Entrepreneurs in Residence
Meet Our Entrepreneurs in Residence! HPU community may reach out directly via LinkedIn or email entrepreneurial@hpu.edu.
Paul Gene
Founder, CEO of North Beach Bus
Paul Gene is a distinguished tourism entrepreneur and educator with over 30 years of experience in Hawaii's hospitality industry. As the Founder and Owner of the North Shore Beach Bus (2007–2024), he built a premier tour company that achieved the #1 ranking on TripAdvisor in Hawaii for six consecutive years and was ranked the #3 tour company worldwide. He is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of tourism professionals and entrepreneurs, leveraging his vast industry network to foster student success.
An alumnus of Hawaii Pacific University (Masters in Business Administration) and BYU-Hawaii (BS in Tourism Industry Management), Paul combines strong academic foundations with extensive practical expertise. His background includes serving as Marketing Director for BYU-Hawaii's Asian ESL & Business Executives Training Program and managing Asian Language Services at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Fluent in English and Korean, Paul is a resilient leader known for his strategic planning and crisis management skills, notably successfully navigating his business through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rumpa Giri
Chief Technology Officer of multiple healthcare startups (former), social enterprise founder
Rumpa Giri is using 20 years of healthcare IT experience to bridge the gap between emerging AI capabilities and practical healthcare workflows. Always open to connecting with leaders, engineers, and builders exploring AI system design, healthcare innovation, and the evolution of development practices. As a former Healthcare CTO, Ms. Giri specializes in modernizing infrastructure, rethinking engineering processes, and introducing cloud-first, AI-enabled architectures in organizations with legacy complexity and high reliability needs. Her leadership approach is rooted in analyzing people, process, and technology — and shaping frameworks that elevate all three. At MDLand, she helped steer the organization through a period of rapid technical change, guiding modernization across engineering, QA, cloud, and AI strategy. From defining SDLC/PDLC practices to rolling out DORA-based weekly releases, she rebuilt the cadence of a 25-year-old platform — without rewriting it from scratch. She introduced SRE and RCA disciplines, shifted from on-prem MongoDB and SQL to cloud-native platforms (AWS, Atlas, OpenSearch), and guided AI adoption through ambient scribe APIs, chart retrieval modules, and Cursor AI enablement.
Ms. Giri cares about: building systems with integrity, releasing fast but responsibly, mentoring engineers without enabling shortcuts, and making legacy systems resilient, not just rewritten. She is currently on a sabbatical to dive deep into AI applications in healthcare operations. Conducting market research with healthcare organizations, building cloud-native proof-of-concepts (github.com/codekunoichi), and exploring how agentic coding assistants and modern AI tools can solve real operational challenges in claims processing and revenue cycle management.
She is also the founder of Karigor, which sought to deliver globally the crafts of blind craftspeople in India, as well as EnlightenEd, providing practical CS training to Indian university students. She holds an MBA from University of California San Diego.
Chris Hissom
CEO & Co-Founder of SurfUp and Business Development Director of Crown Bioscience
Christian Hissom bridges science, business, and entrepreneurship. In his biotech career, he focuses on moving new treatments from bench to bedside—turning research into real impact for patients.
As co-founder of SurfUp, he brings the same lab-to-market mindset. The SurfUp App functions like Bird scooters or Bikis — several boards are available in convenient locations along the coast, with a customer simply renting one for as long as needed with the app. The renter checks the board back into the surf rack when done — no rental car, surfboard car rack, or day or week-long rental needed.
He earned his bachelor's degrees in Physiology and Neuroscience as well as his MBA from University of California San Diego.