hawaii
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Mark Wang and the art of coming back
He moved to Hawaii with little money and stayed for 27 years. Now the Hilton Grand Vacations CEO is taking a much larger business back to the places that shaped his career.
Yishan Wong and the problem with planting a trillion trees
After PayPal, Facebook, and Reddit, Yishan Wong retired to Hawaiʻi. Then a patch of dry land pulled him into a new job: building the systems that help forests come back.
Surf Air wants to fix the short hop.
It began by selling unlimited flights. Now Surf Air is betting that the way to improve small-plane travel runs through the software behind it.
Alex Fielding and the things we cannot find
At Ripcord, Alex Fielding sent robots after paper records. At Privateer, he is working on a larger search problem: making sense of the activity above Earth, and the world beneath it.
Peter Dames and the art of keeping time
A bassist, a former Toyota “Chief Dreamer,” and the first CEO outside Servco’s founding family. Peter Dames is carrying a Hawaiʻi business into its next chapter, with one ear on its past.
Hawaiʻi Angels: 500 decks. Two seats at lunch.
In Honolulu, a free pitch can lead to a very serious conversation. Hawaiʻi Angels turns a monthly lunch into a bridge between early traction and investors willing to write their own checks.
Skin Deep Tattoos and the business of staying on someone forever
Waikiki sells plenty of things you can leave behind. Since 1979, Skin Deep has worked in a more permanent medium - and watched the crowd around the tattoo chair change.
Kelly Urban
Kelly Urban is the Chief Marketing Officer of Maui Jim, the Hawaii-born sunglasses maker now part of the Kering Eyewear group. Based in New York, she leads brand and marketing for a company famous for its PolarizedPlus2 lenses and aloha-rooted identity. Before Maui Jim she built a marketing and communications career that included time at GoPro and the agency Formula Public Relations, with strengths in strategic communications, brand storytelling, and team leadership.
Alex Abelin
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.
Colby Takeda
Colby Takeda is the co-founder and CEO of Pear Suite, a digital health company that gives community health workers the software, billing tools, and data infrastructure to be recognized as a foundational part of the healthcare system. A fourth-generation Japanese American from O'ahu, registered community health worker, and former senior living executive, he built Pear Suite during the pandemic on Google Sheets and Typeform before turning it into a care navigation platform that supports thousands of frontline workers. In October 2025 the company raised a $7.6 million Series A led by Rock Health Capital to expand its reach into Medicaid and Medicare markets.
Chris Burniske
Chris Burniske is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder, a venture capital firm that has invested in over 75 blockchain companies and networks since 2017. He co-authored the influential book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond' and led ARK Invest to become the first public fund manager to offer bitcoin exposure in 2015. Known for his unconventional approach - famously rolling up barefoot on a skateboard to pitch Cathie Wood - Burniske combines deep technical knowledge with a surfer's mentality toward finding uncrowded opportunities in crypto markets.
Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, the company that invented cloud-based CRM and pioneered the SaaS model. He built Salesforce from a San Francisco apartment in 1999 into the world's largest enterprise applications company, while simultaneously pioneering the 1-1-1 corporate philanthropy model that has been adopted by thousands of companies globally. Owner of Time magazine since 2018 and a vocal advocate for stakeholder capitalism, Benioff sits at the intersection of tech innovation, spiritual practice, and social activism — swimming with dolphins in Hawaii one day, staging fake protests outside competitor conferences the next.