduation, and there are so many options at the community colleges,” says Karen Lee, chancellor of Honolulu Community College. About 3,700 students are enrolled at HCC, which has seen its numbers steadily increase after dropping during the pandemic. That trend is similar across the UH System.

Many practical two-year associate degrees lead to trade careers, viewed broadly as skilled work requiring specialized training and often a license. People straight out of school or training programs can earn $100,000 or more – and live far more comfortable lives than a living wage provides, which would barely cover a decent one-bedroom rental, a compact car and fresh food.

The young pragmatists gravitating to the trades are sometimes called the toolbelt generation, and they’re looking for financial freedom, an escape from office life, and jobs that are less likely to be disrupted by technology and economic downturns.

Ramsey Agustin, above, and his cohort in the mechatronics program at Leeward Community College learn how to wire control panels.| Photo: Jeff Sanner

Mechatronics: demand exceeds supply

In a set of unassuming temporary buildings at Leeward Community College, students are wiring control boxes based on detailed schematics. Other rooms are filled with elaborate machines and tools for learning about sensors, robotics, control systems, computer-integrated machinery and other technology.

William Labby, an assistant professor at LCC, founded the mechatronics program to fill a specific workforce need – technicians to maintain Honolulu’s driverless trains – and it’s since blossomed into a two-year program, leading to an associate of science degree. He chafes at the “trades” label and explains that his students gain high-level math and troubleshooting skills that complement the design skills of engineers.

“Engineers and highly skilled technicians are two sides of the same coin,” he says. “Engineers are design oriented, while technicians deal with installation, maintenance, retooling, reprogramming and all the follow-on functions behind the engineering design.”

About half the mechatronics graduates are hired by Hitachi, which installs and maintains the operating system for Skyline’s trains. For the others, Labby says, companies are coming “out of the woodwork” to talk to his students, with many landing jobs at medical imaging companies, military contractors, Cirque du Soleil and the Ball Corp. in Kapolei. He says new hires at Ball, which makes 12-ounce cans, start out at about $85,000 a year, with lots of overtime opportunities.

“Automation is a growth industry in the state. We’re going to get more and more automated with all of our small food and beverage manufacturing companies,” says Labby. “Most companies would rather hire local, and now that word is getting out about this program, I’m getting more of a push for graduates. Demand exceeds my supply.”

While 22 students are enrolled in the program now, Labby says he has the capacity for 40. The obstacle is high school college counselors. “The message they convey is that if you don’t go to a four-year school, you fail, and that is not the case,” he says.

A fourth-semester student, Christian Smith, just landed a job with a military contractor, and negotiated to work part time until he graduates. Before joining the program, he was a helicopter mechanic with the military, and says he now has “a better, deeper understanding of how things work.”

Another student, Ramsey Agustin, graduated from Damien Memorial School in 2022 and spent his freshman year at Oregon State University studying mechanical engineering. Formidable out-of-state tuition and housing costs forced him to return home.

He’s now completing his final semester in the mechatronics program while also working at a machine shop in Pearl City, and he looks forward to getting a better-paid job soon and eventually finishing his bachelor’s degree.

Agustin finds the classes challenging but manageable. “I haven’t ever felt like we’re being lectured too much, which is helpful,” he says. “About 70% of the classes have been mostly hands-on, which is better for some people. I like it.”

Caitlin Fackender and Matthew Sun are second-year students in Kapi‘olani Community College’s popular radiologic technology program. | Photo courtesy: Kapi‘olani Community College

RadTech: a reverse pipeline

More than half of Kapi‘olani Community College’s students move on to four-year universities, says Misaki Takabayashi, the college’s chancellor. But some programs are so sought-after that the pipeline is reversed: people with bachelor’s degrees head to KCC for an additional associate degree.

The radiologic technology program is one of them. Two of the three students I spoke with already had degrees from UH Mānoa: Aura Coffman in animal science and Garrison Hiramatsu in elementary education. Neither felt that their choices suited them, and they were drawn to the prospect of a well-paid career with defined hours and tasks. A third student, Breanne Yang, says she always wanted to work in health care, but got sidetracked in restaurant jobs.

About 25% of applicants are accepted, with decisions based on an admissions test and grades from prerequisite courses taken in their first year. In the second year, selected students focus on how to safely image the human body using X-ray equipment and gain practical experience in health care settings.

Along with respiratory care, radiologic technology is the most popular program in the college’s health care division, and offers the highest pay. The entry-level hourly wage is $45 on O‘ahu, and a technologist with a couple of years’ experience earns about $92,000 annually, according to Program Director Kimberly Suwa. Very experienced or specialized technologists, such as those working in mammography or radiation therapy, earn about $112,000, she says.

When high schoolers tour the campus, those figures usually impress them. “They obviously understand that there is a large discrepancy between what you can make at McDonald’s versus what you can make as a technologist,” Suwa says. “But I don’t know if they fully understand the impact of being able to do a two-year degree as opposed to having to go to a four-year college.”

For one thing, the community colleges in the UH System charge $131 per credit hour for in-state students, or about $2,000 a semester for a full 15-hour course load. Tuition at UH Mānoa is $441 per credit, or about $6,600 per semester for a similar load.

Despite the lower cost, and access to scholarships and federal financial aid, more students than in the past seem to have outside jobs, says Jodi Ann Nakaoka, the chair of KCC’s health sciences department. She says the department cautions students to eliminate or minimize their work hours because the program is intense, but Hawai‘i’s high cost of living increasingly makes that impossible.

Instructors Mike Willett, right, and Brian Quinto lead the aeronautics maintenance technology program at Honolulu Community College’s airport location.| Photo: Jeff Sanner

AERO: training super mechanics

At the end of Lagoon Drive, a shoreline road snaking along the eastern edge of the Honolulu airport, young men and a handful of women are training to become airplane mechanics at Honolulu Community College’s aeronautics maintenance technology program.

Vintage and modern planes line the perimeter of the building, and engines and tools fill the interior workshops. All of the aircraft have been donated, including a small Cessna 172, a replica of an old crop duster, and a DC-9 with its engine removed but airframe intact.

Teams of students are taking engines apart and putting them back together, and learning how to diagnose and fix problems that the faculty have introduced. Much of the classroom instruction gets translated into projects, such as constructing a cross-section of a plane’s wing based on blueprints.

Instructor Brian Quinto drills the students on the importance of safety and attention to detail. “We’re often compared to auto mechanics. No denigration to them, but if something goes wrong with your car, you just pull over.” Signing off on repairs becomes a legal document, he explains to students, and planes aren’t cleared to take off until the mechanic says so.

Andy Tran, a second-year student in the program, says “there’s a big learning curve for the program. The more I learn, the harder it is to fix things.”

Students in the two-year AERO program learn to troubleshoot problems using a wide range of donated airplane engines.| Photo: Jeff Sanner

“Many of the new students are like deer in the headlights because it comes at you really fast, but we have a lot to teach in a relatively short amount of time,” explains Mike Willett, the lead instructor at the AERO program. It’s one of Honolulu Community College’s most popular offerings, with about 75 current students and more than a hundred on a growing waitlist.

Tran took a sheet-metal course at HCC during the year he waited for a spot to open up. He says he loves everything about aviation, but mechanical training is much cheaper and more accessible than flight school.

The schedule runs for seven hours, four days a week, and leads to an associate of science degree. At the end of the two-year program, the pass rate for first-time test takers seeking FAA certification exceeds the national average, says Willett.

Like the radiologic technology program at KCC, many of the students have outside jobs. Micah Holmberg, who used to repair motorcycles and manufacturing equipment, attends the full-time program, then works as a full-time aircraft mechanic helper nearby. At the end of his double shifts, he travels home to the North Shore.

Hawaiian Airlines regularly opens slots for its part-time paid apprenticeship program for AERO students, and a new scholarship program offers students financial assistance and mentorship. Both were developed to fill openings at Hawaiian caused by retirements. Willett says graduates are also hired by companies such as Hawaii Air Cargo, Swissport and United Airlines, and they leave the program with advanced mechanical skills they can take anywhere.

An apprenticeship changed his life

Drew Maberry works long hours as a journeyman millwright, a job that goes back to classical antiquity when skilled carpenters designed and built water mills. Today, millwrights install, maintain, repair and reassemble machinery used in factories, power plants and construction sites.

On the day we spoke, Maberry had just returned from Par Hawaii, where he was welding large platforms on top of the existing plant in Kapolei. His employer, APB, short for American Piping & Boiler Co., has been contracted by Par to upgrade the facility.

Drew Maberry logged 8,000 hours as an apprentice before earning the title of journeyman millwright. Many of those hours were at AES when it was a coal-burning plant, shown here. Photo courtesy: Drew Maberry

He sets the scene of his jobsite: “I’m wearing fire-resistant clothes and a head sock and gloves. I’m basically covered head to toe, with a hard hat that I change into welding headgear. And I’m two stories high,” welding in the blistering sun of Kapolei.

While the job is strenuous, the pay is good, at $55 an hour, and the benefits are great. With overtime, Maberry’s weekly check is more than he ever imagined he could make when he left high school in Missouri, feeling “lost” and stuck in low-wage retail jobs.

In his mid-20s, Maberry moved to Waimānalo, where his father had relocated. He worked in restaurants for a while, then decided he needed a “career job” so he could live on his own.

After passing math and physical tests, he got a traditional carpentry apprenticeship with the Hawaii Carpenters Apprenticeship & Training Fund, then switched to the union’s millwright apprenticeship when it opened for the first time in 2020.

The past decade has seen a sharp increase in active registered apprenticeships nationwide, from 359,388 in 2015 to over 696,205 in 2025, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Hawai‘i’s trend line is less robust, with a steep decline in apprenticeships in 2022, though those numbers have inched up in the past couple of years. In 2025, there are 6,094 active apprenticeships in the state, of which about 85% are in construction, 11% in manufacturing and the rest in a smattering of other industries.

Maberry recently completed his apprenticeship’s required 8,000 hours of work and weekly classes, which earned him the official title of journeyman millwright.

Some of his apprenticeship jobs were challenging, he says, including 12-hour days at AES when it was still a coal-fired power plant, with no days off. “I probably have black lung from welding in tight spaces at AES and shoveling dust, or whatever it was,” he says with a laugh.

And he’s worked with plenty of old-school “tough-love” guys, but says that he’s “fortunate that my boss at APB is so understanding and good at dealing with different personalities, which is important because it can be such long hours and grueling work.”

Despite the job’s ups and downs, Maberry says he’s finally financially comfortable and able to provide for his 5-year-old son. And he feels optimistic about the future: “I think about how far I’ve come and I just want to keep learning and building.”

Alternate on-the-job training routes

Beyond Hawai‘i’s dozens of skilled apprenticeships (see the list at tinyurl.com/hiapprentice) spanning from bricklayers to elevator constructors, some large private companies offer their own paid training programs.

Hawaiian Electric’s apprenticeship program, for example, trains people to be linemen, electricians, maintenance mechanics, and maintenance or substation electricians. The program pairs apprentices with experienced journeymen, and supplements on-the-job training with classroom or online instruction. Apprentices are hired based on written and physical tests.

About 250 employees on O‘ahu and in Maui County have completed the program since 2009, and 22 on Hawai‘i Island since 2017, according to Communications Manager Darren Pai. “Establishing our own training programs allows us to address skilled labor shortages, such as linemen, and maintain high safety standards,” he explains in an email.

The more than century-old Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard apprenticeship is the most popular program at Honolulu Community College; it provides the academic component for an associate of applied science degree upon completion.

Other apprenticeships are more informal. The 29-year-old who repaired my refrigerator says he discovered the trade circuitously. He studied environmental science at the University of Montana, then returned home to Hawai‘i Island and started a landscaping business.

After a few years, he decided to do something “less strenuous and more analytical” and mentored with a seasoned HVAC and appliance repair professional on Hawai‘i Island. Eventually, he branched out on his own in Honolulu, where he says the job is “humbling and stressful sometimes, but the fun is in learning new things and diagnosing problems.”

Reaching the other 50%

While apprenticeships and associate degrees are established routes to good jobs, Hawai‘i’s community colleges also offer short-term vocational training. The programs fill a training gap in the Islands since most private vocational schools only teach massage therapy, according to the state Department of Education’s list of licensed schools. And in June, the two Job Corps training centers on O‘ahu and Maui were terminated by the U.S. Department of Labor, along with 97 others across the country.

Short-term training lets participants sample careers, build foundational skills or upskill into better-paying jobs in a variety of areas. For example:

LCC offers commercial driver courses, as does the Hawaiian Council through its Hawaiian Trades Academy.
KCC recently contracted with the Kahala Hotel & Resort to develop training for employees who want to advance into midlevel leadership roles.
HCC launched a summer program that brings high schoolers to campus to try out three career and technical education options.
The Building Industry Association of Hawai‘i offers free pre-apprenticeship training that covers math, blueprint reading and the fundamentals of the trade.
UH Maui College and Hawaiian Electric created a free training program that can lead to jobs at power-generating stations.
High schools across the Islands have introduced career and technical education that helps students gain real-world skills and work experience.

The UH community colleges’ Good Jobs Hawai‘i initiative helps coordinate and fund many of these programs, using $35 million in federal Covid-recovery grants and private philanthropy. Program Manager Nicolette van der Lee says that grant funding runs out next year, but the state Legislature will continue to fund free, noncredit courses for those seeking careers as commercial drivers, nursing aides, information technologists and other high-demand positions.

The Good Jobs program targets the nearly 50% of residents who forgo college and other formal training.

“We’ve been seeking to connect with them and show that you don’t have to have a job in the hotel industry working as a server, or some other entry-level job that doesn’t have a pathway to a living wage,” says Van der Lee.

Early results are promising

A preliminary study shows that short-term training has a positive impact. Hawai‘i residents who completed Good Jobs training were making, on average, about 12% more six months after completing the program, according to a July 7 blog post on the UH Economic Research Organization’s website.

Among those employed before the program, 38% ended up moving to a different industry, where they saw even higher income gains. The biggest gains were for people switching to the health care industry, which the report says saw “average quarterly wage increases approaching $4,000,” or about $16,000 annually.

Younger participants just entering the workplace found jobs in industries “with stronger wage potential, often linked to their training,” according to the blog post.

Van der Lee says the Good Jobs initiative is part of a thriving workforce development ecosystem in Hawai‘i, spearheaded by the state Workforce Development Council. “We want to change the narrative that says you have to leave Hawai‘i for more education and opportunity,” says Van der Lee. “We’re trying to create the education and training infrastructure here, and also the employment opportunities individuals need to get the good jobs so they can stay.”

A troubled economy

Anna Pacheco, president and CEO at AE Consulting, has spent more than a decade researching education and workforce challenges, and consulting with local organizations. She sees unprecedented opportunities now in trade careers, driven by a wave of retirements.

“It has really put us into a talent crunch,” she says. “We’ve got this huge gap with the more senior folks leaving positions and the younger generation not entering them at the speed we need to fill those gaps. And the problem is becoming more and more profound.”

Like Labby from LCC, she says the predominant message that young people hear is to go to college, get a four-year degree and land a professional job.

“The reality is that our economy relies heavily on those trades positions,” Pacheco says. “I think we’re at an inflection point where we need to get students into those careers because if we don’t, we’re not going to reach our clean energy goals or our housing goals.”

While the prospects are promising for people with practical skills in the trades, the picture for recent four-year college graduates is blurrier. The current hiring slowdown, with new jobs only trickling into the U.S. economy, can hit recent graduates the hardest.

Students who majored in computer science, for instance – once seen as a sure bet, complete with snarky “learn to code” comments to English majors – are now the ones who are often bemoaning their job prospects. Today, 6.1% of recent graduates in computer science and 7.5% of computer engineering majors are unemployed – some of the highest rates of all college majors, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Popular majors such as environmental studies now have higher underemployment rates than art history majors, with 49% working in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Even new graduates in journalism have significantly less underemployment, at 36%.

In Hawai‘i, UHERO economists see the state slipping into a mild recession in 2026, the result of federal layoffs and less consumer spending and tourism due to tariffs and inflation. Only construction remains resilient, according to UHERO’s September 2025 forecast.

While higher education is always valuable, and often the pathway to a prosperous, fulfilling life, that path can be long, winding and expensive. Quicker, more direct routes are launching many of Hawai‘i’s young adults into rewarding careers, and with fewer financial risks – a big advantage in uncertain times.

Categories: Business & Industry, Business Trends, Entrepreneurship

Reviving Hawaiʻi’s Lei Industry One Flower at a Time

Shelby Mattos — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:59:39 +0000

Few things are as inextricably tied to Hawaiʻi’s culture as a fragrant and colorful lei. They’re stacked high on the shoulders of graduates, slipped over the necks of wide-eyed visitors, or draped on community leaders at official events.

Lei making has a rich and vibrant history across the Islands. Yet over recent decades, the bulk of the lei-making industry has moved offshore, to foreign lands where growers and lei-makers string flowers into strands and sell them back cheaply to us here in Hawai’i.

Now, the Lei Poinaʻole Project hopes to turn that around. The project created by the nonprofit BEHawaiʻi aims to revitalize and strengthen the local lei industry through community engagement and advocacy. The main mission of the group is to uplift local flower growers and lei makers to preserve the traditions of lei in Hawaiʻi.

Launched three years ago, the program has engaged propagators on each of the main islands in hopes of building pilot projects into a statewide network of flower growers, lei-makers and vendors that can flourish as it did in the past.

“You think about Hawaiʻi, you think about a lei,” says Brook Lee, secretary of BEHawaiʻi, who helped focus the nonprofit’s attention on the needs of struggling lei flower growers and lei makers.

So far, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has connected with 26 existing growers, 22 new growers and 7 propagators. The goal is not just to support the big farmers, but small and medium-sized growers so that a cottage industry can thrive once again.

Sylvia Hussey

“The objective of the project at the end is to have the Lei Poinaʻole Coalition,” adds BEHawai‘i Executive Director Sylvia Hussey. “The lei project is a mechanism in which to form the coalition” that will carry on even after initial startup efforts cease.

Lee remembers the idea for the Project stemmed from a conversation she had with a lei store owner who told her in 2020 that the lei industry was in decline and needed help. That conversation stuck with her, and when BEHawaiʻi began considering projects to fund, the memory resurfaced. The idea to support a statewide lei network blossomed.

Lee explains: “There are a lot of people in the community who just didn’t have a touchpoint or a place, or the space, to be able to think about the idea of stewarding this thing, because it’s farm to table, which is important, but that has been the whole sort of agricultural space here in Hawaiʻi for a very long time. And it’s necessary, but we’re just trying to follow in their footsteps and expand the conversation around.”

In 2022, the group was awarded a three-year grant from the Federal Administration for Native Americans. The grant supported eight existing and 16 new farmers across the state. While the group knew the grant couldn’t solve the problem in just a few years, it helped them start the conversations needed to build the coalition.

Lee says they aim to help growers who have been quietly maintaining but are at a breaking point and need support. Besides foreign competitors, farmers are facing agricultural diseases and beetle infestations that are devastating long-established farms. When they contacted the USDA for help, she says, some farmers said their concerns were dismissed and they were told to simply burn the trees.

“We’re hoping to be able to set people up, because we can’t fund it forever, but we wanted to just sort of try to piece it into a way that they can know that they’re certain CTHAR will help,” Lee says, referring to the UH Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources.

CTHAR has been holding workshops to teach people how to plant certain flowers. Experts take the participants on a walking tour of their properties to assess what their problems may be or what they should focus on.

After the assessments, some farms are encouraged to propagate flowers in locations that have suitable growing conditions.

Meanwhile, the Lei Poinaʻole Project has been expanding connections between lei-making families and farmers. They’ve had to overcome obstacles, too, including some growers who were hesitant about sharing details about their sites and growing practices.

“One of the first things we explain about the project is that the project takes none of the production. We just want to help them, if it’s more plants, if it is knowledge, pest control,” Hussey says. Their focus, she says, is: “How can we help them keep all of their production and how they want to distribute that, whether it’s commercially or [through] family.”

The Project representatives also ask growers how the group can support them through policy changes or by assisting with general practices. Everyone in Hawaiʻi farms differently, Lee says, and each person will favor certain flowers that are culturally based and close to peoples’ ohana or have a special connection to wherever they’re living.

“A lot of times they don’t like it when people come in and try to tell them how to do something that they are doing for a very long time, there’s some cultural sensitivity around it, right?” Lee says. “Because, of course, they should know how to do it. They’ve been doing it for generations. Yeah, that’s their kuleana. And no one’s here to tell you that your kuleana is wrong or bad. You’ve been doing it. You’ve got the proof. The boots are on the ground.”

While respecting current practices, Hussey says the farmers in the program also share their knowledge with the next generation and in the process gain a scientific grounding in how best to grow their flowers.

Insight from a New Grower

The propagation site on Hawaiʻi Island may be furthest along among the pilot projects. It is coordinated by David Fuertes, executive director of the nonprofit Kahua Paʻa Mua. On a five-acre property in the North Kohala community of Kapaʻau, Fuertes has cuttings of a diverse range of flowering plants that, once they sprout roots, are distributed to five families to plant on their own land.

Flower varieties in the mix include crown flower, pikake, puakenikeni, ʻākulikuli, ʻōlena as well as more common plumeria and orchids.

Under a makeshift greenhouse, a watering system emits a spray of water for 20 seconds every hour, keeping the plants moist. The team meets regularly to discuss best practices for dipping the cutting stems into homemade root hormone mixtures that enhance root growth. They take measurements and share data so they can replicate the results that are most favorable.

The first batch of cuttings have been transplanted, and flowers should be ready within a matter of months.

“The families will supply local lei makers, and they can make their own lei as well,” said Fuertes. “It’s a community-based economic development program. After the initial group of growers are established, we can expand to the next generation of families.”

Fuertes has a special connection to lei making. His late sister, Nancy Fuertes Ueno, was an award-winning lei maker on Kauaʻi.

On the one-year anniversary of her death in September last year, Fuertes inaugurated the Aunty Nancy Lei Aloha Garden on his land in her memory in hopes of preserving the art of lei-making.

At the launch ceremony, Fuertes told a gathering of about 100 people that while the vast majority of lei makers’ flowers come to Hawaiʻi from foreign countries, he hopes this program will help rekindle an interest in lei-making in the Islands.

“Here in Kohala, we want to make the change. If we can get everybody to grow flowers and get farmers switching or intercropping with flower lei, we can bring the price down for lei,” he said.

In his blessing to dedicate the site, Kahu Kealoha Sugiyama explained the social and spiritual role of lei.

“When you pick a flower, it’s a memory between you and the receiver,” Sugiyama explained. “It starts out with one memory, one flower, and you keep adding and adding until the lei is completed. And what was just a single memory, now it becomes a story, a story between you and the lei maker. That story is precious.”

When Hussey enlisted Fuertes to join the state-wide effort, she already knew his background — he had been her former high school teacher.

“I was born and raised in Kohala. I’m a Kohala high school graduate, and so when we were looking for a propagation site in Kohala, there was no question who it needed to be. It would be my former ag teacher from high school who has a farm,” Hussey says. “And that’s an example of leveraging relationships to be able to find in the community those propagator sites.”

Fuertes remembers Hussey developed an early interest in agriculture when she was one of his students.

He said he recalls Hussey started a paʻu unit in Kohala, the ceremonial equestrian groups that ride in parades, with both the horses and female riders adorned with elaborate lei displays.

“That was one of her first involvements with lei back in high school,” Fuertes says.

History of Lei in Hawaiʻi

Lei making traces back to the early Polynesian settlers in Hawaiʻi, and besides the decorative appeal, lei also served as a tribute to the gods and in some cases signified social rank in society.

Early lei included nuts, shells and bones as well as a variety of plants and flowers. The maile lei, an open string lei woven with fragrant leaves from vines that grow in cool mountain forests, is considered among the most cherished types of lei.

Demand for maile lei has soared in conjunction with official events and celebrations. And with the arrival of tourists, and the preference for fragrant plumeria and other brightly colored flowers, lei making became a cottage industry across the islands.

“So what we have heard from conversations from lei sellers is that the supply is getting harder and harder to get and everybody knows, just by experience, maile as an example right there, very rarely can you get a maile of Big Island, maile of Kauaʻi, fresh maile. It’s being replaced by ti leaf,” Hussey says.

Different lei carry different meanings with the color, flower and occasion. The maile lei was once revered by aliʻi and is given as a sign of love, respect or a blessing.

“One of the differentiators is that it is not the demand side of lei,” she says. “There will always be a demand. It’s on the growing side and the mitigating [efforts] helping more growers there, and anybody, not just commercial growers, but family growers, school growers, backyard growers, more lei flower growers.”

Matching Price with Value

Another goal of the project is to change consumers’ understanding of how much labor goes into lei. More than just its price, lei hold the spirit of the farmers and those who sewed it together.

“We know that monetizing or valuing lei is not just in a price point,” Hussey says. “We all know family members at a wedding, even graduation or Mother’s Day, that someone has given you a lei, that they have grown, they have sewn themselves, is worth so much more than when you purchase.

“And that also influences the price point. People complain, ʻOh, the pikake is $15 a strand. My gosh, if you knew how much effort it was to grow that pikake and how valuable, you wouldn’t complain. You would value and mahalo the lei seller and the lei grower for that value.”

The Lei Poinaʻole Project is seeking help to quantify the financial importance of lei in Hawaiʻi, starting with a baseline estimate of current local production.

Every island has its own relationship to lei making and sewing. Oʻahu has lei stands at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and many lei shops on Maunakea Street in Chinatown.

One shop in Chinatown is the family-owned Lin’s Lei Shop.

Manager Tony Ngyuen says that it is difficult to measure how much work goes into a lei since everything is handmade. Some flowers have a special way to be plucked and processed, and can be sewn in different ways. The cost of the lei reflects the input of farmers as well.

The most popular lei are usually the white fragrant flowers like pikake, puakenikeni, ginger and tuberose. Ngyuen explains that when picked, tuberose has a brownish tint on the outside, so it is cleaned to be white and peeled to be used in lei.

Lin’s Lei Shop purchases pre-made orchid flower lei from Thailand since the labor is cheaper and they sell for less.

“They create a product that is long-lasting and economical,” Ngyuen says. “It makes sense, and it provides a strong supply for the demand here.”

One pre-made orchid lei in the shop’s lineup, already made in Thailand, is the famed Christina style lei. The Christina lei was designed in 1990 by Beth Lopez and created to honor the memory of her daughter Christina who died from lupus when she was 22. The design uses a needle and thread to sew together over 500 orchid centers.

“Imagine the amount of work involved to make this,” says Ngyuen. “They just take a single petal from a single flower, and they create this,” he said.

Some orchid lei have a negative reputation for being cheap or imported, but Hawaiʻi Island used to have its own honohono orchid that was specially farmed.

“We don’t want people to get a bad rep that lei orchids are bad, like orchids are part of our history and our culture as Hawaiian people,” Lee of BEHawaiʻi says. “But these are a different type of orchid that are mass produced in Thailand brought in by the pounds of loads.”

Other than the orchid lei, Ngyuen says that all of the other lei he sells are handmade in Hawaiʻi, and in the back of their Maunakea Street store, family members can be seen making lei. They get their flowers from multiple farms and hobbyists across Hawaiʻi.

While most lei are made in-store, sometimes they purchase pre–made lei from people who have trees in their backyards. Ngyuen pointed out a traditional lei made from hala, the fruit of the pandanus tree, that was made by a recreational lei maker. He said that it’s an older style of lei that isn’t usually sold anymore.

Many lei shops, including Lin’s Lei Shop, sell flowers and lei to the mainland for graduations and other celebrations.

“It seems like the lei culture is spreading,” he says. “So now, especially on the West Coast, it’s very common for people to receive lei for graduation. The whole West Coast, right from Washington to California, they all use lei, I think it’s good. Do I have a problem with them selling at Costco? No, not really.”

“Support local if you can,” he says. “But other than that, enjoy a lei, enjoy the craftsmanship, enjoy the artistry. And yeah, support the industry.”

Categories: Arts & Culture, Community & Economy, Entrepreneurship, Hawai‘i History, Leadership, Marketing, Nonprofit, Small Business, Success Stories

How to Grow Your Business? Waste Money

Ken Wills — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:00:20 +0000

Luke Williams says you need to waste money to save your business.

That was the unorthodox prescription the keynote speaker offered to nearly 500 attendees at the Hawaii Business Leadership Conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

Williams, a globally recognized expert on innovation, urged executives to move beyond their fixation on ROI — return on investment.

“Equally as important, perhaps more important these days, is return on learning,” Williams said at the conference in late July. “Every organization in America needs to accelerate their rate of learning. If you can learn at the pace of change, you have an advantage. But if your learning falls below the pace of change, you fall further and further behind. And that’s where we get into real trouble.

“So in order to accelerate the rate of learning, you need waste.”

The author of “Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business” cited a litany of companies that went bankrupt or lost their edge because they failed to keep innovating.

Williams said so-called “disruptive thinking” among employees leads to uncertain results, and not all ideas need to be implemented right away, or ever.

“But you’ve got to break the cycle of incremental thinking,” the idea that today’s successful ideas will continue to serve you well into the future.

In an interview after his speech, Williams expanded upon the idea.

“Disruptive ideas, if the advantages are clear, they’re no longer high risk,” Williams said. “They’re really risking the thinking time, and that’s a matter of priorities.

“I think of different currencies in a business. We often think of money as the main currency, but there are different currencies. I want businesses to see ideas as their most valuable currency.”

Williams challenged attendees to go back to their companies after the conference and to encourage all of their employees to start rethinking everything about their businesses.

“If you don’t have new ideas, you don’t innovate, you can’t grow,” explained Williams who is also Adjunct Associate Professor of Marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business. “Particularly in mature economies like the U.S., they’ve got to get themselves in a position where they’ve got more ideas to spend than their competitors.

“That means as circumstances change, we’ve got more options. We can do A, B, C, D or E depending on how circumstances change, so we’ve got better optionality than our competitors.”

Williams insists no new technology needs to be invented for companies to thrive and grow.

“My message is everyone in the organization needs to have a comfortable fluency moving between the core business and introducing new business ideas,” Williams says. “That’s why I talk about discourse. It’s not the device that’s important, it’s the discourse.”

“Ideas beget ideas,” he says.

So how does a guy who tells others to endlessly innovate keep his own creative juices flowing? After all, Williams has more than 30 patents for product designs and is constantly pushing his mantra — innovate or perish.

He scoffs at the idea of waiting for some creative bolt of lightning to spring from casual imagining.

“I’m a big believer in deliberate creativity,” Williams says. “I don’t believe in shooting water pistols and getting people to take off ties and sit on bean bags. It’s exercising a muscle.”

He has recently gotten back in touch with a creative outlet he pursued when he was younger: drumming.

“I find that really helps with creativity,” Williams says, adding: “It has actually engaged different parts of the brain. … I think my aspiration is to be a jazz musician at some point. Jazz has a lot to do with creativity and improvisation.”

Categories: Biz Expert Advice, Business & Industry, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Small Business

Hawaiʻi CEOs Christine Camp and Micah Kāne turn missteps into milestones

Kalena O'Connell — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:28:17 +0000

Most CEOs can recall their early business failures — and the lessons that helped shape their later success. For Christine Camp, president and CEO of Avalon Group, it started the summer before high school.

After making the cheer pep squad, Camp faced a setback: her family couldn’t afford the uniform.

To raise funds, she and her teammates sold pans of King’s Hawaiian sweet bread door-to-door in Pearl City.

Their coach encouraged them to say whatever it took to close a sale. Camp quickly learned rejection was part of the process — she heard four to seven no’s for every yes.

By summer’s end, she realized it took about 10 tries to sell just two pans. The lesson: every no brought her closer to a yes.

That lesson stuck. The reminder, “every time you don’t try, you already lost” now defines her approach to business, she told attendees at Hawaii Business Magazine’s 12th Leadership Conference in Honolulu.

Since founding Avalon in 1999, Camp has overseen a $300 million portfolio of statewide properties and raised close to $3 billion in capital to develop its projects. Even as Hawaii Business Magazine’s 2024 CEO of the year, she says failure hasn’t disappeared — it’s just become more consequential.

But for Camp, failure isn’t final. It’s a signal to pivot. Decades into her career, she’s still failing — and still pivoting.

Accompanying her on a panel entitled CEO Chronicles was Micah Kāne, CEO and president of Hawai‘i Community Foundation and incoming CEO of Parker Ranch. In a discussion led by moderator Yunji de Nies, journalist at Hawaii News Now and PBS Hawaii, the duo shared how they embrace failures to succeed.

Yunji addressed a critical question for visionary leaders: When plan A through D fall apart and there’s no room left to pivot, then what?

According to Kāne, rising after failure requires attention to your inner strength, your support system and the team you move forward with.

Under his leadership, Hawaii Community Foundation has grown from $500 million to $1.2 billion, carrying lives through challenging times, including natural disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic. Hawaii Business Magazine’s 2020 CEO of the year, Micah Kāne said he works on improving himself every day through a three-minute mindfulness practice.

“Think about the things you have, the mistakes you made the day before and commit to yourself to try not to make those mistakes again,” Kāne said. “Since 2012, I may have missed five days where I don’t take that time in the morning, and I can tell you, it’s been the best advice. Whether you’re a manager, an employee or you’re trying to strive to be a leader, the thicker and stronger that inner pole is, the easier you will get through.”

Beyond restoring confidence, Kāne continues to lose with dignity and win graciously, he said, grounded by the relationships that remain steadfast in his triumph and loss.

Camp echoed his perspective, knowing her success wouldn’t be possible without the people who believed in her before her goals were a reality.

“What I learned again was the people who would come out to help introduce you to the others who could lend you money, to refine my pitch and learn what I should and shouldn’t do,” Camp said. “I made my company better, and I brought people who believed in me. I really had a slew of cheerleaders who truly trusted my vision to actualize their investment goals.”

For Kāne and Camp, creating an environment that encourages colleagues and employees to take risks is vital to their momentum and success.

“I want my employees making decisions just outside their authority,” Kāne said. “I want them to be ethical decisions, I want them to be well thought-out decisions and to be legal decisions, but after that, you go for it, and I’ve got your back.”

By reframing failure as fuel, these local leaders in business are not just bouncing back, they’re building forward.

“If you’re going to fail – and I recommend you do in fact – fail forward,” Camp said. “Maybe you learn something from it. You are going to fail, so fail fast, because you have to pivot. There are a lot of people depending on you.”

Categories: Biz Expert Advice, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Success Stories

A Master Woodworker Makes Furniture That Endures

Ryann Noelani Coules — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 07:00:49 +0000

If you need something made from wood — whether it’s for home, office or store — Dae Son can probably make it. Son is the owner of Wood Hi, a woodworking shop in Hālawa. He says the shop has been commissioned to make custom pieces as small as intricate pocketknife handles and as large as 12-by-4-foot dining tables.

“We never turn down anyone on a project. We actually find a way to do it one way or another,” says Son. “I always tell clients, ‘If you have a budget, just let me know, and we’ll work with it. We can still build it for you, the right way, which will last, and you don’t have to worry about it falling apart.’”

Mass-produced furniture does not last, he says, but creations by expert woodworkers provide enduring quality. “That piece will last you forever and [you can] pass it on to your kids probably.”

And except for the plywood he uses, Son says Wood Hi sources locally. “We always try to use sustainable wood. Koa, monkeypod, mango, anything you find on-island that’s a hardwood, we use.”

woodhi.co

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Parting Shot, Sustainability

Hawai‘i’s Social Media Stars

Ryann Noelani Coules — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:16:59 +0000

The term influencer was only added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2019, but today it refers to the millions of people whose words and images on social media carry clout with their followers.

We’re not talking about athletes, actors or politicians whose fame generates millions of social media followers on their names alone. Influencers used social media to become well known and influential. A growing number make social media their full-time job, while most do it as a side gig. The vast majority gain little or nothing financially, though they may have many thousands of followers.

This article profiles a cross section of local influencers to see how they got started and gained their followings. Some prefer the label “content creator” over “influencer,” because they create unique content rather than just posting submissions from other people. All follower numbers are from early May.

Hyram

hhhnewz

The Hawaii Vacation Guide

808 Viral

Amanda & Felix Eats

My Kailua

Hyram

5.7 million followers on TikTok; 4.47 million on YouTube; 777,000 on Instagram

Hyram Yarbro says his passion for skin care comes from his “own personal battle with not-so-great skin” while growing up on “a cattle ranch in Arizona in the middle of nowhere.” That fascination with skin care stayed with him even after his own skin cleared up.

Yarbro moved to O‘ahu in 2015 for classes at Brigham Young University-Hawaii in Lā‘ie. After dropping out of BYU-Hawaii, he stayed in the Islands and in 2017 created his own YouTube channel, where he continues to post videos about skin conditions and treatments, product reviews, reactions to celebrity skin care routines and the like.

“I saw that a lot of people were primarily getting skin care information from salespeople or would have to dish out a lot of money to go to a dermatologist or an aesthetician. … So that’s when I decided to start creating YouTube videos, because I want to help people navigate the product market a little bit easier so that they’re not spending as much money on products that are inevitably not meant for their skin or not going to give them the results that they want.”

Building an audience was a “slow burn” for the first year and a half, he says, but “once I started seeing the sense of community that was online when it came to skin care, that’s when I kind of had the light bulb moment of like, maybe this could be something that’s bigger than just a little side hobby.”

In 2019, he went from having 50,000 subscribers to 500,000 in less than two weeks; he hit a million by the end of the year. His growth continued to soar in 2020, amplified by people’s increased screen time and interest in skin care during the pandemic lockdown.

Yarbro says the income he generates from social media is “about 50% from sponsorships, about 30% from affiliate programs and about 20% from YouTube ads.” Sponsorships are when companies pay influencers to promote their products. Yarbro says he’s picky about the sponsorships he accepts, because, as the saying goes, trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and even more difficult to regain.

“I typically turn down about 90 to 95% of sponsorship requests because I really want to make sure that any company that I’m working with not only has quality products that I truly want to integrate into my daily routine, but also has formulations that would align with the skin concerns of my audience,” he says, adding that he’s turned down six-figure deals in the past because he couldn’t “in good faith” promote certain products.

He says his rate depends on the size of the sponsor, its prices, the length of the partnership and other factors. Although sponsorships with larger companies pay better, Yarbro says he’s open to working with smaller brands for lower rates if he loves their products.

Affiliate links are unique web addresses that pay commissions for referred purchases; affiliate programs connect creators to companies that are good matches.

“I am grateful to be with affiliate programs that partner with magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan,” says Yarbro. When he uses them, he includes the disclosure: “These are affiliate links that generate a small compensation that supports me and my channel. I would appreciate it if you used these links as you shop, but no pressure whatsoever!”

Yarbro also makes money through YouTube’s advertising program, which pays creators for running third-party advertisements before and during their videos. But many of these ads are skippable after a few seconds and creators are only compensated when the ad plays all the way through.

In 2021, Yarbro launched his own skin care product line, Selfless by Hyram. “This space tends to be very focused on self and beauty and looking amazing,” which he says motivated him to start a product line that “generates some positive global impact with every purchase.” For example, “we’ve been able to protect over 300,000 acres of rainforest through one of our partnerships.”

Not all of his content is focused on skin care. He recently posted a video supporting Millie Bobby Brown, a 21-year-old actress whom the tabloid media criticized for supposedly looking older than her age. “The normalization of using a skin care routine and taking care of yourself, it’s kind of forming these new age beauty standards that I think can be super unhealthy, and … it’s affecting the way that we talk about other people’s appearance.”

hhhnewz

227,000 followers on Instagram

One of three news curators on this list, Isaac “HUNGRYHUNGRYHAWAIIAN” Scharsch reposts videos, images and tips sent in from the public and clips from local news networks on his Instagram account, hhhnewz.

His page features posts about politics, thefts, drugs, car accidents, weather, scams, homelessness, the search for missing people, assaults and other news. “All hours of the day, people send in all kinds of stuff going on around the Islands,” says Scharsch. But he also posts more lighthearted content “to show the other side of Hawai‘i,” including his own scenic drone footage.

Scharsch says he started hhhnewz in 2013, while he was working in Waikīkī and witnessing all sorts of debauchery, like “people getting arrested, police chases, fights. … So I started just recording everything and posting it, and then I did some voiceover comedy. People just started sending the same kind of content in and then it kind of blew up from there.” Today, hhhnewz has over 8,000 posts.

On average, Scharsch says he receives about 50 tips a day from the public and sometimes he gets over 100. “Some days it’s really slow, which is good. I never hope for it to be busy, because that means there’s bad stuff happening,” he says. “There’s a lot of people that send me things that they would like to see me post, like Palestine stuff and Trump, [but] I just try to stick with what’s going on locally.”

Nearly half of his Instagram feed is promotional content that he posts to his page and on his story. Scharsch says his advertising rate for local companies is donation-based – they give what they can, but he charges anyone that’s not kama‘āina more. “All the funds that I get from the page only goes to the growth of the page. I don’t use this money at all for my life,” says Scharsch, adding that he teaches surf lessons to pay the bills.

Unlike on Instagram, the content on his website (hohungryhungryhawaiian.com) is uncensored and sometimes contains nudity, including lewd public acts. The homepage states that “Hungry Hungry Hawaiian started as an Instagram page to bring awareness to the grim reality the residents of Hawaii are faced with on a daily basis and has become a movement to show the major housing crisis and drug epidemic. … The people of the Kingdom of Hawaii deserve so much better. We are here to bring people together to talk about the tough topics.” Below that is an “I’m 18 years old, ENTER” button, which takes you to the content.

Most videos posted on his website receive ratings, ranging from “funny” to “serious” to “hardcore” to “XXX.” “Hopefully in the future, there will be more people putting out more positive and better behaviors for kids to follow on social media,” he says. “I’ve been trying to navigate that myself.”

But there’s no getting around the negative behaviors. They’re real. “I grew up around a lot of stuff like that, a lot of mental illness, suicide, drugs, you know, substance abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence,” Scharsch says. “So I’m kind of used to it.”

Sharing sensitive information and content that some find disturbing has led to controversy: “Some things, by posting, will just make the situation worse. Before, I didn’t really think about that kind of stuff. … I’m not perfect and I do make mistakes.” Scharsch says he tries to be “really transparent” when he does screw up.

Rather than running his account anonymously, Scharsch says, “I actually decided to go public with my identity because I knew it would make me have to be more responsible and hold myself accountable for what I post. … And it has, so far, kept me responsible and accountable.”

He says his main motivation for running hhhnewz is to help his community. That could mean facilitating animal adoptions, providing information when people go missing and sharing GoFundMe pages for local causes.

“I reach out to people all the time, and I should have been keeping track of how many people I’ve helped in specific, personal situations because there’s been so many,” says Scharsch. “I don’t really care about [building a following], and I never really did. But then recently, I’ve been thinking, more views, more followers, more people I can help.”

The Hawaii Vacation Guide

137,000 followers and over 400 videos on YouTube

Married couple Erica Gellerman and Jordan Fromholz met through mutual friends at a Super Bowl party during their last semester at UC Santa Barbara. After graduation, she worked as a freelance writer for accounting companies and he as a chemical engineer. Gellerman came to the Islands to do work for First Hawaiian Bank and Fromholz tagged along.

“He decided he liked Hawai‘i so much he wanted to move there, and a job opportunity presented itself,” says Gellerman. They jumped at their chance and lived together on O‘ahu, “but then the job transferred him away.” Yearning to return, Fromholz took a sabbatical from the company he was with after 15 years and Gellerman continued freelance writing. The couple moved back to Hawai‘i, this time to Maui, in 2019.

“As we started looking for things to do with our son, we realized there was a lot of information, but it felt like a lot of it was not great or outdated or faceless information, so you didn’t really know if somebody was actually doing this stuff,” Gellerman says. Seeing a need, they started sharing information shaped by their own experiences, which led to the creation of The Hawaii Vacation Guide two months after they arrived on Maui. Their content covers the unique characteristics and personalities of each island, along with recommendations for beaches, hikes, hotels, tours and restaurants, plus more practical advice for prospective travelers.

They began with a website and then expanded to YouTube a few months before the pandemic hit, which made for a rocky start. Fromholz contributed to The Hawaii Vacation Guide full time from the get-go, while Gellerman continued freelance writing. She says they started to see growth in summer 2021, when travel started picking back up.

Their posts touch on typical “touristy Hawai‘i” attractions as well as experiences that reflect the authentic culture of the Islands. “For years, we were hesitant to recommend lū‘aus,” Fromholz says. Gellerman finishes the thought: Then, “somebody told me this quote – ‘You have to give people what they want, and then you can give them what they need.’ ” Fromholz says they try to balance their more touristy suggestions with “other cultural activities, like visit Bishop Museum, go out on an outrigger canoe ride, go visit a heiau, there’s amazing national monuments and parks.”

As they gained more subscribers and engagement in 2021, Gellerman decided to pivot her career towards running The Hawaii Vacation Guide full time alongside her husband. While Fromholz mainly focuses on the YouTube side, including capturing drone footage and editing, Gellerman contributes most of the writing and administrative work.

“Never did we think, ‘This is gonna be our job,’ ” says Gellerman, to which Fromholz adds, “It started out as a hobby, sharing our experiences and trying to give the best advice possible, just having fun with it.”

They moved to California at the end of 2022 to be closer to Gellerman’s parents, but Fromholz says they still visit Hawai‘i “four or five times a year.” Operating costs are expensive, factoring in flights and hotels, and Gellerman says they pay for “95% of the activities that we do.” They say this gives them the ability to speak honestly, but Fromholz says they avoid publishing negative reviews even when they have poor experiences.

“We make like $3,000 a month on YouTube through advertising. So that doesn’t even cover the cost of doing this stuff.” They also earn commissions when they post affiliate links to rental car services, tours and hotels, and they sell crafted itineraries for cruises and visits to O‘ahu, Hawai‘i Island, Maui and Kaua‘i, for $37.

“We’re not living a lavish life, but we can support ourselves and our two kids,” says Gellerman. She says they build their savings through other side hustles.

808 Viral

438,000 followers on Instagram

Daniela Stolfi first started posting funny videos in 2014 on Vine – an app that allowed users to make and share videos no longer than six seconds – and formed friendships with other local creators.

Despite its popularity, Vine shut down in 2017. “We had all this great content that I downloaded from Vine that I wanted to keep alive, and so I started a Facebook page originally. I started posting things we had all done, whether it was like friends of mine or things I had done.” 808 Viral was born.

The page gained traction with a post about a fictitious Spam-flavored Oreo. “That went really viral, like, ridiculously viral, to the point where Snopes had to debunk it and Nabisco had to make a statement. It was totally a joke, but I guess people took it seriously. We got 30,000 followers just from that.” Stolfi has since expanded to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

As 808 Viral developed, Stolfi says she not only saw an opportunity to share creative and comedic content about Hawai‘i, but also to capture local people’s perspectives: “I made sure that we always had all kinds of representation in our group – Hawaiians, Tongans, Samoans, LGBTQ – so they’re a little bit of everything. And I think that’s why it did so well, because everybody saw themselves in the content.”

Today, Stolfi manages the 808 Viral page almost entirely by herself and it’s grown into something much bigger than just a comedy page. Mixed in with silly videos are posts about community events, news items, archived footage of the Islands, things related to Hawaiian culture and more.

“I run a large, organic media page that is independent. We keep our pulse on the community, and we try to support it in any way we can, with humor and education, and I take it really seriously,” says Stolfi.

Stolfi sometimes monetizes her content through Instagram’s invite-only Reels Bonuses, where earnings are based on the number of bonus plays or post views. She also makes money by selling 808 Viral merchandise and occasionally gets paid to post promos on her page.

But Stolfi’s biggest moneymaker is social media consulting. “I’ll take over a brand. I’ll help them get their sites up and situated, get their entire digital presence done and then teach their people internally how to do it. And I manage some people’s social media for short amounts of time.”

Running social media accounts is not all rainbows and sunshine, however. Stolfi admits there’s a dark side to being chronically online and she sometimes has “blackouts,” or periods where she refrains from social media activity. She warns that a lot of platforms “are not here to help us and it’s making people crazy. … I’ve watched friends of mine that I had to separate from because they got so wound up in social media that it changed who they were and made them go down these like crazy rabbit holes to where they weren’t even speaking sensibly anymore.”

But still, she says, a lot of good can come from social media when it’s done right. And that motivates her to continue. “I worked at the city and county for years, and I saw firsthand how posting and getting people behind certain things and pushing for legislation and for change was what had to happen to make things work.”

Stolfi helped found Hawai‘i Creators, today a group of 224 Hawai‘i content creators, which she considers the “chamber of commerce for creators.” Its community of creators get together to talk about how much to charge and to share knowledge with each other.

“We wanted to bring them together and try to set some kind of standard, not only to protect businesses because they’re getting ripped off a lot by scammer influencers,” but also to protect influencers, making sure that they’re charging enough and that they have standards that make sense. “It helps when you have a community of other people now that kind of understand what it’s like to be on social media. … If something goes wrong, we all come on and we vent about it, or we help share information.”

She says that when creators use their pages to support businesses for free, or when they undervalue their services, nobody gets paid properly.

Amanda & Felix Eats

63,700 subscribers on YouTube

Seven years into dating, the now-husband-and-wife team of Amanda Yee and Felix Le turned their love for food into a YouTube channel, Amanda & Felix Eats. “I used to work in the tourism industry. So when the pandemic hit, I was furloughed and had nothing to do,” says Yee. “I realized during that time that I’m kind of an artistic person that likes making videos.”

Driven by a desire to help eateries survive the pandemic, the couple began documenting their takeout dining experiences. “We were trying to encourage friends and families to also support local, so we wanted to combine our love for food and our home, and put ourselves out there,” Yee says. According to Le, they pay for 90% of their meals, which mitigates any conflicts of interest and makes it easier to give honest reviews. It also means they’re putting their money where their mouth is, Yee says, since their channel encourages people to support local businesses.

“We started in September of 2020 and then we hit the 1K subscriber benchmark I want to say in January of the next year,” Yee says.

Amanda & Felix Eats’ top two performing videos, which each have over 200,000 views, were filmed in Japan. Their other most popular videos, with over 100,000 views, include “Old School Eateries in Hawaii,” “Hawaii Street Food Tour!” and “Full Day of Eating Filipino Food in Hawaii!”

Both Yee and Le contribute to running their channel, but Yee takes on more responsibilities since Le still works full time as a radiologist. “I do all the editing, most of the filming and thumbnails, the uploading, most of the social media, and then Felix does a lot more of the research and the planning, because he really loves those low-key spots,” Yee says.

Le says planning is essential since they need to work around his busy work schedule. For example, if they leave town to film content on O‘ahu’s North Shore, they’ll try to hit several food outlets to maximize productivity.

Although Yee says their videos haven’t reached viral status, “we kind of pride ourselves in having a closeness with our foodie ‘ohana.” She cites frequent commenters who leave positive feedback and who they’ve built a rapport with. In other words, she says, they focus on engagement “quality” over “quantity.”

Yee says they started accepting PayPal and Venmo donations because “subscribers were asking us, ‘Hey, like, we want to treat you to a coffee,’ or ‘How can we treat you to a meal?’ kind of thing.” But that’s a very small portion of the funds they raise, she says, adding that “99% of our money is through YouTube ads.”

So just how much money do they generate from their channel? “We just finished our taxes for last year, and we didn’t make any money. We actually overspent. … All the money we make on YouTube via ads, it just goes straight back to making content, whether it’s paying for food or upgrading our gear – video cameras, tripods, hard drives, computers, microphones, all of these things we upgrade every couple of years.”

And while they haven’t yet figured out how to turn a profit from their channel, Yee and Le still find the work fulfilling. “Every now and then we would revisit these businesses and actually get to talk to the owners,” Yee says. “Making friends with them and hearing their story about how our video made an impact is very rewarding for us. It’s gratifying to know that we helped them in some way.”

My Kailua

108,000 followers on Facebook and 87,700 on Instagram

Daniel Casler says he created My Kailua first as a Facebook page to reconnect with the community he grew up in after moving to California and touring the world with his rock ’n’ roll band, Pennywise. Casler visited Hawai‘i frequently during that whirlwind chapter of his life before eventually settling down on O‘ahu.

“I think Kailua is such a magical place. Growing up, being in waterfalls and rivers and surfing and paddling out to the Mokes, and just having that life was like, ‘God, I wish everybody could experience that,’ you know?” Casler says. So, he created an account dedicated to the east side of O‘ahu, which he considers everything from Kahuku to Hawai‘i Kai.

“Sometimes I post stuff that’s outside of the community if I think it’s important because it brings awareness to a situation, but I try and really focus on Kailua and the Windward Side,” says Casler.

Casler says he used to run free advertisements on his page, but that ended when the pandemic led to the demise of the Pacific Ink & Art Expo, one of his moneymaking ventures. After the expo was cancelled, he says “local businesses started coming to me and being like, ‘Hey, you really helped my business through the years. … I saw that your business is shut down, and I really want to help you.’ ”

Casler says he didn’t want to accept money at first, but reluctantly agreed after his wife told him “they’re blessing you, and you bless them.” And once he received his first $500 for helping a company with its own social media – he used the money to support his two newborn babies – he recognized that the community was willing to pay for social media help.

He and his wife now help other businesses with social media, marketing and even responding to Google and Yelp reviews. They charge based on what the business needs help with.

“It can be very simple, or it can be way more involved,” Casler says. “That’s where I’ve kind of grown into, I don’t want to call it an agency, but me and my wife have grown and understood how to work this social media thing and so it’s enabled us to be a proxy of these businesses and help them run their business.”

One of their clients, Ali‘i Animal Hospital, started with one location and, since working with Casler, has added five more locations, with further expansion expected. “That’s what social media can do,” he says. “When you work with the right people – not saying we are – but if you work with the right people that can really get your message out there to the demographic that you’re trying to reach, you can have a lot of success with that.”

Like hhhnewz and 808 Viral, My Kailua mostly posts items sent in from the community, along with original and promotional content. Although their feeds are comparable, they each have their own flare – hhhnewz posts more graphic content and 808 Viral more comedy, while My Kailua posts a lot of scenic photos and videos.

“Over the years, it became a very powerful networking and news sharing site,” says Casler. And he says it’s led him to connect with leaders in the community, including some of the state’s highest officials. “Next thing you know, I’m sitting with the governor and the mayor, and we’re talking about what we can do with policy,” he says.

Politicians aren’t the only ones who see the benefit of connecting with local news content curators. “It’s also attractive to law enforcement, because they’re like, ‘Hey, you’re getting information that way. So how do we partner?’ ” says Casler, who adds that he often meets with law enforcement officials behind the scenes. “It’s a part of My Kailua that nobody really knows about.”

Casler says My Kailua “changed my life because it gave me a perspective, to see different sides of my community that I didn’t know existed, to meet different individuals I would have never met. Like, I’m just a regular guy, but now I’m sitting with different organizations of the government. I’m sitting with the mayor and the governor and then I’m meeting like the historic families of my town that I would have never met before.”

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Lifestyle, Trends

How Hawai‘i Women Can Overcome Obstacles and Build Thriving Businesses

Steve Petranik — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 07:00:25 +0000

For the past two years, the Women Entrepreneurs Conference has been a high-energy half day of learning, inspiration and networking for hundreds of local female business owners. This year’s event on Friday, May 2, promises to be the best one yet.

The opening keynote speaker is Rose Wang, chief operating officer of the fast-growing social media platform Bluesky, who came to fame nationally in 2017 by successfully negotiating with Mark Cuban on TV’s “Shark Tank.” Wang and co-founder Laura D’Asaro impressed the billionaire investor with their Chirps snacks made from crickets. Cuban wanted a 20% stake for $100,000, but Wang was gutsy in bargaining him down to 15% for the same money.

The closing speaker is Hawai‘i-born and raised Lori Teranishi, founder and CEO of iQ360, a strategic business consultancy headquartered in Honolulu with offices in San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C.

Hawaii Business Magazine is hosting WECon with the support of presenting sponsor Central Pacific Bank. Catherine Ngo, CPB’s former CEO and chair and now president of its foundation, says she is especially excited to hear from both keynote speakers.

“What’s special about our keynoters, this year and in previous years, is their willingness to share their personal and professional journeys, their challenges and failures.”

In between those two keynote speakers will be eight sessions focused on providing solutions, ideas, opportunities, examples and inspiration to female entrepreneurs. Speakers include Isabella Hughes, who launched Better Sour after selling Shaka Tea; Elisia Flores of L&L Hawaiian BBQ; Chenoa Farnsworth of Blue Startups; and Ku‘ulani Keohokalole of People Strategies Hawai‘i.

Session topics include how to successfully exit your business, how accelerator programs can fast-track your company, how to expand into markets beyond Hawai‘i and how to pivot from your current corporate job to full-time entrepreneurship.

Small group discussions on specific topics will be enhanced this year. Each discussion will be led by a local expert and will include about 10 people or fewer per table. That format allows more questions and answers and a deeper dive into key subjects, says Susan Utsugi, group senior VP and division manager at CPB.

Extra Challenges

Ngo says every business owner faces huge challenges, but women often face extra obstacles. The Women Entrepreneurs Conference helps them overcome those obstacles.

“One challenge is access to resources – things women need to start and grow their businesses. That might include resources and advice on strategic planning, financial management, marketing, sales and HR, and women often lack easy access to these resources,” Ngo says. WECon has sessions and speakers targeting each of those areas.

“A special challenge for women is raising capital, both on the debt side and equity side. Part of it is just being unaware of the many options out there for capital. But it’s also about how to make the ask and follow through by actually bringing the money in,” she says.

Utsugi calls financing – and addressing the challenges that women face in raising capital – the “foundation of the conference.”

“Our research shows that women tend to hold off on applying for a business loan or getting additional capital to grow their business. And some women feel they need the perfect business plan before seeking capital or too often feel the timing is not right,” Utsugi says.

“And often, when they do get financing, they do not ask for as much as they really need.”

WECon covers the many options to acquire capital, and helps female entrepreneurs gain the knowledge and confidence to take smart steps forward.

The speakers have dealt with some of the same challenges facing the entrepreneurs in the audience, Utsugi says, and their advice and personal experiences provide a road map for others.

A further challenge many women face is not having access to networks of other entrepreneurs, and that’s a big reason for the conference, she says. WECon connects female entrepreneurs with each other and with the resources and people who can help them succeed.

When you bring a couple of hundred entrepreneurs and business professionals into one location, many connections are made.

“It happens in all kinds of ways,” Ngo says, then starts listing examples: “Following a session, two women start talking about their businesses and discover how they can help each other. Then there are women sharing leads: One got her goods on the shelves of a particular retailer and told the other woman how to do the same. Two women in the food industry discover they can share space and keep their costs down.

“As women, we naturally gravitate to helping each other as we become more successful. We want to lift other women up – a sincere desire to help each other.”

Says Utsugi: “I think you’re going to be inspired. When you enter the venue, you can feel the dynamic energy in the room and how women are there to support each other while learning and growing.”

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Small Business

Is It Venus or a Satellite? A Local Astronomer Helps People Read the Night Sky.

Savvy Andrews — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 19:00:50 +0000

Nick Bradley, born and raised on O‘ahu, developed a passion for astronomy at a young age and eventually turned the hobby into his profession.

His stargazing events are “about exposing more people to the wonders of the universe – getting them to look up, be curious, ask questions, find the answers and share what they learn. And honestly, it’s just a fun experience for literally anyone.”

Inspiration

In middle school, he discovered a book about constellations. He began connecting the dots in the night sky, using binoculars to explore. His curiosity grew when he visited the Bishop Museum and experienced its planetarium show. There he also learned about the local astronomy club, which introduced him to serious stargazing.

“Growing up, I was always just curious how things worked. I used to take things apart, even if they were still working, to try and figure out how they worked and learn something from it,” he says. “I used giant telescopes to look at amazing things. And now I’m left asking, ‘How do the stars work? How does the galaxy work? How does the universe work?’ I gotta know!”

Turning Point

In January 2019, Bradley turned his love of the stars into a business.

Bradley faced a slow-down in the pandemic, but it gave him time to be more thoughtful about his business, refine his marketing strategy, build his reputation in the community and plan for the future. After the pandemic, the business took off, he says.

Stargazers of Hawaii today offers both public and private shows for locals and visitors, including events at Turtle Bay Resort, Prince Waikiki, Royal Hawaiian Center and Salt Kaka‘ako. Using 7-foot telescopes and stargazing apps, the shows engage audiences with hands-on explorations and visual aids that make stargazing and astronomical concepts accessible.

Parents Become Kids

Stargazers of Hawaii also does birthday parties, weddings and school visits – “anything outside that you can think of works great!” he says.

“Those community events are really fun,” he says. “…. It’s amazing to see schools and parents getting involved. Many of the parents have never looked through a telescope before so it’s a whole new experience for them as well. They become the kids.”

Hawaiian Culture

Bradley says stargazing is a way to honor the ancestral knowledge that Hawaiians have used for centuries to navigate the Pacific Ocean. The ancient practice of wayfinding – in which navigators use the stars, ocean swells, wind patterns and more to chart their course – is always discussed during his events.

“We talk about wayfinding – the traditional way and the modern way – as well as incorporate Hawaiian stories, along with the stars.”

Astronomy Community: The blend of tradition and exploration helps make the astronomy community in Hawai‘i so special,” Bradley says.

“We have the museum, which presents and shares research; the navigators, who study the stars; and the Institute for Astronomy, with all the giant telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunakea. There’s so much spark and curiosity. … It’s kind of a mecca for stargazing.”

Categories: Careers, Entrepreneurship, Science

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025

Shelby Mattos — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 22:43:11 +0000

For a quarter century, the Hawaii Venture Capital Association’s awards programs have highlighted local entrepreneurs and companies that succeed despite challenges.

“It’s really hard to do business here in Hawai‘i. … We are an island chain in the middle of the Pacific,” HVCA President Meli James says. “We have a high, high cost of living. There are a lot of things that naturally make Hawai‘i challenging. That being said, small business has been really at the heart of Hawai‘i and has really been such a huge driver for so much of our community.”

Today, HVCA’s recognition program is called the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards; it was known as the Hawaii Venture Capital Association Awards back when Hoku Scientific won Deal of the Year in 2004 and Hoana Medical won the same award in 2009.

Hoku Scientific founder Dustin Shindo focused his company on renewable energy and fuel cell components. Shindo, whose early customers included Sanyo, Nissan, and the U.S. Army, sold Hoku in 2009 just before the effects of the Great Recession hit the company. Since then, he’s founded other startups and now consults for HPM Building Supply.

“While there’s always entrepreneurs, it’s nice to see the next group kind of come in, pick up the fight. You know, a lot of the young ones always want to change Hawai‘i and improve it,” Shindo says. “As my generation kind of moves on, the next generation of entrepreneurs, seeing them want to improve Hawai‘i and make a difference is nice.”

Patrick Sullivan, founder and CEO of Oceanit, was presented the Deal of the Year award in 2007 for the Oceanit spinoff Hoana Medical, which developed, manufactured, sold, and serviced what it called the world’s first totally passive medical monitoring system, the LifeBed.

“Hoana ran into trouble after the 2008 collapse of the financial market. We were in the middle of financing and literally had a signed document that evaporated and ended up with the company in a real pickle,” Sullivan says.

Oceanit continues to flourish globally from its base in Hawai‘i, Sullivan says. He says human capital is extremely important and it’s crucial to help keep smart, educated people in Hawai‘i. Sullivan says the next generation of entrepreneurs needs to embrace who they are.

“We live in Hawai‘i, but we work around the world. Don’t make excuses for living in Hawai‘i, always a great place to live and have a family, and we think it’s a great place to do innovation,” Sullivan says.

The Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards bring organizations, entrepreneurs, and investors together to celebrate achievements.

“I’m a big believer in collision and just getting smart people in the room,” James says. “You think about anything people are doing. It’s so hard to get the word out. Everyone has their lives, and there’s just so much going on. It’s really nice to be able to do this storytelling.”

James says she’s excited about the future “and what we’ll be able to celebrate in the next five years, 10 years, next 25 years.”

Entrepreneur of the Year

Agriculture/Clean Tech Entrepreneur

Consumer Packaged Goods Entrepreneur

Social Impact Entrepreneur of the Year

Deal of the Year

Startup Paradise Champion

Corporate Intrapreneur of the Year

Investor of the Year

Island Innovator of the Year

Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

Lifetime Achievement Award

Student Entrepreneur of the Year

People’s Choice Award

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Entrepreneur of the Year

Awarded to the individual who has gone above expectations with their company, and who serves as a clear example to other entrepreneurs.

Winner: Alexia Akbay, Symbrosia

While digesting grass, cows typically burp or fart out methane that contributes to global warming, so Alexia Akbay set out to tackle the problem. She found a study that demonstrated that limu kohu, or red seaweed, is a kind of “magical” organism that reduces those emissions when fed to cows.

“We just really focused on figuring out how to cultivate it, how to deliver it in a formulation to animals and ensure that it’s working, and then how to kind of put an offering on the table for farmers to allow them to make a profit from using our product,” Akbay says.

Symbrosia has an aquaculture system that grows limu kohu at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kailua-Kona.

“The fastest-growing industry in Hawai‘i is aquaculture, and it’s really an opportunity to diversify our economy away from the government, defense, and tourism,” she says.

Symbrosia is growing and plans to fill 80 full-time positions in limu aquaculture, agriculture, and research.

“Working to reduce the impact of climate change through natural resources is a privilege,” Akbay says.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Agriculture/Clean Tech Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur and company whose technology supports a greener future or helps farmers with innovative agricultural practices.

Winner: Kaiulani Odom, Hawai‘i Good Food Alliance

The Alliance is a partnership of eight organizations focused on improving Hawai‘i’s food system, reducing dependency on imports, and building community resilience.

Its members collaborate and support each other with the goal of strengthening all parts of Hawai‘i’s food system, from production and processing to distribution and consumption.

“It’s all about promoting a healthy food system in Hawai‘i that makes sure that we’re taking care of our land, we’re taking care of our people, we’re taking care of our community,” says Executive Director Kaiulani Odom.

In fact, caring for the ‘āina is one of the group’s pillars. The others are that food should be culturally grounded, act like medicine, be equitably distributed, and be community-based.

Among its many projects, the Alliance worked this year with the state Department of Education on a plan to send 58,000 produce boxes to local residents within five months.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Kerry Kakazu, Metrogrow Hawaii

MetroGrow Hawaii says it operates Hawai‘i’s first indoor vertical farm to grow hydroponic produce for local restaurants and the community. Despite major capital costs at the start and high ongoing energy expenses, the farm has maintained operations for over a decade.

Founder and president Kerry Kakazu says indoor farming is currently more expensive than traditional farming in Hawai‘i but that MetroGrow’s location in the heart of Kaka‘ako puts it closer to its customers. Kakazu says his goal is to make indoor farming economically competitive with traditional farming.

“You use less water, use less land, don’t have to use pesticides – a new, modern way of growing that could be very productive,” he says.

MetroGrow’s greens are sold directly to restaurants or can be purchased at farmers markets on O‘ahu.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Judiah Mcroberts, Kaua‘i Hemp Co.

Kaua‘i Hemp Co. sells products in Hawai‘i and Japan that are infused with locally grown organic hemp – including oil, soap, and sun paste.

President Judiah McRoberts says their products contain none of the toxins found in nonorganic hemp products.

The company, founded in 2019, operates a 10-acre certified organic hemp farm and manufactures CBD products. McRoberts says he hopes the farm will be able to start tours to educate the public about hemp and how it is grown and used.

The mission of the company is to revitalize the hemp industry and spur sustainable agriculture in Hawai‘i. Located in ‘Ōma‘o on Kaua‘i’s South Shore, the farm uses solar panels to help power its operations and is establishing an on-site well to supply its water.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Consumer Packaged Goods Entrepreneur

Presented to the entrepreneur whose CPG company has consistently seen month-over-month growth in revenue and customers.

Winner: Caesar and Gina Ho, Hawaiian Soda Co

During the pandemic, while Caesar Ho and his dad ate prime ribs every weekend, Ho would ask bartenders to mix sparkling water with any fresh fruit juice that was available. A few years later, Caesar and his wife experimented on their own by mixing different juices and sodas.

After working with a food scientist, husband and wife Caesar and Gina Ho founded Hawaiian Soda Co., which produces sodas with Hawai‘i fruit flavors and no added sugar.

“We wanted to just make something that we felt good about giving our kids if they wanted something refreshing to drink,” Gina Ho says.

The soda is now sold by about 20 retailers in Hawai‘i, California, Texas, and the Midwest. Ho says they plan to add more retail and distribution partners in Hawai‘i and on the West Coast.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Sara Smith, Wrappily

You may have felt this guilt and frustration:

After all the presents have been opened at Christmas or at parties, you are disheartened by all the wrapping paper that can’t be recycled.

“These joyous moments were sort of tinged with this kind of feeling of guilt or that pain of like, ‘Oh that sucks,’” says Sara Smith.

So in 2013, she started Wrappily, a company that makes colorful yet eco-friendly and compostable gift wrap.

“We’re asking consumers to give up glitters and glossy foils and all the bling and glitz that traditional wrapping papers offer that make the product unsustainable and nonrecyclable and just bound for the landfill.”

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Karli Rose Wilson, To Be Hawai‘i

When she was a hairstylist, Karli Rose Wilson’s customers would sometimes talk about how fragrances gave them headaches. She suffered from the same problem, so she started making natural candles with no artificial fragrances.

From her base on Maui, she later expanded her product line to body butter, lip butter, and other organic skin care products under the brand To Be Hawai‘i (founded as To Be Organics).

“We’re constantly growing and evolving our brand to add and support self-care, to elevate daily rituals, and to really incorporate the essence of the island in the things that we use every day,” Wilson says.

She also says it’s important for everyone to slow down and add self-care to their everyday routines.

Customers can find her products online and at To Be Hawai‘i’s store on Wai‘ale Road in Wailuku.

– Shelby Mattos

An entrepreneur and company that substantially contributes to helping solve some of Hawai‘i’s toughest problems.

Winner: Denise Yamaguchi, Hawai‘i Ag & Culinary Alliance

For 15 years, the Hawai‘i Food and Wine Festival has showcased Hawai‘i’s chefs and food products while targeting tourists. The festival is one of the many programs the Hawai‘i Ag & Culinary Alliance supports to highlight the Islands as a culinary travel destination.

The Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation is a separate entity that supports local farmers and collaborates with schools on agricultural education programs for 5,000 students and 150 teachers a year. The organizations have given over $5 million to agricultural and culinary education programs in the last 14 years, says Denise Yamaguchi, CEO of the festival and executive director of the foundation.

“One of the main reasons why we need to support local ag industries is to be, number one, more sustainable, but also to support diversity in our economy,” Yamaguchi says.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Kaina Makua, Davis Price, Kumano I Ke Ala

Based in West Kaua‘i, the nonprofit Kumano I Ke Ala uses Hawaiian knowledge to revitalize local food systems with the goals of reducing imports and preserving traditions.

One project involved 650 volunteers removing silt from the Waimea River so the waterway could flow freely. Kumano I Ke Ala works with local schools and students to teach hands-on agricultural skills and methods year-round.

It also hosts monthly volunteer events that allow community members to work on its farm projects and learn about sustainable practices.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Daniel Richardson, Makali‘i Metrics

Makali‘i Metrics combines modern analytics and traditional Hawaiian practices to measure soil fertility for food production in Hawai‘i.

Founder Daniel Richardson says a goal for the company is to build Hawai‘i’s first soil analysis lab, but for now, samples must be sent to the mainland. The company’s first project started in 2023, and it currently manages soil health-related projects for UH and the state.

Richardson says the company is focused on reviving indigenous crop systems and methods on former plantation lands.

He says Hawai‘i has yet to reach an agricultural turning point in the post-plantation, post-sugar cane era, and because of that, it’s hard to know what the next big thing in agriculture “could be and what people want it to be.”

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Deal of the Year

Recognizes the local company that received the largest financial deal in the past year.

Winner: Brett Jacobson and Naehalani Breeland, Hawaiian Ola Brewing

Brett Jacobson and Naehalani Breeland, co-owners of Hawaiian Ola Brewing, purchased and renovated the historic Hilo Sugar Mill property, now home to their distillery. To finance the project, they raised funds from the community to purchase the land from Ed Olson, one of the largest landowners on Hawai‘i Island, who died in 2024.

The company started as Hawaiian Ola with nonalcoholic noni energy and immunity shots. In 2016, sales plateaued, so Jacobson and Breeland sought to make a bigger impact by founding Hawaiian Ola Brewing.

“We were brainstorming, trying to figure out how we could use all of these great fruits that were being wasted and not being used throughout Hawai‘i,” Breeland says. “That’s when we came up with the idea of making ciders and using all these great fruits – the ones that couldn’t be sold to hotels or restaurants or stores because of their aesthetic.”

The company grew to have over 4,200 shareholders and continues to support local farmers by using local ingredients. She attributes her and Jacobson’s success to their connections to the overall community and the lāhui Hawai‘i, or Hawaiian nation.

“Putting the ‘āina first as a business is possible, and putting lāhui as first in business is possible,” Breeland says.

This year, Breeland and Jacobson plan to launch their version of ‘ōkolehao, a spirit made from the ti plant with a history stretching back two centuries.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Startup Paradise Champion

Someone who consistently contributes to the success of Hawai‘i’s innovation community.

Winner: Ian Kitajima, PICHTR

For almost 40 years, the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research has been the “incubator of incubators” in Hawai‘i, President Ian Kitajima says. PICHTR has helped hundreds of startups and existing companies in Hawai‘i to start projects or to transition into dual-use incubators that sell products and services to civilian and military markets.

“Our whole focus is partnering,” Kitajima says.

While he just started his role as president two years ago, Kitajima had collaborated with PICHTR for over 20 years. In his previous job at Oceanit, he was able to use funding from PICHTR to create new divisions to focus on material science and renewable energy. Similar programs now help support the Japanese and U.S. government’s departments of defense.

He says he has a different perspective from the proverb that states, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The way he sees it, entrepreneurs and companies need to go fast and far, “and the way to do that is by partnering.”

The nonprofit has partnered with many different organizations and has a goal to find the partners needed to complete tasks that no organization can do on its own.

PICHTR helped scale a renewable energy project, Elemental Impact, that started in Hawai‘i and is now a global player, while keeping the headquarters in Hawai‘i after it was sold.

Some recent projects that PICHTR collaborated on:

An engineering team at Mānoa received a $750,000 award from the U.S. Department of Transportation to help develop an advanced artificial intelligence system that uses multiple types of sensors to detect and prevent potential crashes at intersections.
PICHTR and WAI: Wastewater Alternatives & Innovations will receive a $1 million federal grant to address the health and environmental impacts of wastewater pollution in Hawai‘i. The money will help fund a program to train local workers in cesspool conversion.
PICHTR received a $14 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to place microgrids and develop agriculture technology to help homeless people in Wai‘anae.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Corporate Intrapreneur of the Year

Someone who works in a large organization but advocates for innovation and entrepreneurial thinking.

Winner: Billy Pieper, American Savings Bank

Billy Pieper brings an infectious passion and an entrepreneur’s instinct for finding new solutions to unsolved problems to his role as VP of strategic partnerships at American Savings Bank.

As head of the bank’s “affordable housing hui,” he helped roll out innovative mortgage programs and turned ASB into the state’s largest mortgage lender “for the first time in probably decades,” he says.

One new initiative is “This is Home,” which was inspired by VA home loans, a program with the best terms on the market. ASB’s program reduces monthly costs for middle-income homebuyers with a 3% down-payment option and a heavily discounted mortgage-insurance rate.

“One in every four mortgages we did last year was to a first-time homebuyer using this program,” says Pieper. While the bank earns less profit on mortgages, he says, volume is up substantially, which makes up for the loss.

Another unique program helps Hawaiian Home Lands beneficiaries access funds to build on vacant leased land. The bank provided capital for construction loans to its partner Hawai‘i Community Lending, which helps people who don’t qualify for traditional loans.

Both homeownership programs are urgently needed given the past eight years of outmigration and population loss, which Pieper sees as a crisis: “Who’s going to take care of us in the hospitals, who’s going to teach our kids?”

The bank’s housing hui meets regularly “to make sure that our strategy is measurable and leads to the desired outcome of providing hope for folks that they can stay in Hawai‘i and thrive,” he says. And he uses the specter of a shrinking working class to overcome resistance to change at the bank.

“We’re going to have a business problem because that’s our client base and our workforce,” says Pieper. “We cannot do things the same and expect a different result. We have to think creatively, or else Hawai‘i may be unrecognizable in 10 years.”

ASB executives are committed to affordable housing, he says, “and we’re happy to lead. We’ll be very prudent in our approach – we’re still a bank, we’re regulated – but we will do things that push the boundaries in order to create impact.”

– Cynthia Wessendorf

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Investor of the Year

An individual or entity that has invested substantially in the Hawai‘i startup ecosystem.

Winner: Johnny Chankhamany, Builders VC

Johnny Chankhamany serves as Hawai‘i program director for Builders VC. “We invest in early-stage software startups,” which, in investment terms, are in “the seed or series A level,” says Chankhamany.

He oversees Builders VC’s partnerships with Hawai‘i-based entrepreneurs who are often transforming existing industries – such as agriculture, industrial, real estate, and health care – with innovative technologies and operational excellence. His firm provides capital, and its partners can leverage their decades of expertise in those industries to support their companies and their investments, he says.

Although Chankhamany has achieved success in his career, he admittedly had a rocky start. He didn’t discover his passion for finance until his final semester at UH Mānoa, so he missed out on earlier internships. After graduating, nearly all of his job applications to firms on the mainland went unanswered because he trailed his like-minded peers.

“By the time I realized finance was my calling, it was too late. The pathway to Wall Street is very rigid,” he says. His struggles turned into a desire to help the next generation have a better shot at being hired. “I want to help other people in Hawai‘i avoid the heartache that I went through,” he says.

Chankhamany volunteers with the Akamai Foundation. Its finance academy supports students by helping them secure internships, reviewing resumes, conducting mock interviews, and offering networking opportunities with finance professionals.

“We train, develop, and help Hawai‘i students get jobs on Wall Street,” he says.

– Ryann Noelani Coules

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Island Innovator of the Year

Celebrating innovations that help Hawaiʻi solve a major problem in the community, the ocean or the ʻāina.

Winner: Joey and Christine Valenti, Bizia

To help reduce waste in Hawai‘i, the founders of Bizia are focusing on albizia trees. The tree, one of the fastest growing in the world, is an invasive species in Hawai‘i and prevalent on the islands of Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, Maui, and Hawai‘i.

After removing the invasive trees, Bizia plants native species in their place. It uses the wood to make handcrafted surfboards, furniture, and cutting boards, which can be found at the company’s Bizia Surf and Coffee Bar in Wahiawa and its online store.

Joey Valenti was working toward his doctorate in architecture when he set out to build a house out of albizia. He and skilled woodworker Eric Bello built the house and began collaborating on Hawai‘i-grown wood surfboards.

Albizia is similar to balsa, another wood used for surfboards. Compared to boards made with styrofoam and plastic that can break every season, wooden ones are stronger and can last a lifetime.

By creating high-quality wood surfboards, Bizia is curating a greener surf industry in Hawai‘i, Christine Valenti says. She wants to bring the community together through Bizia by creating pop-up events at the beach, such as “demo days” where people can try the albizia surfboards.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

An entrepreneur who has created technology and innovation to make our lives better.

Winner: Jason Sharp, Umi

The language-learning app Umi launched in February 2023 and has already reached nearly 200,000 downloads.

The app springs from co-founder and CEO Jason Sharp’s years in the freewheeling Beijing of the 2000s and 2010s, where he did a university study abroad stint and founded two companies. He says watching TV shows helped him master Mandarin.

Umi lessons use TV clips to help users distinguish words in spoken speech and build vocabulary in context. The most popular language is French, followed by Japanese, Spanish, and Korean.

“Our brains are really good at pattern recognition, so if you give them a lot of exposure to native speakers, they start to recognize that,” says Sharp. Without listening comprehension, foreign-language students “can go through four years of college, then travel to a country and not understand anything.”

The goal of Umi is to help people become truly fluent, says Sharp, because “language is connection, and connection opens up opportunities.”

– Cynthia Wessendorf

Finalist: Romesh Jayawickrama, Inttent

Romesh Jayawickrama left a successful career in investment banking to found a startup, Aurigin, which helps connect medium-sized companies with compatible investors.

After Aurigin took off, he pivoted to his second startup, Inttent, a platform that transforms traditional data-heavy documents into more engaging, multimodal presentations.

For example, one aspect of finalizing a deal is called the Confidential Information Memorandum. “It’s basically a prospectus for a listed company – so like a 100- to 150-page document. It takes months to put together and it’s not being read,” says Jayawickrama.

Inttent reduces the time needed to write CIMs and other documents and to effectively relay their key information.

With Inttent, “all you have to do is upload all of your source files, and our model analyzes, identifies the relevant parts, generates the text and charts, all in one seamless flow.” Instead of taking 400 hours, it can take three or four, he says.

– Ryann Noelani Coules

Finalist: Randy Marsden, Lyv Technologies (dba Skidattl)

Randy Marsden was in college when a friend broke his neck and became paralyzed. “I did a student project to help him, and that turned into a company” that developed assistive technology to help disabled people, he says.

Marsden later founded and successfully exited four businesses while working for companies like Nike and Apple. Now he is focused on Skidattl, his fifth startup.

“We are all getting sucked into our screens too much and forgetting about the real world. Skidattl … uses technology to pull you back into the real world by creating experiences that you can see through augmented reality on your phone,” he says.

Skidattl’s app launched in February, but you can also access it via QR codes without downloading it.

– Ryann Noelani Coules

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Lifetime Achievement Award

Winner: Dennis Teranishi, PICHTR

Dennis Teranishi’s life has been focused on two passions: agriculture and improving U.S.-Japan relations. He started as a soil chemist at Amfac, one of the Big Five companies that dominated Hawai‘i’s plantation economy, and 19 years later had worked his way up to company president.

Teranishi, 80, is now the longtime CEO and chairman of PICHTR – the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research – a nonprofit that focuses on climate change adaptation, renewable energy, technology, disaster preparedness, health care, and resource conservation.

“Most of my friends are retired, but I don’t want to retire,” he says. “I don’t consider it work, because I enjoy it so much, and I have such good people working with me that they make it so pleasant. I just can’t wait to get to the office in the morning.”

He values building a good team above other goals.

“We get so tempted to try to make more money or build a business, and we forget that the most,” he says. “There’s so much stress, even when things are going well. So if you work with bad people, or you have bad partners, or if you hire bad people, life is so much more difficult.”

He says he also serves as an advisor to other companies, specifically those that allow him to travel to Tokyo and New York.

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Student Entrepreneur of the Year

Honoring a younger member of the innovation community who has a passion for learning and the tenacious spirit of an entrepreneur.

Winner: Candide Krieger, Edukits Hawai‘i

As a teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, Candide Krieger noticed that there was a lack of resources and funding for teachers to incorporate local values and lessons into their curriculums. While studying for her master’s degree at UH Mānoa’s College of Education, Krieger entered a venture competition sponsored by the Shidler College of Business. From there, in August 2024, she launched Edukits Hawai‘i.

The nonprofit creates kits that help schools teach STEAM within the Hawai‘i Department of Education’s Nā Hopena A‘o framework.

Krieger graduated from Kaimuki High School and teaches at Jefferson, and both are Title I schools, which means they receive federal funds to support students from low-income families. Her nonprofit donates the kits to Title I schools across the Islands, with funding from UH and donations.

So far, 30 schools have been involved and 1,400 kits distributed.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Jazlen Lucas, Pūhano Hawai‘i

Jazlen Lucas’ business mission is to connect people with the feeling of home in Hawai‘i.

With Pūhano Hawai‘i, she creates stickers, air fresheners, and tumblers with local designs for her friends, family, and former classmates studying at colleges on the mainland and those who have moved away.

Lucas, who’s studying business entrepreneurship at Honolulu Community College, plans to add clothing to her product line and sell more often at local markets.

“It gives me a lot of joy and happiness to see that I can connect and form that sense of community with them through my products,” Lucas says.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Timothy Kim, Gochi

If you are not part of Gen Z, you may not understand this business. But if you are an innovator of any age, you’ll probably admire Timothy Kim’s creativity and chutzpah.

Kim is the owner of a Korean BBQ restaurant called Gochi that is currently open only on the internet. He started Gochi in Roblox, an online platform that allows people to create their own games.

“I have combined cultural authenticity with dynamic entertainment to deliver a uniquely immersive experience,” he says.

Gochi has 13 employees, over 11,000 members, and raised $20,000 for student entrepreneur scholarships.

Kim’s goal is to one day run a digital experience alongside an actual restaurant chain. But for now, Kim says, his team is putting “full attention on actually getting all those resources into the game, having a finished product and a finished brand to release first.”

– Shelby Mattos

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: People’s Choice Award

Chosen by our local community via an online poll conducted by Hawaii Business Magazine.

Winner: Roselani Aiwohi, Waiwaolani

Roselani Aiwohi was inspired while visiting Waikamoi Preserve, a Maui forest that’s home to 63 species of rare plants and 12 species of birds, seven of them endangered.

Today, she says she uses her slow fashion clothing brand, Waiwaolani, to bring more attention to Hawaiian culture, conservation, watersheds, and plants. That focus on the environment informs how she makes her clothes.

“I’m not going to be another clothing business that just adds more textile waste to the landfill,” Aiwohi says. Among her goals is finding a way to upcycle and recycle clothing to further reduce waste.

This year, she plans to add to her lineup by launching dresses, swimwear, and other apparel for the Merrie Monarch Festival. She says the mission of the business is to support nonprofits and other organizations that protect the water and plants of Hawai‘i.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Neale Asato, Asato Family Shop

Asato Family Shop offers its “local kine” sherbert – sort of guri guri-esque – in flavors reminiscent of childhoods spent in Hawai‘i. The menu, which changes every week, may include conventional flavors like strawberry and pineapple, and others like pickled mango, li hing float and cold noodles.

Co-owner Neale Asato even created a spam, eggs and rice sherbert that was sold during the Spam Festival. Asato says the family-run business’s mission is to support the community and make treats for the next generation. You can often find him alongside his parents at the Pali Highway store near Downtown Honolulu; it’s only open for a few hours a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Asato says the shop has enjoyed exponential growth since he started making the sherbert in 2017 in his home kitchen. Now he creates thousands of pints each week for sale in the family store.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Nile and Hana Dreiling, Holey Grail Donuts

All of the doughnuts at Holey Grail Donuts are created with taro, cooked in coconut oil when you order and served hot, bringing a unique twist to the beloved dessert.

The brand was launched by sibling co-owners Nile and Hana Dreiling in 2018 in a humble red trailer in Hanalei. They soon gained a cult following of people eager for new flavors that have included passion-orange-guava, miso honey and whiskey smores.

Meanwhile, the owners say they focus on sustainability and work directly with local farmers and other food producers.

They now have a store in Kaka‘ako, two food trucks on Kaua‘i and three locations in Los Angeles, and plan to continue supporting local in 2025.

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Alex and Sarah Kawakami, Alikaleo Park

Alikaleo Park combines vintage patterns and sun-protection to create activewear for keiki that encourages outdoor play in a world filled with distracting devices. Co-owners Alex and Sarah Kawakami use SPF 40 fabric to create hats, shirts, shorts and pants that protect children’s skin against the sun.

“Just being able to have that extra layer of sun protection gives you the motive to be outside and play and let kids have that childhood that is colorful and fun,” Sarah Kawakami says.

Alex comes from the same family that ran ‘Iolani Sportswear, a Hawai‘i apparel business that started over 70 years ago. The couple started overseeing that company in 2016 but paused during the pandemic to focus on the birth of their second son.

Alikaleo Park launched in 2023, inspired by the designs and legacy of Alex’s parents and grandparents.

“We’re a very family-oriented company,” Sarah Kawakami says. “We just want to make the generations before proud.”

– Shelby Mattos

Finalist: Kea Peters, Kākou Collective

One day while hiking, Kea Peters grew curious about the plants along the trail. When she got home, she searched for their names and characteristics and eventually drew them.

She later created workshops to teach others how to draw the plants and sold stationery with her Hawai‘i-inspired designs. During the pandemic, she hosted live sessions on Instagram, where each week she taught people how to draw a different plant connected to Hawai‘i.

Peters is the founder and owner of Kākou Collective, whose online and in-store lineup now includes greeting cards, stickers, tote bags, apparel and more. As the business grew to include a store in Downtown Honolulu’s Harbor Court, the events and workshops halted, but she plans to create more opportunities.

“I’m not just selling a sticker, I’m reconnecting you to your grandma or your auntie who’s no longer here,” she says.

– Shelby Mattos

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Small Business

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024

Kathryn Drury Wagner — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:00:39 +0000

The challenges of a startup business are as tough as ever, but with the growing local ecosystem of investors and new-business support systems, the green shoots of entrepreneurship are encouragingly healthy.

And for the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards, the yield this year is an impressive array of products and services among its finalists and winners.

Two of the finalists, Maui Ku‘ia Estate Chocolate and Reef.ai, illustrate the range, from craft chocolate and Isle-grown cacao to artificial intelligence-driven services that strengthen a client’s revenue potential.

The Islands’ entrepreneurial sector has grown, says Meli James, president of the Hawai‘i Venture Capital Association, sponsor of the awards. James is also co-founder of Mana Up, a Hawai‘i-based accelerator that helps consumer product companies ascend to the next level.

“I would definitely say since I moved home about 11 years ago and joined the organization as president and board member, there’s been a heavy increase in the interest in entrepreneurship,” James says.

Covid indirectly enabled some of that increase, she says, by spurring advances in technology and its uses: Remote sales and conferencing platforms, for example, have freed startups from some of the capital-intensive brick-and-mortar requirements for new businesses. And virtual assistants and other digital tools are relieving businesses of even more of those startup chores.

The global pandemic also forced a pause in economic activity and a disruption in employment, prompting many to strike out in new directions, James says.

“Not only did people have an opportunity to do a little bit of a life shift, whether that was by choice or not … many people had an opportunity to take that hobby or that interest and really start a company,” she adds. “I think that was good for small business and entrepreneurship.”

Chenoa Farnsworth, one of the leaders in the local venture capital sector, is also a founding partner of Blue Startups, on the team with Henk Rogers and Maya Rogers of Tetris fame. She says that because Hawai‘i was seen as a safe place to be, the pandemic brought “an influx of talent and experience that we didn’t necessarily have before.”

“It brings a little more critical mass to the ecosystem,” Farnsworth says. “There are now other people out there working on the same thing: You are not alone.”

However, she adds, the jury is still out on whether this new momentum is a blip or will have long-term effects on Hawai‘i’s entrepreneurial landscape.

Blue Startups focuses on assisting new technology-centered businesses. Its mentorship program works with roughly 10 companies at a time, for 12 weeks in Honolulu and one in San Francisco.

“The reason I’m a big believer in the technology space is it’s one of the few industries that pays enough where we can afford to work here,” Farnsworth says. She points to the Turno platform, which helps to automate interactions between cleaners and vacation-rental hosts, as a success story. Turno leveraged the Isles’ tourism industry on its path to global potential.

Among the company’s newer initiatives, Farnsworth cites its outreach to the Japanese government to bring Japanese companies, and their additional capital, to Hawai‘i.

“We are well connected to Asia and we can leverage that connection,” she says. “Finally, that is beginning to bear fruit.”

The state’s relatively small population makes it hard to get critical mass for a new industry, she adds, but she says she’s encouraged by the innovative thinking of its younger generations.

Sandra Fujiyama is on the front lines witnessing the advent of future entrepreneurs, and she agrees. Fujiyama is executive director of PACE, the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship at UH Mānoa’s Shidler College of Business, which offers an extracurricular menu of entrepreneurship programs and mentorships for students in all majors.

Fujiyama sees Hawai‘i’s funding ecosystem beginning to flourish. And that ecosystem was recently enhanced by the arrival of Hi-CAP, a state program that funnels federal money to new startups.

Among the startups Fujiyama points to is Pear Suite, a software platform that supports community healthcare services. It started at PACE and has rolled out nationally.

Problem-solving is crucial for entrepreneurs, and it’s being taught to young students now, she says.

“We’re really trying to empower and educate our students on what we call the entrepreneurial mindset,” Fujiyama says. “And if they can go on to build a business utilizing those skills, then wonderful, right?”

–Vicki Viotti

Entrepreneur of the Year

Startup Paradise Champion

Social Impact Entrepreneur of the Year

Deal of the Year

Lifetime Achievement Award

Ag/Clean Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) Entrepreneur of the Year

People’s Choice Award

Investor of the Year

Intrapreneur of the Year

Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

Student Entrepreneur of the Year

Island Innovator of the Year

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Entrepreneur of the Year

Awarded to the individual or team that has gone above expectations with their company, and is a clear example to other entrepreneurs.

Winner: Alexis Akiona, LexBreezy Hawai‘i

When I first started the company, it was just me and my then-boyfriend, now husband, packing orders from our one bedroom in Kalihi,” says Alexis Akiona about the modern alohawear company she founded in 2016. Today, LexBreezy Hawai‘i has a team of 20 and two stores: one in Kailua and one at Ala Moana Center.

“I’m just a small-town Hilo girl making waves on O‘ahu and I’m honored to be Entrepreneur of the Year,” she says. “As a Native Hawaiian, I’m proud to be the voice for a lot of up-and-coming mana wāhine who are looking to become entrepreneurs.”

Akiona “has transformed her startup into a high-demand local fashion brand, revolutionizing the perception of local Hawaiian wear,” wrote the judges of the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards. “In addition, she generously opens the door for other designers to join her consortium, fostering synergism and creating a platform for them to thrive.”

In 2023, Akiona expanded the reach of LexBreezy Hawai‘i by attending trade shows in Las Vegas, Japan and New York City. “It’s our chance to go and showcase what alohawear really is, and what it means to us, and the traditions behind it,” says Akiona. “It’s a whole different ballgame.”

She has also launched a streetwear component, “focusing on what alohawear means in the 21st century. I wanted something that inspires the younger generation, and that is streetwear. I began my career in streetwear, so it’s full circle to incorporate it in.”

Akiona says she helped raise more than $100,000 to aid Maui families after the wildfires, via an exclusive release print that benefited Maui, as well as donations from each online purchase. “We worked with Maui Rise and donated directly to the families,” she says. “I wanted to step up.”

She also works with the UH Foundation on the Lexbreezy Scholarship, which supports students enrolled in fashion technology or cosmetology programs. In fall 2023, 10 students received financial assistance.

“I always wanted to work for myself,” says Akiona. “I wanted to create a legacy. I would tell the younger generation, ‘Figure out what you want and go after it.’

” Stay tuned for another store opening in 2024, Akiona says. “We are fueled for that, as well as focusing on taking care of my team and the community and looking for even more ways to give back.”

–Kathryn Drury Wagner

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Startup Paradise Champion

Someone who consistently contributes to the success of Hawai‘i’s innovation community.

Winner: Susan Yamada, Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship (PACE), Shidler College, University of Hawaii

After working for startups in Silicon Valley for 17 years, Susan Yamada moved home to Hawai‘i in 2001. She’s amazed to see how far the Islands’ innovation ecosystem has come in the ensuing two decades.

Yamada is chairman of the board of the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship at UH’s Shidler College of Business. PACE offers mentorships, training and resources to students across the UH system and encourages the commercialization of ideas bubbling out of UH.

When she first took a position there in 2008, PACE had about three programs. “We didn’t have money, but we had a community that gave generously of their time. When we needed judges, coaches, they were always there. That’s the beautiful part of where we live,” Yamada says.

“Now we offer 20 programs. Monetarily, we have earned the trust and respect of our donors. I wouldn’t say money is falling out of the trees, but donors know if we do something, it will be done right and professionally.”

The judges of the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards told Hawaii Business Magazine in an email that Yamada’s “leadership at PACE has been instrumental, transforming it into a hub of innovation with RISE and other programs and initiatives that have invested over $10 million in services, awards and scholarships.” It’s that leadership, they wrote, that earned her the title of Startup Paradise Champion.

RISE is a newly opened 374- bed, live-learn-work innovation facility. “The challenge is that the university is so siloed – you have your business students over here and engineers over there,” says Yamada. “Some of the best ideas, but worst business plans, come from four engineers. Getting engineers with our business students, they can work out the business model and then start a phased approach to a company.”

RISE is open to graduate and undergraduate students in all majors.

“It’s not only about startups, but also getting students to think about how to look at a problem, how to figure out solutions, how to talk to each other – skills the 21st-century workforce must possess. Innovation and technology are our future, and we really need to invest in it.”

–Kathryn Drury Wagner

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Social Impact Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur and company that substantially contributes to helping solve some of Hawai‘i’s toughest problems.

Winner: Jeff Gilbreath, Hawai‘i Community Lending

Since 2014, Hawai‘i Community Lending has issued more than $42 million in grants and loans to support affordable housing for more than 4,300 Native Hawaiian and other local families.

“We have a deeper level of knowledge of transactions on Hawaiian Homelands in particular, with team members who reside on Hawaiian Homelands themselves, helping others to get on the land and stay there,” says Jeff Gilbreath, founder and executive director of the community development nonprofit.

HCL’s role is to help families overcome financial barriers to home ownership.

Gilbreath says he is inspired by the hope expressed by people who come through the program, and ultimately, in their successes.

“It’s like seeing individual sovereignty in action – to see families years down the road, their health changing for the better, better family interactions, connections to social networks and brighter opportunities.”

–Cynthia Sweeney

Finalist: Carlo Liquido, Circular Design Internship

An entrepreneur and company that substantially contributes to helping solve some of Hawai‘i’s toughest problems.

Hawai‘i is not yet a business hub for the tech world, but Carlo Liquido is taking a ground-up approach that he hopes will change that.

“Let’s build the talent, and then the companies will come,” he says.

With more applicants than it can currently handle, Circular Design Internship pairs job-seeking software designers with mentors, both locally and on the mainland. Its partners include Amazon and Shopify on the mainland and Blue Startups in Hawai‘i.

Liquido and seven other designers run the all-volunteer operation. Over the last few months, they have supported 19 projects, with 25 interns and 19 volunteer mentors across 18 companies.

“Five years ago, I never would have started this,” Liquido says. “But a silver lining to the pandemic is that there has been a paradigm shift with regard to remote work. Now, we have the ability to live in Hawai‘i and make a San Francisco salary, which was not really possible before.”

–Cynthia Sweeney

Finalist: Julie Morikawa, ClimbHI

This past year, ClimbHI has engaged more than 170,000 students across the state, from kindergarten through college, with 600 businesses.

ClimbHI connects teachers and businesses with events, platforms, and portals, providing job opportunities for students and potential recruits for employers.

Its flexibility enables ClimbHI to respond to the greatest needs of our state’s workforce, says Julie Morikawa, the organization’s founder and president.

“It’s literally a revolutionary educational tool. We’re trying to create economic self-sufficiency for our keiki, to stop exporting our number one resource, our talent and aloha spirit, to other places,” Morikawa says.

In response to the Maui fires, Morikawa says, ClimbHI created an emergency response leadership training program for students. Graduates “emerge as prepared leaders, not just for Hawai‘i’s sake, but for our entire nation and beyond to serve a new model going forward, of how you can come out of tragedies better than when you went into it.”

–Cynthia Sweeney

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Deal of the Year

Recognizes the local company that received the largest financial deal in the past year

Winner: Brenton Grimes and Corey Goff, Reef.ai

Brent Grimes

Net revenue retention measures a company’s ability to retain customers and expand revenue from them. Innovative technology from Reef.ai is able to better leverage the data around that key measure of business success, says Brent Grimes, co-founder and CEO of the Hawai‘i-based company that combines “the best of human and artificial intelligence.”

Reef’s success in attracting investors and its commitment to Hawai‘i are why the judges of the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards picked it for Deal of the Year.

“Raising $5.1 million from investors in 2023 is remarkable given the tough fundraising environment,” the judges told Hawaii Business Magazine in an email. “Reef has a demonstrated commitment to Hawai‘i: Its founders are based here, a number of its investors are Hawai‘i-based and the company is committed to hiring locally.”

Reef sells mostly to other software technology companies, Grimes says, “and they have a lot of data about how their customers are interacting with their products.” Reef’s artificial intelligence is applied to that data and it provides analysis and guidance, he says.

“Reef can isolate those customers that are showing the most signs of risk early on, so they can intervene,” he says.

“Another example is on the growth. Many companies will introduce new products and want to sell those new products into their existing customer base. But most of them don’t have the tools to know who the best customers are to focus on.”

Grimes says Reef’s clients range from early-stage startups to larger organizations with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Corey Goff

Reef.ai was founded three years ago by Grimes and Corey Goff, now its chief technology officer. Grimes previously was an executive with San Francisco-based software company MuleSoft. Reef was born in part out of his experience there.

“We were just following our gut instincts initially and doing an OK job,” he says, “but we weren’t always making great decisions about how we allocated our resources.

“So we pulled a bunch of data about our customers and then aggregated the data and did a simple scoring model as a way to really start to prioritize customers more effectively.”

While acknowledging some of the challenges of doing business in Hawai‘i, Grimes says Reef drew investors specifically seeking to invest in the Islands.

“People really believed in the company, but also were very interested in helping a business with ties to Hawai‘i take the next step.”

–Vicki Viotti

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Lifetime Achievement Award

Winner: Nake’u Awai, Nake’u Awai Designs

Nake‘u Awai, 85, is often described as the “Grandfather of Hawai‘i Fashion.” During 50 years in the field, the images on his designs have become iconic: maidenhair fern, kukui, lauhala fans, maile. Every year, buyers come to see what “Uncle” has conceived in the Houghtailing Street shop where he has worked for four decades.

Fashion is nothing without change, and it’s the same with aloha attire, Awai says.

“It’s changed, definitely. The silhouette … the colors. Because there was a time when alohawear was all neon-bright, but now there are subtleties where fashions are coming out in grays and beiges.”

Awai’s creations hang throughout the shop: prints in muted shades on fabric from cotton to seersucker in a range of pastels, and garments with splashes of brighter colors mixed in. Familiarity and novelty are both present.

What ensures all of it remains Hawaiian, he says, is the use of images that are more local than commercial. Awai compares his approach with that of another noted Island designer, Allen Akina, who also returned to Hawai‘i after time away.

“We both came back. He wanted to appeal to Waikīkī and tourists,” he says. “And I wanted to design clothes for local people.”

For his five decades of fashion accomplishments, Awai has earned the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Nake‘u Awai stands as the visionary pioneer who with humble grace was the first Native Hawaiian designer to use native and indigenous floral in prints,” the judges wrote in an email to Hawaii Business Magazine.

“Awai opened the doors of Hawaiian fashion to the masses. For five decades, his unwavering creative spirit and determination have forged a path for succeeding local designers.”

After graduating from Kamehameha Schools and the University of Washington, where he studied theater and dance, Awai became a professional Broadway-style dancer, appearing in touring productions and TV variety shows.

He nurtured his interest in fashion in costume shops, then came home and started his new career: Carol & Mary stores were the launchpad for his first line under the Nake‘u Awai Designs label.

And, while Awai says he doesn’t miss performing, showbiz plays a big role in his fashion shows. Instead of the classic runway walk, he says, he chooses local models who act out characters he assigns them. Search YouTube for “An Occasional Man Nake‘u Awai” to see an example.

“If they playact, they can go through the whole segment without being nervous,” he says.

–Vicki Viotti

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Agriculture/Clean Tech Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur and company whose technology supports a greener future or helps farmers with innovative agricultural practices.

Winner: Gunars Valkirs, Maui Ku‘ia

Gunars Valkirs suspects some of his interest in fruit trees— cacao, specifically — is in his genes. His father was a farmer before World War II altered his path and Valkirs himself “was always growing things.”

Valkirs had been head of R&D for Biosite, a diagnostics firm in California that was sold in 2007.

He and his wife moved to Hawai‘i and invested in what became Maui Ku‘ia Estate, a maker of award-winning craft chocolate. The on-ramp was getting involved in a UH cacao field trial.

“As soon as I realized I didn’t know anything about it, being a scientist I wanted to learn,” he says.

The company is also about giving back: The couple created the Makana Aloha Foundation, which receives 100% of the estate’s net profits, including what is raised through factory tours, to support local nonprofits.

–Vicki Viotti

Finalist: Emma McCaulley, Sweet Land Farm

Even after Emma McCaulley was well into her studies in culinary arts at Leeward Community College, she hadn’t left the farm far behind. Her mother was part of Wahiawā’s Peterson family and worked on the well-known Petersons’ Upland Farm.

McCaulley found her own calling of raising goats while doing a summer job at Surfing Goat Dairy on Maui. She has owned Sweet Land Farm in Waialua since 2010.

“I enjoyed what I was doing rather than being in a kitchen all day,” says McCaulley. “This was what I was supposed to do.”

The farm, 87 acres that she owns in fee, has about 300 goats. Her culinary skills helped develop a product line that includes various cheeses, caramel, gelato, soaps and lotions. The items are sold at the farm’s onsite store and wholesaled to restaurants and hotels.

–Vicki Viotti

Finalist: Yishan Wong, Terraformation

Terraformation’s goals are clear, and they’re as big as the Earth.

“Our mission is to accelerate the reforestation of the world, that is to say, the restoration of native biodiverse forests, because we believe that this is good for people, communities, ecosystems and ultimately as a solution to climate change,” says Yishan Wong, Terraformation’s founder and CEO.

The company is set up as a Delaware C corporation, he says, because that enables raising of private funding more quickly than a nonprofit. Speed is of the essence, he says.

Terraformation partners with companies and organizations worldwide, tapping forestry and science experts to design projects.

These projects span the globe from Ecuador to Tanzania. Hawai‘i-based projects include a Bishop Museum seed bank and Pacific Flight at Kaupalaoa, which aims to restore a native forest ecosystem in North Kohala that was destroyed by logging and grazing.

–Vicki Viotti

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Consumer Packaged Goods Entrepreneur

Presented to the entrepreneur whose CPG company has consistently seen month-over-month growth in revenue and customers.

Winner: Sandra Gibson, Sea Salts of Hawai‘i

Sandra Gibson, who started Sea Salts of Hawai‘i 12 years ago, considers herself part of a team. Altogether, 17 people, most of them Native Hawaiian, work at the harvesting site in Kona and in the production kitchen on O‘ahu.

Gibson says regulation of food products means the salts are processed differently from old ways. Salt water is drawn from deep ocean streams that may have migrated over great distances, and then evaporates naturally, but in a contained environment.

“Everybody who’s on the Kona team grew up in Kona, and there are salt ponds there, and a strong cultural connection. … They’re certainly very knowledgeable when it comes to the salt traditions and the salt culture in Hawai‘i.”

The company produces gourmet salts and supplements such as magnesium, nigari (used to make tofu) and AstaFactor (astaxanthin, an antioxidant).

–Vicki Viotti

Finalist: Ethan West, Piko Provisions

Ethan West got his MBA and started Piko Provisions with an eye on the niche baby-food market. But it was his family’s farming history, in Maine and Rhode Island, that helped drive the decision to source it locally in Hawai‘i.

“A lot of it has to do with honoring the past,” says West. “I come from six generations of family farmers. … Looking back on it now, there’s nothing else that I would rather be a part of.”

West partners with the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative and GoFarm Hawai‘i to produce the ‘ulu (breadfruit), Okinawan sweet potato, banana, taro, pineapple, kabocha (a winter squash sometimes called Japanese pumpkin), avocado and kale in Piko’s three puree blends, for infants 6 months and up. More products for younger and older babies are in development.

And a new taste tester is arriving soon: a baby daughter.

–Vicki Viotti

Finalist: Leala Humbert, Ua Body

Leala Humbert’s line of botanical products was born out of her late mother’s similar skin-care business, Island Herbal, and both use plant-based materials and florals. Her mother learned about the field while living in Japan and France and then brought it to Hawai‘i, where she also worked in lei making.

Humbert named her business Ua Body – ua meaning “rain.” Locally sourced components include mango butter, macadamia and kukui oils, and sandalwood.

Glass packaging and the avoidance of plastics are part of the brand.

“When we relaunched in 2020, we had this slogan, ‘Skin care should be simple,’ ” she says. “It encompasses a lot, and touches on sustainability as well. In this day and age, I don’t understand why a company would not try to be as sustainable as possible.”

–Vicki Viotti

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: People’s Choice Award

Chosen by our local community via an online poll conducted by Hawaii Business Magazine.

The poll asked voters to pick the startup that they think best represents the interests and goals of Hawai‘i’s Startup Paradise, one that serves as an example for others based on its products, successes, popularity and support of fellow community members.

Winner: Tiara Delgado, Kahiau Poke & Provisions

In 2015, Kahiau Poke & Provisions was a side hustle for Tiara and Hinano Delgado, with customers flocking to their Pearlridge Farmers Market tent for fresh fish and flavorful jerkies.

But Tiara says they felt constrained because they shared a commercial kitchen, so in 2018, they opened their own kitchen on Smith Street in downtown Honolulu. The site wasn’t meant to be a storefront but evolved into one as customers sought their products beyond farmers market hours.

Tragically, Hinano died during the Covid pandemic in 2020. “He always believed in me and some of my crazy ideas,” Tiara says of her other half.

Tiara continues his legacy by honoring the company’s mission and name – in Hawaiian, kahiau means to give generously with the heart. It’s a name her customers understand, too: She says they’ve supported her through some dark moments and many have volunteered to assist with the business, when needed.

“My amazing loyal customers supported me, allowing the business to continue.”

Kahiau Poke & Provisions’ products include poke poi, ‘ahi spreads, chile pepper water and various flavors of fish jerky. On the company’s catering menu are platters of poke and sushi.

–Cathy George

Finalist: Deron and Kit Furukawa, Maui Chili Chili Oil

Maui Chili Chili Oil got its start in 2020 when Deron and Kit Furukawa spent many hours experimenting in their kitchen during the Covid lockdown.

By December 2020, Deron had concocted a recipe for a chili oil flavored with Chinese spices, Szechuan peppers, crunchy garlic bits and onions. And their business was born.

The couple sold their products for a year at local markets, then in 2022 landed a contract to sell at Foodland stores.

Deron’s original recipe is the baseline for three flavors: “Mild Kine Spicy,” “Medium Kine Spicy” and “Spicy Kine Spicy.” A fourth flavor, “Yikes! Kine Spicy” is sold online only

. The early days were marked by trial and error, with “broken bottles in shipping, burnt ingredients while cooking and challenges in sourcing materials,” says Kit. She calls herself the “more aggressive entrepreneur, charging at every opportunity,” while Deron is “more grounded, realistic and calculated in his moves.”

This year they plan to test new markets at the Foodex Japan convention.

They continue to volunteer in Maui relief efforts and donate a portion of sales to wildfire victims. “The community work done in 2023 was so substantial that running Maui Chili Chili Oil in parallel was an achievement on its own,” Kit says.

–Cathy George

Finalist: Ola and Puna Trip, Liquid Life and Hā Tonics

Ola and Puna Trip founded Liquid Life in 2015, a chain of health cafes in Kea‘au, Waimea and Hilo, selling coldpressed juices, salads and sandwiches made with nutritious foods grown in the Islands.

But the couple is now pivoting: In March, Liquid Life will rebrand as “Hā Tonics,” specializing in shelf-stable products, and the rebranded logo is expected to roll out in the Hilo cafe. They also sold the Kea‘au and Waimea cafes to other young entrepreneurs.

The rebranding aligns with the company’s original mission to heal and educate customers about the nutritional wisdom of traditional Hawaiian medical practitioners, known as lā‘au lapa‘au.

The Tripps are passionate about sharing the knowledge of their ancestors. Ola’s paternal great-grandmother, Anita Pua, was a traditional healer. Puna’s maternal great-grandmother was a curandera, a traditional Latin American healer. “My mother juiced for me since I was a toddler,” she says.

Puna usually leads the kitchen, and Ola manages the office but occasionally, they swap roles to do “whatever that needs to be done.” In addition to the Hilo cafe, their products are sold at Kilauea General Store, Auberge Mauna Lani, Kohala Grown Market, Island Greens, Plant Based Foods and Umekes.

–Cathy George

Finalist: Adrienne-Joy and Jeremy Jataas, UBAE

Adrienne-Joy and Jeremy Jataas sold desserts made from the purple yam called ube out of their van until one day in 2015 when they went all-in, she says.

Today, they own and operate the dessert company UBAE, which stands for Ube Before Anything Else.

Crinkle cookies and mini cheesecakes are the fastest-selling items at UBAE’s store in the City Square Shopping Center in Kalihi. The products are also sold in grocery, convenience and drug stores; the Navy Exchange; and at KTA stores on Hawai‘i Island. UBAE items also have appeared at pop-up events in Japan.

Sales, production, packaging and distribution are handled by the couple and their 13 employees. UBAE recently acquired a production space in the same neighborhood as the Kalihi store, and Adrienne-Joy says further expansion plans could be announced this year. Cookies and cheesecakes aside, the company also crafts their ube takes on leche flan, sponge cake, chiffon cake, rolls with coconut cream, and softserve dairy-free ice cream.

What fuels the couple’s success and growth is their partnership. “Jeremy is more hands-on, while I’m more in the background and in the books,” Adrienne-Joy says. Their motto from day one: “No risk, no reward!”

–Cathy George

Finalist: Kamalani Dung, Keenan Shigematsu and Micah Yoshino, Hawaii Candy Factory (Noms)

Kamalani Dung

Hawaii Candy Factory’s business concept is sweet, sour and surprisingly simple.

The company says it purchases candies in bulk, coats them in li hing mui powder at a commercial kitchen and warehouse in Kapolei, then sells the hand-mixed sweets under the brand Noms.

What helps sales is Noms’ packaging. It stands out in candy aisles thanks to the bright hue and colorful caricatures created by the company’s in-house designer, Fred Zaha.

Keenan Shigematsu

The company says it launched Noms in March 2021 during the Covid pandemic with a straightforward mission: to “create snacks and holiday products that people of Hawai‘i can look forward to.”

In addition to school and team fundraisers, Noms are sold from a shopping mall kiosk, at convenience stores and drugstores, and retailers focused on the visitor market.

To expedite manufacturing, Hawaii Candy Factory’s executive team created an

Micah Yoshino

inventory management and ordering system customized to their needs; the system uses low-code, web-based platforms and databases.

Hawaii Candy Factory’s sales grew nearly 150% from 2022 to 2023, according to the company. This year, chocolate-based products are scheduled to launch.

–Cathy George

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Investor of the Year

Individual or entity that has invested substantially in the Hawai‘i startup ecosystem.

Winner: Donavan Kealoha, Startup Capital Ventures x SBI Fund

Paying it forward comes naturally to Donavan Kealoha.

“You get a little, you give a lot. That’s how it is in Hawai‘i,” says Kealoha. He is a managing director at Startup Capital Ventures x SBI Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, and Honolulu, and an entrepreneur himself. Kealoha’s first interaction with the firm came about 15 years ago, when it supported a startup he co-founded.

Kealoha joined Startup Capital Ventures in 2014, and more recently began working with its third and latest fund, a joint venture with Japanese financial services SBI. He splits his time between Hawai‘i and the Bay Area.

“I try to leverage the network I have,” he says, “to bring insights and learning, and help people develop business plans or fundraising pitches.”

Because the firm focuses on early-stage investments, he says, “You’re really looking at the person, at their expertise and passion, and if we align in values. Have they identified a unique problem and a unique solution to it? Are they going to be able to get early employees to join their mission? They’ve got to have that – what do the kids say? – the rizz.”

Successful investments include WhiteHat Security, a Maui-launched tech company that was later acquired for a nine-figure sum, and Shifted Energy, a Honolulu startup focused on energy solutions.

Kealoha is also a co-founder of the Purple Mai‘a Foundation, a business accelerator program created to uplift Native Hawaiian entrepreneurs. “That was in response to being a Native Hawaiian and wanting to see Hawaiians in particular in this space; I wanted to help diversify the system,” he says.

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards judges told Hawaii Business Magazine that they picked Kealoha and his firm for Investor of the Year because of their track record. “For over two decades, Startup Capital Ventures has been a driving force in Hawai‘i’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, and the new SCV x SBI Fund reflects the continued commitment to support innovation here,” the judges wrote in an email.

“In addition, Donavan’s remarkable contributions extend to the community through the Purple Mai‘a Foundation, which is dedicated to empowering high-opportunity youth in underserved Hawai‘i communities.”

–Kathryn Drury Wagner

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Intrapreneur of the Year

Honors someone who works in a large organization but advocates for innovation and entrepreneurial thinking.

Winner: Micah Kāne, Hawai‘i Community Foundation

First covid, then the Maui wildfires. The Hawai‘i Community Foundation is navigating the most challenging era in its history. “And we’re still in the middle of this,” says Micah Kāne, CEO and president of HCF. “This is an extremely complex disaster. It’s deep, long, emotionally charged, politically charged.”

More than 250,000 donors from around the world have given to the Maui Strong Fund, propelling HCF into a global spotlight. “We’re a different organization than we were,” says Kāne. “A lot of evolution had to happen in a short amount of time.”

He’s proud of the people on his IT team, who worked 24/7 to fix crashing systems; of the management team that conducted 1 a.m. Zoom interviews with press in different time zones; of the overall organization’s “willingness to grind, at a time when it’s really hard.”

HCF’s values align internally and with those of its community partners, he says. That synergy doesn’t develop overnight, he notes, and it’s served the organization well in these times of extreme pressure.

Even before the fires, Kāne “demonstrated innovative thinking and positive impact in the community through his leadership at HCF,” wrote the judges of the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards, who chose him as Intrapreneur of the Year, an annual award that goes to a person with an entrepreneurial mindset who operates within a larger organization. “Expanding stakeholder partnerships and incorporating the CHANGE initiative, he expanded the scope of HCF to have a broader impact.”

Past models for philanthropy, Kāne says, aren’t working. “If someone is hungry, you want to feed them; if someone needs shelter, you want to house them. But if the pipeline is growing faster than philanthropy can support, you have to work upstream … to deal with the real issues.”

For example, HCF has joined the Maui Interim Housing Plan, a collective of government and nonprofit groups aiming to create a pool of 3,000 stable housing units on Maui. “That was a huge milestone for us,” says Kāne. “The way that disaster programs are structured is rapid response and somewhat uncoordinated. You almost have to hit pause and get everyone around the table to figure out what resources you have and what you’re good at or not good at.

“The opportunity going forward for Hawai‘i is incredible, to use this as a way to rethink affordability and how we treat the environment. We can revisit how we manage and engage communities in developing the future vision for a place – rethinking people and place, and how they both can thrive.”

–Kathryn Drury Wagner

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

Honoring the entrepreneur who has created technology and innovation to make our lives better.

Winner: Ricky Uy, Komodo

Ricky Uy believes people are at their best when they play.

He is the co-founder of Komodo, a company based in Honolulu and Tokyo that creates and publishes video games and creative software products.

“We try to be a company of consequence. We create products that have elements of play with the goal to empower, educate and entertain people,” says Uy.

This April, Komodo will roll out Niuhi (the Hawaiian word for tiger sharks and other man-eating sharks), a program designed to inspire people to learn another language by sharing their favorite manga comics. Players can connect, form a community and translate the stories.

Uy says many people begin to learn a language, but it’s hard to stay motivated to achieve fluency.

“Fluency in a language is where there are major life rewards. Breaking down language barriers is a big key because otherwise you end up with siloed communities that don’t really get to engage with one another.”

–Cynthia Sweeney

Finalist: Amber Imai-Hong, Luke Clements, Christopher Amendola and Frances Zhu, Mahina Aerospace

HokuSat, a small satellite built and sold by Mahina Aerospace, is ready for space flight, and might put Hawai‘i on the map in the small satellite industry, says Amber Imai-Hong.

“I really hope we can build this high-tech industry in Hawai‘i to offset the tourist industry and provide a little more economic stability to the state,” says Imai-Hong, who is CEO of Mahina Aerospace, a spinoff of the Hawai‘i Space Lab at UH Mānoa.

Mahina’s four-person team developed software and hardware for HokuSat at UH Mānoa. Manufacturing takes place primarily in the U.S., and assembly occurs in Honolulu.

Uses for the CubeSats include science research, educational projects and commercial ventures.

Since January 2023, Mahina has delivered more than a dozen satellite chips to universities across the U.S., which are used as course materials to help build aerospace programs.

–Cynthia Sweeney

Finalist: Mina Singson-Brightman, Sebastian Borys and Kim Andreello, 40Hammocks

Mina Singson-Brightman

As the owner of two destination event planning companies, Mina Singson-Brightman knows the challenges that large groups face in finding accommodations in Hawai‘i.

“They can spend hours online researching accommodations and activities,” she says. “I realized there should be an app to make the booking experience easier.”

Sebastian Borys

Singson-Brightman and her two partners built 40Hammocks, a free platform for groups to book premium hotel accommodations.

“These groups want an overall experience they can remember, so we focus on four- and five-star hotels,” she says.

The app also lets group members track their hotel bookings, and communicate with other members, such as with announcements.

Kim Andreello

Since launching the platform in August, 40Hammocks says it has put together contracts with hotels on O‘ahu totaling nearly $100,000.

This year, 40Hammocks plans to expand to Las Vegas; Aspen, Colorado; and Austin, Texas; as well as popular destinations in California including Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Napa Valley.

–Cynthia Sweeney

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Student Entrepreneur of the Year

Honoring a younger member of the innovative community who has a passion for learning and the tenacious spirit of an entrepreneur.

Winner: Amelia Stucker and Adam Sullivan, Zingipop Sodaworks

In a beverage market saturated with beer and hard drinks, Zingipop Sodaworks aims to fill a niche with nonalcoholic soda.

Zingipop’s co-owners, current UH student Amelia Stucker and past UH student Adam Sullivan, make and package the sodas in a warehouse in Kalihi and sell them to boutique hotels, coworking spaces and small restaurants on O‘ahu. They recently purchased two new tanks that allow them to double their capacity to 600 gallons and produce four flavors of soda, including fan favorite Ginger Lilikoi.

Stucker says Zingipop is 100% locally sourced; each can’s label features local farms that provide ingredients. “We want to let our customers know where their food is grown,” she says.

Stucker has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a certificate in entrepreneurship from Kapi‘olani Community College, and she’s on track to earn an associate degree in accounting from KCC.

–Cathy George

Finalist: Dani Pasion, Illicitlover

Dani Pasion’s fascination with “cute, dainty car products” led her to launch Illicitlover, an e-commerce store (illicitloverjp.com) that sells air fresheners for vehicles.

She says the company’s name stems from her personal experiences. “I’ve always felt that I had so much love to give and would get overwhelmed by these feelings. … I first started this small business as a way to cope with these feelings during a tough time in one of my past relationships … I focused this energy into art and this business.”

She designs each version of the air fresheners and sends the art to an off-island manufacturer. The whimsical designs reflect Pasion’s childhood, much of which she spent at car shows, surrounded by customized classic vehicles. One design, Turbo the Duck, consistently sells out, she says.

Pasion is on track to graduate this summer with a marketing and entrepreneurship degree from UH Mānoa.

–Cathy George

Finalist: Tahiya Kahaulelio, Kahaulelio Candle Co.

Kahaulelio Candle Co. specializes in candles infused with the scents of mango, coconut, papaya, hibiscus and other local favorites.

Tahiya Kahaulelio says she was inspired to launch the company in 2020 by her love of the Islands and the rich heritage passed to her by her Nigerian mother and Native Hawaiian father.

All of her candles are handmade with coconut beeswax, she says. Coconut wax is costlier than the soy wax typically used in candle-making but has “the cleanest burn of any candle wax available and plays a significant role in decreasing my company’s carbon footprint,” Kahaulelio says.

Kahaulelio is enrolled in the environmental and interior design program at Chaminade University of Honolulu and is scheduled to graduate in 2026. She says that running a business since high school has been demanding but worthwhile. “It taught me self-discipline, among many things.”

–Cathy George

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2024: Island Innovator of the Year

Celebrating innovations that help Hawaiʻi solve a major problem in the community, the ocean or the ʻāina.

Winner: Claire Sullivan and Rob Barreca, Farm Link Hawaiʻi

How can you make healthy, locally grown food affordable and accessible while still ensuring that producers make a living? Achieving both objectives isn’t easy, but it’s how Farm Link Hawai‘i thrives.

It is a local online grocery that provides customers on O‘ahu with next-day delivery. But ultimately, its mission is to make Hawai‘i healthier by supporting diversified agriculture.

Rob Barreca

Rob Barreca, the company’s founder and chief technology officer, launched Farm Link Hawai’i in 2015. Most food production businesses in Hawai‘i are very small, he says, so he sought to use technology to spur innovation and collaboration with the local food system. “The other angle we have leaned into more heavily now is realizing the disparity of access for food. Fresh local food can’t be for the restaurants only, or fancy people only.”

Claire Sullivan

Claire Sullivan, CEO at Farm Link Hawai‘i, says diversified agriculture benefits Hawai‘i in multiple ways, including: lessening economic dependency on tourism; reducing factors that lead to climate change; and improving human health, especially among vulnerable populations.

“Under Claire and Rob’s leadership, Farm Link is providing Hawai’i producers with a supportive market and ensuring that everyone on O‘ahu has access to the same great food, no matter where they live,” the Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards judges wrote to Hawaii Business Magazine.

For example, Farm Link Hawai‘i accepts SNAP, and beneficiaries of the program automatically get 50% off local produce and poi via the Da Bux program, and free delivery. Beginning this year, the company will be able to process SNAP transactions online, rather than having customers physically swipe their cards when food is delivered.

And in March 2024, deliveries will increase to seven days a week.

“We are also expanding selection, so we can truly replace a trip to the grocery store,” Sullivan says. “Because we do 100% foods that are locally grown, raised or fished in Hawai‘i, we have to woo producers into the marketplace, or get them to add products, and also support aspiring folks. We think of this as supply building rather than passive supply taking – to build that availability together, in both volume and selection. Our growth is intertwined with that of the grower community.”

How will they know they’ve achieved success? “When you are eating 90% local food and not even thinking about it,” says Barreca.

–Kathryn Drury Wagner

Categories: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Small Business

Entrepreneurship Archives - Hawaii Business Magazine

Hawai‘i’s Young Pragmatists Are Choosing Trades Over College and Making Six Figures

More money, less debt

Mechatronics: demand exceeds supply

RadTech: a reverse pipeline

AERO: training super mechanics

An apprenticeship changed his life

Alternate on-the-job training routes

Reaching the other 50%

Early results are promising

A troubled economy

Reviving Hawaiʻi’s Lei Industry One Flower at a Time

History of Lei in Hawaiʻi

Matching Price with Value

How to Grow Your Business? Waste Money

Hawaiʻi CEOs Christine Camp and Micah Kāne turn missteps into milestones

A Master Woodworker Makes Furniture That Endures

Hawai‘i’s Social Media Stars

Table of Contents

Hyram

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The Hawaii Vacation Guide

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How Hawai‘i Women Can Overcome Obstacles and Build Thriving Businesses

Extra Challenges

Is It Venus or a Satellite? A Local Astronomer Helps People Read the Night Sky.

Inspiration

Turning Point

Parents Become Kids

Hawaiian Culture

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025

Table of Contents

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Entrepreneur of the Year

Winner: Alexia Akbay, Symbrosia

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Agriculture/Clean Tech Entrepreneur

Winner: Kaiulani Odom, Hawai‘i Good Food Alliance

Finalist: Kerry Kakazu, Metrogrow Hawaii

Finalist: Judiah Mcroberts, Kaua‘i Hemp Co.

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Consumer Packaged Goods Entrepreneur

Winner: Caesar and Gina Ho, Hawaiian Soda Co

Finalist: Sara Smith, Wrappily

Finalist: Karli Rose Wilson, To Be Hawai‘i

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Social Impact Entrepreneur

Winner: Denise Yamaguchi, Hawai‘i Ag & Culinary Alliance

Finalist: Kaina Makua, Davis Price, Kumano I Ke Ala

Finalist: Daniel Richardson, Makali‘i Metrics

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Deal of the Year

Winner: Brett Jacobson and Naehalani Breeland, Hawaiian Ola Brewing

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Startup Paradise Champion

Winner: Ian Kitajima, PICHTR

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Corporate Intrapreneur of the Year

Winner: Billy Pieper, American Savings Bank

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Investor of the Year

Winner: Johnny Chankhamany, Builders VC

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Island Innovator of the Year

Winner: Joey and Christine Valenti, Bizia

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Tech Entrepreneur of the Year

Winner: Jason Sharp, Umi

Finalist: Romesh Jayawickrama, Inttent

Finalist: Randy Marsden, Lyv Technologies (dba Skidattl)

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Lifetime Achievement Award

Winner: Dennis Teranishi, PICHTR

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: Student Entrepreneur of the Year

Winner: Candide Krieger, Edukits Hawai‘i

Finalist: Jazlen Lucas, Pūhano Hawai‘i

Finalist: Timothy Kim, Gochi

Hawaii Entrepreneur Awards 2025: People’s Choice Award

Winner: Roselani Aiwohi, Waiwaolani

Finalist: Neale Asato, Asato Family Shop

Finalist: Nile and Hana Dreiling, Holey Grail Donuts

Finalist: Alex and Sarah Kawakami, Alikaleo Park

Finalist: Kea Peters, Kākou Collective