Startup Hawaii hopes to rally Hawaii Island tech community

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As Hawaii Island communities emerge from the pandemic and people begin to reconnect, life-long visitor and new resident Maria Leonardi — working with local partners and proceeding thoughtfully — hopes a new name and brand for the island's innovation ecosystem will help build a new sense of community.

Startup Hawaii is hosting its inaugural meetup next Thursday.

"There are so many things that are happening here — I don't need to create it," she says. "Right now. to me, the biggest need is connecting all the people that are doing great things, all the founders that are already here, and then collectively figuring out a path forward."

Leonardi knows that outsiders have a tendency to burst into tight-knit communities with grand ideas that will create the next big tech hub. That's not her intention.

"I'm very conscious of that, and I don't think it works when somebody comes in and tells people how to do it," she says. "I view my role as bringing people together and building those connections."

"I have a lot of skills I can contribute, and I have some time, but I can't tell this island what it wants to be," she continues. "Startup Hawaii is empowering people to create that vision for this island, and I can help it get there when that vision is clear."

A love letter to Hawaii Island

Hawaii Island is known colloquially as the Big Island for good reason: all of the other Hawaiian Islands could fit within its bounds with room to spare. Ecologically, 10 of 14 climate zones can be found there, from tropical rainforest to hot desert to annual snowfall (and the occasional blizzard).

Hawaii Island is also where some of the state's most impressive science, technology, and engineering is taking place.

On the east side, Hilo is home to the magnificent University of Hawaii at Hilo, with top-notch programs in oceanography, astronomy, pharmacology, even drones. On the west side you'll find the National Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA), and innovative primary education institutions like the Hawaii Technology Academy. And up top, in the middle, the most advanced telescopes in the world.

And that's just the 90-second highlight reel. Both the natural environment and the people of Hawaii Island are incredible. I might have been born and raised on Oahu, but my mother's Hawaiian side of the family is from North Kohala, and it feels like home. It's where I met my wife. It's my favorite Hawaiian island.

Wandering across all that space, though, it can sometimes be hard to find your tribe.

Where are the geeks?

Part of it is simple math: Hawaii Island has a population density of less than 50 people per square mile, about half that of the U.S. average, which includes cities like Honolulu and its 1,700 people per square mile. It's not Montana, but it's not Seattle, either.

Geography plays a part as well. East Hawaii and West Hawaii are along opposite edges, and are two very different socioeconomic communities. And Ka‘u down south might as well be another country.

There surely were clubs and meetups focused around tech when I was a student at UH Hilo, I just wasn't aware of them.

Conversely, post pandemic, there are thousands of "digital nomads" now working remotely from Hawaii for North American or international tech firms that you'll never see out in the community. They don't know who else is here, and they don't care.

Over the years, there have been efforts to bring tech people and startup founders together on Hawaii Island: Big Island Startups and Hawaii Tech Works are a couple that I remember. Until recently, there was also the Hawaii Island Business Plan Competition... but it became the Tropical Ag Tech conference.

In Hilo, Don Kosak founded the Hawaii Tech Exchange (HITX), a coworking space and workshop. Although COVID put an end to large, face-to-face gatherings, HITX survived and still welcomes smaller groups. Kosak tells me the pandemic brought a shift from software and web development meetups to more hands-on hardware hacking, including Raspberri PI and ESP32 microcontrollers and other gadgets, making HITX part makerspace.

In Kona, Rod Hinman has hosted meetups at NELHA for years. Kona Science Cafe, formerly the West Hawaii Tech Pau Hana, featured presenters every month, along with lots of time for networking and talkstory. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone on hiatus when the pandemic hit.

There's plenty of room, in other words, for another tech group.

A girl named Maria

"I've been coming to the Big Island for my whole life," Leonardi says. "I really feel better in places where nature is kind of the centerpiece, and this island has always felt like it just has so much power."

Her parents would bring her to Kohala when she was a kid, and they eventually moved here.

"My husband and I could never have lived here until the pandemic hit," she explains. "Everything went remote, so we went on the road and spent a few months in different places across the country, and came here to stay with my parents for a couple of months... and then we never left."

As it did for many, Leonardi says the pandemic created the opportunity to shift gears.

"I had just been going, going, going — I worked in the nonprofit sector, went to business school, came out, went to investment banking, and then went into an accelerator," she says. "I had never stopped for a second to take a breath and ask, 'What am I doing with my life and with my degree and with my experience?'"

So she left her job running a TechStars corporate tech accelerator at MetLife, picked up remote work for a handful of startup founders, and hit the reset button.

"I really wanted to get involved here," she said. "I was trying to think about how I could combine my experience both in nonprofit and economic development with this founder work."

Like any good Hawaii transplant, Leonardi wanted to get involved and give back to the local community. She joined a volunteer group organized by Vibrant Hawaii, a nonprofit born out of the Hawaii Island pandemic response that's best known for setting up an online information and resource hub.

"Janice Ikeda is the director there, and she said they wanted to work with startups," she recalls. "I shared my idea for Startup Hawaii, and they just told me to go run with it."

Leonardi knows how fortunate she is to have found backing so quickly.

One of the most amazing things about moving here is just the support I've found," she says. "People didn't know who I was — what if I was exaggerating my experience? — but they just gave me the freedom and support to do this and it turned into something I never, I never expected."

Remote opportunities

Being from a small, population-700 town herself, Leonardi is familiar with a lot of the challenges of smaller, more remote neighborhoods.

"One of my passions is rural communities and equity across geographies," she says. "There's no reason why a rural community can't succeed like a city, in their own different way."

The pandemic made the path even clearer.

"As soon as remote work happened, I knew there's no reason why people everywhere shouldn't be able to access the same opportunities," she said. "It sped up this whole thing — there's no reason why Hawaii Island can't participate in this economy either."

That said, Leonardi is quick to clarify that the goal isn't to recreate San Francisco.

"We don't want to be Silicon Valley, we're not going to be, we can't and we shouldn't be," she says. "We can do it our own way, we're just different, and that's good."

The traditional ingredients for a startup and tech hub aren't available on Hawaii Island, according to Leonardi.

"We're not big enough to have spontaneous collisions of ideas that just happen in other places," she says. "For example, in bigger places, if someone's building an accelerator, someone else is probably doing a startup weekend, and someone else is running a program in a university, and something has to be there to tie it all together and move things forward together."

Similarly, going solo is unlikely to lead to success.

"Just building a single project on its own, like an accelerator or an angel network, is not going to succeed on its own — not because they're not good or high quality, but because there's no ecosystem support, no support around the whole community's growth," she explains.

Leonardi sees a couple of systemic gaps in the Hawaii Island startup pipeline.

"We have a lot of accelerators or early-stage programs, huge resources for sure, but then what happens after you leave that accelerator?" she asks. "There seems to be a bit of a gap, you're going to quickly fail or move away."

"On the other side, there tons of great programs for younger people like Nalukai Academy," she continues. "But then what happens when that kid goes to college and has to figure out what to do next? There's another drop off there, and they also have to leave."

Leonardi hesitates to put a label on Startup Hawaii. An association? Volunteer organization? It's an ecosystem, or the start of a framework for one. It's a business, but could also involve a non-profit.

"I want to bridge the gap between kind of that philanthropic side and the investor side," she explains. "Grants are really important to do things around education, things that you're not going to invest in as an investor, but we also want to have somewhere for investors to invest in companies when we are successful."

Next steps

However you label Startup Hawaii, its community currently consists of about 45 people, a group that Leonardi hopes to grow with Thursday's virtual meetup.

"We have a mix of people from the Hilo side and the west side," she says. "In Hilo we have a lot of young professionals just looking for connections and career paths, and on the west side it's a lot of people who moved here, whether it was in the last two years or 10 years ago."

Leonardi is well aware of the digital nomad dilemma.

"One thing I'm really trying to be conscious of is getting people who are residents, people who have not just moved here, or if they just moved here because this is an amazing place, that these people care about it and want to give back," she explains.

"A lot of time people I meet really didn't know that anybody else here was in the tech world, that there were 25 other people in Kona and Kohala that also are in tech and also want to do something good," she adds.

The first major milestone Leonardi envisions is an open, blue-sky kickoff session.

"The big near term goal is to get people together in a room to do community brainstorming," she says. "What are the gaps in the local ecosystem and what does the community really need to fill those gaps?"

In the mean time, she says she's building out a mentor network and trying to find a platform to facilitate interaction.

"I would like some kind of online engagement community, because we're too big to have in person events all the time, and we must also have that connection outside of the island with mentors and investors and employers," she said.

No island is an island

I asked Leonardi what she would say if she could address the innovation ecosystem at large.

"My message is, 'Don't forget about us,'" she replied.

"We have a specific island mission, and we do need to have our own path and we can do it our own way, but we can also participate in the global economy," she said. "That's going to take more than an on-island network, and that wider network includes Oahu."

She notes that Honolulu is "the closest thing we have to a successful startup community," and that she hopes that community will be open to making connections.

"We're not trying to create an isolated little community," she says. "It's got to be connected, or we're going to fail."

Indeed, founders, entrepreneurs, and investors statewide face some of the same challenges.

"We kind of need to change the perception that Hawaii is only a tourist place, or only a place where people go to hide out, or it's just some lava and sand," Leonardi says. "We also need the world to know that not just Oahu can do it, but that the whole state can do it — we can do business here. We really can."

For more information on Startup Hawaii, visit Startup-Hawaii.com. All Hawaii Island photography courtesy Maria Leonardi.