A TECH INNOVATOR MADE IN PARADISE

HPU alumnus Michael Bennett '12 has been going to Sandy Beach since he was a young teenager. The beach sits on the southeast shore of Oahu, below Koko Head crater, where the Ka Iwi coastline runs open and unprotected and the sun comes up straight out of the water. The shore is legendary for its rough breaks. Waves quickly appear, crash over shallow sand, offering experienced, lifelong Sandy’s experts just a few seconds inside a barrel before it closes. Generations of bodysurfers and bodyboarders have tackled those waves, and many have the scars and memories of their bruises to prove it.

Bennett worked summers in construction and as soon as the day was done, he would swap out the jeans and toolbelt for a pair of Billabong boardshorts and DaFins. He still gets out when he needs a break from work, although less frequently than he’d like to.

"Riding that perfect barrel at Sandy's, there are few things as beautiful as that," Bennett said with a smile. “You can walk into the water, get barreled in 30-seconds, and go from having a horrible day into an amazing one. This is just one of the blessings of life in Hawaiʻi.” 

It is worth sitting on that image, because the wave asks for the same things Bennett has spent his entire career practicing. You have to see the set forming while it is still out past the horizon. You must commit before you are certain. And you cannot do any of it alone, because the water belongs to everybody. It is a fair description of what Bennett has built.

Honolulu Tech Week began in 2024, and the premise behind it was simple enough to fill a coffee shop napkin. Hawaiʻi already has the talent, the capital, the ideas. What it lacked was a moment that put all three in the same place at the same time and use that as a flywheel to further develop future talent, initiatives, and investment.

Bennett had spent nearly a decade on the U.S. continent watching that moment happen elsewhere: in Miami, where he attended the first-ever tech week format in 2021 and later, and Los Angeles where the format turned whole cities into open-air conferences for a few days each year. He wrote a mission for the Hawaiʻi version and kept it concise: accelerate talent, capital and adoption, to empower local people, grow the state's tech economy and build bridges to the rest of the world.

Two years later it carries a new name: Hawaii Tech Week, and a different order of magnitude.

The 2026 edition runs Aug. 31 through Sept. 6, built around more than 50 independently hosted events across 30-plus venues in Honolulu, with over 100 speakers and roughly 5,000 people expected to attend. There is no keynote hall and no single stage. Companies and community leaders host their own gatherings, attendees register for the ones they want, and for seven days the city works as one distributed campus. Past speakers have included Canva Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, State Chief Information Officer Christine Maii Sakuda, and Privateer Space CEO Alex Fielding.

Where it goes from here is the part Bennett argues for with the most conviction. He believes the next decade will set the course of the century given the rapid pace of acceleration, especially around code, intelligence, and their applications to not only knowledge work but the physical world.

“I’d like to see Hawaiʻi become more prosperous, clean and green, and building for a technological future while staying rooted in tradition and nature. Hawaii Tech Week is where the people, companies, and institutions building a better future with technology come together." said Bennett.

This year, HPU joins the week as a sponsor through the John F. Scarpa Entrepreneurial Pathway. Working with HPU Dean of the College of Business Amy Nguyen-Chyung, Ph.D., and Senior Vice President and General Counsel Kenji Price, J.D., the University will host two events: Hawaiʻi Tech Week AI Strategies Panel on Sept. 2 and Build with AI: Student Hackathon on Sept. 3.

"AI is going to touch every industry in Hawaiʻi within the next few years, and the question is whether our people are building it or just buying it. Partnering with HPU means our students are in the room while it happens, not reading about it later."

Bennett grew up an only child in a religious household. His parents came to Hawaiʻi on their honeymoon, returned home, then moved back for good to be part of their church. His mother worked as an accountant for several nonprofits, including the Hawaiʻi Foodbank. His father was an IT support manager at Kaiser Hospital.

Bennett attended public schools the whole way through: Kailua and Aina Haina Elementary, Niu Valley Middle and Kaiser High. He worked construction. He washed dishes at restaurants in Niu Valley shopping center. He did well in his classes and, by his own account, kept some company that made high school rougher than it needed to be.

Tenth grade was the year he needed to reset, so he spent it at a high school in Iowa attending high school and working as a farmhand. That year was an entirely different way of living, and the first real evidence that the world extended well past the island he had always known. He returned home and graduated from Kaiser, and the necessity of college resurfaced in his mind. He looked around at what was the best route for success and arrived at HPU.

HPU offered Bennett a full-ride Presidential Scholarship and he happily accepted, arriving at a campus community small enough that professors learned his name in the first few weeks. He fell back in love with school and its limitless possibilities. He chose business as his major, a natural decision that proved to be the perfect degree for his future career endeavors.

Bennett entered the Honors Program and led the Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series, bringing working founders in front of students who had never met one. In 2011, he won the HPU Writing Award in the business, computer science and law category for a paper on international trade and its effects on child labor, cross-cultural exchange and the environment. He was busy, holding jobs the entire time.

Two professors account for much of his educational success. Faculty members Ken Schoolland and Mel Masuda did not simply teach Bennett economics and law; they took an interest in what he might become, and he still names them first when asked how he got where he is.

HPU also sent Bennett to Brazil. He spent three semesters at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, ranked at the time as the finest private university in the country, and learned Portuguese well enough to work in it. He returned to Rio later as an analyst with the International Trade Administration, covering offshore energy and travel markets and hosting visiting diplomats.

"This had a profound and lasting effect on my maturation into adulthood, and it kept me wanting to go back again and again," said Bennett. "Brazil is an incredible country and attending university, learning Portuguese, and working at the consulate was a great experience."

He graduated from HPU magna cum laude with a 3.8 grade point average and a degree in business administration.

Bennett soon moved to San Francisco to work as an assurance associate at Ernst and Young, auditing pre-IPO technology, biotech and real estate companies. He was 23 and sitting across the table from executives running billion-dollar balance sheets. Within a year he had co-founded his own venture, a peer-to-peer global shipping startup for critical goods and left the accounting world behind for good.

What followed was a fast education in how technology companies grow. He joined Captricity, later Vidado, as its first sales development representative and left as a member of the executive staff. He helped build the team and machinery which took it from hundreds of thousands to 8-figures in ARR, and a $35 million Series C. He launched U.S. go-to-market for DayTwo. He advised, then ran, a proptech business unit at SquadStack that reached a hundred of the top thousand real estate teams in the country before it was acquired.

From 2020 to 2022, Bennett served as president of the board of the Hawaiʻi Chamber of Commerce of Northern California, an organization connecting more than 3,000 people and 50 organizations across the Hawaiʻi and Bay Area communities. He was building the bridge home years before he crossed it.

Bennett moved back to Honolulu when his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and he has stayed close to family since. While at home, he co-founded OceanBit, a company developing round-the-clock ocean thermal energy to meet growing demand for electricity, computing power and climate solutions.

This summer he will return to campus for the HPU and Blue Startups Entrepreneurship Bootcamp as a mentor, working with high school students who have five days to start and launch a company.

"Bettering my people, bettering Hawaiʻi and bettering mankind is key for me," said Bennett. "Fatherhood is also important to me and I look forward to being a father one day. It will change my perspective, and it will change everything about who I am, and I look forward to enjoying that one day soon in my life."

Somewhere there is a version of this transformation where Bennett is standing on the sand at Sandy's with a child of his own, pointing out past the break, at a set still forming, teaching his child how to see it coming, how to predict and prepare for the future.