Editor’s note: Olin Kealoha Lagon will be writing bi-weekly for Civil Beat on a variety of topics, typically about the intersections of technology and culture. Born in Hawaiʻi and raised in public housing here, he became a serial entrepreneur and inventor.
I love telling other people’s stories. I have spent years collecting them for “The Innovation Archipelago,” a book I am finishing with Tim Dick. Weʻve documented more than a hundred innovations born or catalyzed in Hawaiʻi that have changed the world. But for this inaugural column I want to do something less comfortable. I want to tell one of my own. Not because it is the best story I have collected. Because I know this one from the inside, doubts and dumb luck included, and if I am going to ask hard questions of the place I love, I should go first.
This story carries the two truths I want this space to hold. Real hope about what we can build here, and real honesty about what gets in our way. This column will often be rooted in technology and always about Hawaiʻi. And I will keep chasing the connections we do not usually make, looking at familiar things from unfamiliar angles, especially the way things grow and wither exponentially…