Occasionally, my co-writer, Rob Kay, and I like to highlight successful Hawaii startups. There’s no question that Paubox (www.paubox.com Opens in a new tab) and Hobnob (www.Hobnob.io Opens in a new tab) fall into this category.
Specializing in HIPAA-compliant email (for the health care industry), it was founded in Honolulu by veteran entrepreneur Ho‘ala Greevy in 2014. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) is U.S. legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information.
Greevy moved the company to San Francisco in 2015 to grow it. It wasn’t easy to rip his roots from Hawaii soil, but to find customers, capital and top-notch employees, it was a necessity.
There were other intangibles, too. Greevy said that “potential customers took my products more seriously when they knew my company was in the Bay Area.”
It proved to be smart move.
Paubox now has 1,000 customers in all 50 states, and his company is rapidly moving toward profitability. The product is user-friendly (no plug-ins or extra logins) and works on any device. Think of it as a super security app, which is what HIPAA demands.
Greevy said Paubox is now shifting its focus back to Hawaii to enter a new market — senior care providers — which he believes could be a mother lode of new business. Paubox already has three large local clients in this space: Aloha Nursing Rehab Centre, Kahala Nui and Ho‘okele.
He believes this represents the tip of the iceberg. Says Greevy, “The senior care home market is in dire need of our solution. A lot of people put up with inefficient (encryption) systems because they’re unaware there’s another choice.”
Like so many tech companies, he sees Hawaii as a perfect test bed for his technology, and given his local relationships, it’s a perfect place to introduce the product. He’s convinced if it’s a hit here, he will launch it nationally to the elder care services sector — a market valued at over $300 billion, according to the Freedonia Group, a Cleveland-based marketing research company.
Hobnob, founded in 2014, is also the creation of a seasoned entrepreneur, Tina Fitch, who has an enviable startup track record. She founded the travel e-commerce platform Switchfly and turned it into a $2 billion company. Hobnob, she opines, is a byproduct of social media, which she says can make us less social. Her premise is that “people were craving a return to real, offline relationships and dialogue.”
She has a point. Social psychologists say even though people are more connected now than at any other time in history, they are also lonelier and more isolated in their “nonvirtual” lives.
That’s where Hobnob comes in. The app’s purpose is to help people spend more time in real life with the people they care about. Unlike traditional social media invites, which are more like mass mailings, Hobnob, according to Fitch, creates a greater sense of intimacy. Essentially, it’s an easy-to-use tool to create and manage offline events as well as providing a private forum for groups to safely discuss topics in a manner for which today’s social media platforms do not provide. Hobnob offers pre-designed boilerplate invitations, or you can create your own layout.
Thus far, Honolulu-based Hobnob, with a team of eight employees, has attracted over 800,000 monthly active users around the world and has sent out almost 10 million invitations. The company has raised over $500,000 of investment from Hawaii and $2.5 million from mainland investors. It’s available on the App Store and Google Play. Its 4.7-star rating (out of five from over 7,000 reviews on the App Store) speaks highly of its quality.
The company plans to stay in Honolulu and grow its national base from here. That’s good news for our growing tech sector.
Both Paubox and Hobnob are exemplars of cutting-edge local companies that were incubated in our own high-tech ecosystem. This is the kind of news we like to write about.
Mike Meyer, formerly internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, is now chief information officer at Honolulu Community College. Reach him at mmeyer@hawaii.edu.
