 Aloha and welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawaii. I'm Daelyn Yanagita and we're broadcasting live from the Think Tech Studios in Pioneer Plaza in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com. You may also go to that website to subscribe to our programs and get on our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawaii is to share with you stories of local businesses by local people and our guests share with us how they were able to build successes in the challenging business environment. In the Think Tech Studios today, we have Daniel Barrett, the Network General Manager for Volta Charging in Hawaii and Stuart Zweigel, CEO of the concierge company. And between the two of them, we have covered industries from tech to media, super, super exciting. They promised to take the show away, so I'm going to turn it over and I want to welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having us. I totally want you guys to just talk about how you got here, how'd you guys meet? What's that all about? So we agree that I would start. So not unlike a lot of people that move to Hawaii, there's sometimes a local connection of some sort. In my case, my wife is half native Hawaiian and we've been coming here for decades since we met in college. We've been coming and we're trying to figure out, how do we make it work? And I was kind of indoctrinated from a young age to go up the corporate ladder and go to school and then join a tech company and then progress there on after. But it was always this big question mark. We would come here and we would speak to everybody in our natural network and we'd try to figure out, how do we make it actually happen? And finally, after about 17 or 18 years of career, we decided, well, it's not happening and we had a young family and we said, well, about a couple of years ago, we said, why don't we just do it? Why don't we just take that risk and take kind of a sabbatical and figure it out once we got here? So one thing led to the other and we came out here two and a half years ago and I've been dabbling in the entrepreneurial world and now running things for Volta here in Hawaii and really enjoying it. And Stuart and I met. We're neighbors. We're neighbors. So my story is that my husband was born here. He did not go to high school here, as everyone would ask. He knew that was going to be his question. I knew that was going to be your question. But he was born here and left when he was very young. And when we first met a long time ago, he had said he always wanted to come back to Hawaii. So we did. And that was a number of years ago. He attended UH when we came back. I worked for American Savings Bank and the Marketing Department. And we fell in love with Hawaii. However, circumstances occurred. We had to go back to the mainland. But he became an opera singer and he has been coming back year after year after year, many seasons performing with Hawaii Opera. So we've had a very long relationship with Hawaii to the point where we always knew we were going to come back. It was just a matter of when come back full time. And last year was a very pivotal year for us. And we decided it was time to make the move back. So we did. And fortunately, having a long relationship with Hawaii, we know the island really well. And we knew where we were going to move. And we bought a home. And I met Daniel two days after we moved in, kind of thing. And it was interesting meeting and then learning about each other because it seemed like we had very similar experiences in terms of our relationship with Hawaii and coming back. And not only that, but I think that we had the same perceptions and perceived, I would say, frustrations almost. Like we kind of gelled right away. And we started talking about, well, what do you do? What do I do? And what was our past on the mainland or elsewhere? Because I did have an international career as well in tech. And we immediately started pretty much commiserating around the opportunities or lack thereof and why. And also the pace that we were used to and would it be the same? And we had a lot of question marks. And we were both kind of venturing into new spaces here locally. And so it was something that we connected pretty much immediately. Yeah. And I think it was really refreshing for me, even though I have friends here and I know other people here and because of Jamie's relationship with the opera, we know a fair amount of people here. But it was really refreshing for me to meet another business person and who you could talk story with and who you could just really feel at ease with and talk about the fears and the good things about being here. So that was really helpful. I think the commonality is very similar because you folks have very illustrious careers. Daniel, you and IT. My head is going to get too big. Too big for the camera. Median entertainment. Median entertainment, but totally, well, maybe not different ends of the spectrum, but very different. Talk to us a little bit about your tech career. Sure. So I kind of grew up as an expat. So I was used to very cosmopolitan-type environments, whether it be in Asia or Europe or on the mainland, major metropolises that I grew up in. And so I kind of continued that lifestyle when I finished college as an American that never really lived in the US for much time. I moved back to the States and started in what I call tech 1.0, which was the semiconductor industry. So people forget that in this day and age, everything that powers everything we do, including every camera and every screen in this room, is powered ultimately by components. And that was the birth of tech in the Silicon Valley, the Bay area. And so anyway, I did that. But then I realized that things were moving dramatically into a different direction. So fairly quickly, I joined Google. And I was selling ads. Like a lot of salespeople do at Google, and then running teams eventually out of their Dublin Ireland offices. And I saw a lot of similarities, if I'm skipping ahead now, that still exist today within an island nation like Ireland and what they did to revolutionize their economy, and which planted a lot of seeds in my mind of how we collectively can impact Hawaii. But anyway, after a good stand at Google, I joined LinkedIn. I'm a firm believer in networking and the power of the network, and more so than what everybody thinks LinkedIn was made for, which is just a job recruitment site. It's much, much more than that. It's truly a place for professionals to network and to grow in their careers. And there's a trend that you'll see here. But then after that, I joined a company called Upwork, formerly known as Elantan ODesk, which merged and became the largest freelancer platform in the world. So we talk a lot about the gig economy today and breaking down barriers and being able to work from anywhere. And that was really a flagship company that still exists today and is doing really well. And then hence coming out to Hawaii and taking my working sabbatical and doing some other things that are way off into left field and not at all anything to do with tech. But here I am back within Volta. I always say once you're in tech, you get reeled back in. You can't really leave. It's like the mob. But that's the storyline. But the trend I wanted to really touch upon was the fact that the reason why I liked working for companies like Google, or LinkedIn, or Upwork, or now Volta is because there's an underlying thing. Any business professional that wants to be commercially active and at the tip of the spear of technology knows some of the names of the companies that I just mentioned. And obviously, they're great places to work. But what I take away is my own personal mission that coincided with those companies at the time that I was working with them. The democratization of information everywhere. Like if we all think about the movie Goodwill Hunting, I always use that analogy. Matt Damon makes fun of some college kids because he's the janitor or whatever at Harvard. And he talks about how with the information available in this day and age, and that was way back already, but in this day and age especially, it really kind of equals the playing field, no matter where you are in the world, to get that information and to be self-taught or to expand your current knowledge and so on. LinkedIn was truly democratizing the opportunity for people to be able to network and connect with each other and better themselves in their careers. And then the gig economy transition within platforms like Upwork was truly revolutionary because think about somebody in India or Bangladesh or in Bulgaria could have the same type of earning power potentially almost as somebody that's in Hawaii or in California or in New York, depending on how good their work is. And the beauty was that fractured the old concept of the working world that our parents and those generations would have come from, which was you have to go sit in an office physically and be there. You can actually go and work gigs anywhere as long as you have the knowledge. And that's something that I'm still fascinated by, you can tell. And Volta now, I think sustainability, green energy, protecting, especially in places like Hawaii where we talk about protecting our Aina and everything so much, something that my mother-in-law would have talked about, still talks about when she's 82 years old from Kohala on the Big Island. She tells me stories about no pollution and riding home to school and back on a donkey. And what can we do in places like this to not turn it into, especially with the growing population into a place where pollution and air quality are detrimental to health overall, right? And as a parent, it matters to me. So that's kind of the, that's the long-winded answer. That's amazing. I don't know that I have that long-winded answer. So I came out of business school with a degree in marketing and I was always gravitated toward entertainment. And so, like I said, when I lived here, I worked for American Savings Bank and I worked in their marketing department. They had an in-house marketing department at the time. We did wonderful things in terms of creating TV commercials and campaigns and that type of thing. And so when I went back to the mainland, I then started to work for an entertainment research company. It was actually the precursor for an online, like the online kind of database thing that we know about today, subscription service for entertainment research. And it just sort of grew upon that. I ended up working for Comedy Central at the time. And that was before I made my way out to Los Angeles to Hollywood, Hollywood was calling. And I continued to work my way up into management positions. And by the time I left to come back to Honolulu, I was chief operating officer for a very large TV production company. My whole career has primarily been in reality TV production. And I've dealt with networks. I've dealt with agents. I've dealt with talent and movie stars and all those kinds of people. But I've always been on the operation side, which is where my sweet spot is. And I left all the creative up to the creatives, but always felt like I needed to provide an operational infrastructure for them to do their best work. So when I came back to Hawaii, I really thought about just looking for a job in media and figuring out that kind of path. But I've always been involved in, as I say, dealing with the merging of personalities and how people work together and dealing with creating environments for people to do their best work, which is part of what inspired me to create this company. So that's my long-winded version of how I got to where I am. Well, I think it's also an interesting conversation on how IT meets operations and how that all comes together. I mean, they can't exist without each other, especially in the world that we're in today. They can't exist without each other. Right. So we're gonna go to a quick break, but when we come back, I wanna talk about what your experiences have been in entering the Hawaii market again for having very large company, large corporate experiences. How you see that as transferable to Hawaii, the landscape in Hawaii, and what the possibilities are, what the opportunities you see. And then, of course, I wanna hear more about Volta and I wanna hear more about the Kansaiers company. So let's take a quick break and we'll be back. This is Business in Hawaii and we'll see you back here shortly. I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii and today I am honored, super excited to have Stuart Zweigel of the Concierge Company and Daniel Barrett of Volta Charging Hawaii. Lots of talk going on here about the brain drain and all that buzz, you know, being tech and being media related. You guys have all the buzzwords going. So I'm just gonna let you take it away. All right, cool. So I talk about the brain drain all the time, actually. And it's something that I'm extremely passionate about because now being... Can you say what that is? Sure. So the brain drain from my perspective is, and it's happened in other places in the world, if you take once again Ireland as an example, there's more Irish people living outside of Ireland than in Ireland and many more. Like we're talking about 12 million versus four million or something. And the reason why it happens is because of opportunity or lack thereof. And there's a perception in Hawaii and probably not a false perception that there aren't as many opportunities for making as much income and advancing in people's careers if they stay here on the islands, right? And a lot of the people in my wider family talk about it all the time because we all have kids, nephews, nieces and so on that we all encourage, go to college on the mainland, go to the best colleges in the world, who cares? But wouldn't it be great if they had that opportunity to come back? And I think that we're at an inflection point right now where a lot of people are realizing that these really great brains are leaving and they're not coming back. And if they do, it's for whatever negative reasons. Or the parents have aged and they've decided to come back to take their parents or something like that. And I'm excited about the opportunity though because that's something that could be highly reversible, right? Tax structure could be one thing to encourage more entrepreneurial spirit and that's something I feel strongly about. But more importantly, just fostering that entrepreneurial spirit from a younger age. I recently went, so Volta Charging is actually, so it's Volta Industries, but we call ourselves Volta Charging so everybody knows that we're free electric vehicle charging stations with sponsored media. But I went to, it's a blue startup company. So Hank Rogers, the Tetris founder, helped start and is leading what we call blue startups here in Hawaii and they're right across the street actually. And they are kind of, well, they're not kind of, they are a startup accelerator that bring in people that have great ideas and they're from all over the nation, potentially even the world. And I went to one of their events the other day and I was highly, highly impressed to see the caliber of people that type, it was a kind of like a shark tank type environment where they had to each do their demo pitch because they finished their three month period of hand holding and they're gonna go out into the big world and try to raise more capital. But nevertheless, I was really impressed but when I spoke to people over there that are managing the startup accelerator, they said the problem too, all too often is the companies will start out here and have a great idea or whatever and then they'll think they need to go to the mainland to get subsequent funding and that's what they do. And then they're generating more jobs and a better economy and whatever city they end up in versus here. And so how do we break that? I think the gig economy, the fact that we have access to IT, we don't have to necessarily be anywhere. Why not be in Hawaii? So for example, here in the creative community, have you heard of Tibet? Do you know where Tibet is? Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Sure. And so they have the arts and culture branch which oversees the Hawaii Film Office and what's also called the Creative Industries Division and they have part of that called Creative Lab Hawaii and that is on the creative side to foster creative entrepreneurs here in Hawaii. And I only bring that up because I've only recently discovered that, heard about it and I think that's a really wonderful thing. And so I think to your point though, I don't know about that startup that you were talking about, but the message needs to be out there more. I think the wonderful thing about Hawaii and part of the reason why I created a company is the community and the culture here is so tight knit and so close that we're all looking out for each other. Certainly there are some barriers to creating a company and all that kind of thing, but in general, it's small and it's intimate and it's people look out for each other. So if people can, we can figure out a way for people to come together and get the message out there and it's education, it's communication, those are, I mean it's baby steps too. Those are the things that can start to happen to counteract that brain drain, I would imagine. I think what's important for our young people are to hear from entrepreneurs like yourselves who have ventured out and done lots of really exciting things and decided to make Hawaii your landing spot. I think that our young people need to hear from people like yourselves and encourage them to open their eyes to entrepreneurship and I think our executives should get out into our schools and talk to our kids. Yeah, I think that for me, when I was inspired to create the company, part of the reason I was inspired to create the company is because even though I have a relationship with Hawaii and I'm familiar with Hawaii and I feel like I speak the culture as opposed to just understanding the culture, which is very important here. You know, I lost my train of thought. It's because you have so much good content. Yeah, exactly. It's all good. It's all good. We were talking about it at the break, right? We were talking about how you cannot, so we were talking about how a lot of people on the mainland view the business climate here in Hawaii as something that is closed off to them, right? And so maybe that will stifle the spirit of people to say, you know what, I wanna start a company and I wanna live wherever I wanna live and especially if we're talking about millennials, right? Millennials don't have those same chains and barriers that we all may have grown up with and good because they truly buy into the whole mentality of, you're married to who you are in your career but not necessarily to a company and I think that's a great thing, right? If people are willing to move around and be mobile and willing to start companies in desirable locations to live, I mean, let's take CNN as an example, right? Every time they pan out when one of the presidents is here and when President Obama used to come out here and they would pan out at the end of the interview and the guy's wearing shorts and then everybody back in the studio would be like, oh, it's a tough life and all that but why should, and this is how millennials think because I've managed large groups of millennials and they've told me, like why should it be a tough life if you have the background and you have the motivation and you have the willpower and the ambition to work and why should you live somewhere where it's detrimental to your health or you just don't like it because you don't like the mountains or you don't like cornfields or whatever it may be or big cities and you'd rather be on a big city on the water. So I think mentalities are gonna change and it's up to people here in Hawaii, us collectively once again, I think that's what you're alluding to is to say yes, it's a tight knit community, there's a big respect factor, you can't just come in here and bulldoze your way in but at the same time, it's the aloha spirit, right? I mean, if you come in and you respect and you do something that's good for the local community while also growing a business and building a business, then people are gonna be, well, highly motivated to embrace you because it's something that is lacking here on the tech side once again, right? Yeah, what he said, that's exactly what I was gonna say. Yeah, what did he say? Thank you for saying that for me. I appreciate it. We're neighbors, right? Exactly. That's what I was saying. I know, right? If you were just trying to structure this interview, whatever you say. Yeah, yeah. I fall asleep thinking about these things, right? That's a hard life. Almost three-year-olds, she's gonna be three in two weeks and I have a six and a half year old girl and they're my life, right? And I want them to go explore the world but if my wife and I, which it looks like, are gonna end up finishing out our careers and retiring here, I don't want them to only come and visit. I want them to have the option at least to thrive in their careers. Yeah, now when it starts with that kind of attitude to, you know, absolutely. And as a consumer, I want you to spend time with me. I don't want you to blitz into my life and... uprooted and show me all this stuff and then off you go, right? I want you to spend time with me and build that relationship with me so I can hang over the fence and go, hey, neighbor, what do you think about this, right? Or, well, I'll take that but are you gonna come and service it for me? I'm laughing because I'm just saying thank God we're across the street or else we need to be hanging over the fence. Half the time the cars are coming down, we're talking across. We can't even hear what we're saying but we're still talking. But we agree. But we agree. In a couple of minutes, I want you to kind of tell me what Volta Charging is doing in Hawaii. You know, I think it's a new company name and it's just stuck with the concierge. So believe it or not, a lot of people know Volta Charging because it's one of those success stories from the Blue Startup Acceleration program and the company has done very well and the company actually started out here and it's one of those tech stories where it was literally started in a garage and a friend of the CEO's house in Kahala or something like that. And if he sees this, sorry Scott, I've bastardized that whole story. I'm trying to do it quick. But in any case, it started in a garage so to speak and then they went through an accelerator program and they got some funding and then they were doing fairly well but they decided to move to the mainland to get what they thought was the only place to go get funding, right? And we've been very successful up to now. We just closed the series C for another 35 million so it takes us to over 65 million in the last four years of raising capital. And the company is in true growth but me being out here and somebody that had joined Volta prior to me joining that used to work with me in Europe at Google tracked me down and said, hey, we think that you have the right skill set to help Volta here and help Volta how? Obviously to maintain our network, we have 34 stations on Oahu which is pretty good for an island this size. It's one of the larger markets but as I mentioned, it's free electric vehicle charging and it's free for the sites. We actually install these stations, we maintain them, we take care of everything and so our site partners meaning the malls like Alamoana Mall or Kahala or wherever that may be they love it because people come and it's an added attraction for EV drivers but also it's a huge media opportunity for sponsorships and that's how we actually make money and pay our bills. So we can provide it for free to the community but at the end of the day the sponsors who sponsor it are ultimately the heroes because they are associating themselves with sustainability and we're finding that there's huge brand uplift in perception among the public because as we talked about everything is very local and community oriented here and when a company is actually doing something or sponsoring something that is good for the community then there's direct tangible benefits. So that's what I'm doing. I'm handling the media side, I'm also handling the operational side for Volta out here. Tell us a little bit about how your experience was coming into Hawaii and remember that question because I'm gonna ask someone to. Overall in business you mean? Yeah. So I'll actually say that I am pleasantly surprised. When I was in Europe we talked about how every single country, so Europe is a union but every country has very dramatically different cultures and you have to kind of be a chameleon and adapt if you wanna sell into, which is what my gig is, into any of those different cultures. In Hawaii I find people are very open to sitting down and talking but I will say it's not a cold call mentality. Everything is done through a connection. Stewart and I, Stewart's been helping me out a lot. My wife's family network has been helping me out a lot and then it's kind of snowball effect, right? And if you are going back to the respecting, if you're respectful and you do it the right way I would say and that's a much longer conversation. I think that people then are very happy to refer you to somebody else and so on and so on and you very quickly realize that I mean these are people through the discussions, even at the sea level at any of these corporations or organizations that I'm meeting with, you know these are people that I see at Magic Island when I'm running next to my kid trying to learn to ride a bicycle, right? And stuff like that. Stewart I wanna hear about the concierge company. Tell us about it. I'm gonna start with that second one first because when I got here, and then I'll tell you about it, but when I got here what I immediately started to do and that's how you and I met for example is I just started to pull myself out into the community. Friends that I have here, they're very good friends and long-term friends said to me, you know listen if you're going to do this you need to be out and about, you need to be present, you need to be meeting people, you need to be in front of them and you know that's an old school sort of mentality anyway. LinkedIn, sure I've been doing a lot of LinkedIn, emails and all that kind of thing but you know people don't respond so quickly here. Text, you know people don't respond so quickly here. So I literally put myself out into every networking situation I could think of and I think that that has really paid off because that contact, that emotional connection with people, that talking story, that you know listening to other people's experiences and those kinds of stories, that's what builds relationships. I don't want to cut you off but I want to make sure that we hear about the classroom, what it is. What I was inspired to do when we moved here was the idea that there was no one place to go for anyone to figure out what you needed to do, what you needed to know to be an executive in Hawaii and that really was my inspiration and so what I did is I created this company to help executives relocate here, workplace concierge services and general lifestyle management kinds of concierge services. Real quick, tell our viewers where they can find you. I am at www.theconciergeco.com, THE conciergeco.com. Awesome. I'd be remiss if I didn't say just find me on LinkedIn, Daniel D. Barrett, otherwise just shoot me an email Daniel at voltacharging.com. I do answer fairly quickly. I want to thank you guys for joining me on the show today. I wish we had more time. You guys are just like super, super exciting. Big thanks to our production staff. They always pull this together without a hitch. If you want to be on our show, please feel free to shoot us an email at shows at thinktecawaii.com. We air every Thursday at two o'clock and we look forward to seeing you here next week.