Small is beautiful, said Kyle Datta, general partner of Ulupono Initiative, which pairs a private investing fund with social investments aimed at achieving Hawaii’s sustainability goals. He sees a relatively small state having important advantages over one with seemingly greater power and capacity.

“If you look at a state like California that’s so interconnected with the national economy, it’s actually harder for it to make the degree of changes we’re going to make,” Datta said. “Because we’re smaller, and if we want to work together, we can actually get it done.”

But large is beautiful, too, and the intent of Ulupono, launched in 2009 by entrepreneurial power couple Pierre and Pam Omidyar, is to scale up the things that work to create that sustainability.

It’s a tricky balance, though, and circumstances do change. For example, Datta said, the NextEra Energy Inc. proposal to take over Hawaiian Electric Industries, and be the central purveyor of renewable energy, once would have been embraced far more warmly.

“If NextEra had come to our state 15 years ago with exactly that proposal, we would have thrown plumeria at them,” he said.

Now that solar energy in Hawaii has spread out among so many individual rooftops, utility-scale renewable energy projects have less appeal.

Some of Ulupono’s investments can be seen online (ulupono.com/portfolio). Boosting local agriculture and food security is one emphasis, but even that runs up against obstacles.

Hawaii Dairy Farms (HDF), the initiative’s Kauai project near the tourism developments of Poipu, has been a prime example. There’s been pushback from residents and resorts about HDF, which has now filed its environmental impact statement.

“Our hope is that science and facts will help … address their fears,” he said. “And loud voices can sometimes dominate the conversation. We’re all about trying to let the middle speak, and being objective.”

Datta, 56, is married with a grown daughter. He holds two master’s degrees from Yale University, in public and private management and in environmental science.

QUESTION: Can you give the elevator speech about what Ulupono does for the community?

ANSWER: The Ulupono Initiative is a social investment initiative. We’re actually a hybrid. We’re both a private investing fund, which is really 80 percent of what we do.

But Pierre (Omidyar) wants to hybridize us with a social investment fund, and his idea was you really should blur the lines between the two, using the best of both. But primarily what we do is private investment; we focus strictly on Hawaii.

We have a very straightforward mission. It’s to improve the quality of life for the people of Hawaii, with more locally produced renewable energy, more locally produced affordable food, and better manage our wastes.

So the way we work is to collaborate with the people and institutions of Hawaii to sometimes bring in new business models, sometimes new technologies, sometimes just to scale up what we are already doing well. …

What we are trying to do is make Hawaii more resilient, self-sustaining and prosperous — the reason we are called Ulupono. It’s actually a Hawaiian pun: It’s prosperity through the right, or pono, path.

The idea was that sustainability, at its highest level, actually is synonymous with prosperity. It’s how we look at the future. And the pono path is really doing it the right way. And the right way is to work with other people so that it becomes a mutual engagement toward moving society forward.

Q: How do you view Hawaii in terms of social investment? What do you see here that needs to be improved or fixed?

A: What we have is a tremendous geographic richness. If you think about renewable energy or food production, what you have is a physical environment that has tremendous potential. And you also have a multicultural society that actually knows how to work well together, which is good. So those are our core strengths.

We have, of course, real challenges. We are 3,000 miles from anywhere, things are expensive, all the cost factors of production: Anything you import, your energy, your labor, is all more expensive than a lot of other places in the world.

One of the most important things that we are trying to catalyze will help us achieve our goals and be competitive and prosperous. The No. 1 thing is getting the different groups in society to work together.

Business ventures are often joint ventures where parties start to cooperate together and manifest the business models that are needed.

We are in a place in society where no one company, no matter how big it once was, can really achieve the goals; you have to work with others.

The second is, we have to be willing to take risks. One of the hard things to do in this society — and it’s true for a lot of Asian societies — is failure. Taking risks means you may fail, and nobody likes to fail. …

What Ulupono does, in the way that we joint-venture, the way that we try to work with others, is to help mitigate and underwrite some of that risk, so that it’s easier for people to take one step forward, holding hands together.

And if it works, great! Things take off. And if it doesn’t work, we want to fail fast, learn something and be willing to try it again. …

Q: Are we particularly risk-averse here?

A: We are culturally more risk-averse than many other places in the United States. … It’s one of the traits of where we are.

I think part of it is just how businesses evolved over the last 40, 50 years. When you have a strong sense of tradition, change is challenging. …

We have to change. We have to move forward as a society.

(We) actually, literally, have all the geophysical resources we need in almost all of our counties — possibly even Oahu, which might need some additional infrastructure — to really go 100 percent renewable.

And that’s an extraordinary thing. Most other states, frankly, do not have that. They have less than what we have.

We are in a subtropical environment; we have wet and dry. … Our productivity is off the charts. We have some real factors that allowed us to be successful, but you have to apply another layer of technology to overcome the factors that would make us unsuccessful. …

Q: How would you evaluate where you are, at this stage? How is it going?

A: Things that have gone extremely well are our investments in grass-fed beef. It’s wonderful. More importantly, the ranchers believe that this is possible, and the customers are happy to get it. Everyone’s making money, and it’s really starting to replicate. It’s wonderful, and it’s affordable: It’s actually beating imports.

With some of the solar investments — albeit it was more challenging with the utility than we had hoped — the federal government has been very generous. We as a state didn’t take as much advantage (of federal credits and subsidies) as we could have, but nevertheless some of our investments in solar did very well, and we’re glad to see more solar out there. As a state, we’ve done extremely well.

If you look at our social investment work, the school gardens program did extremely well. It started with four schools, and now I think it’s in 90 percent (of schools). I don’t think anyone would ever let go of that program again, because the kids are loving it.

They’re learning, they are eating from the gardens, they like vegetables, it’s helping their STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) scores. Everything you hoped for is happening.

We put a lot of venture investment chips down on bioenergy; we tried algae, we tried (the biofuel) cellulosic. We tried a number of different companies. And to a certain degree the technologies partially worked. They couldn’t quite get to the economic competitiveness to get to the next level. …

Q: What’s the issue? Is it a question of scaling up?

A: Well, it turns out that nature is really smart! (Laughs.) And cellulosic — there’s a reason why nature held those sugars really tightly into those trees. We tried a lot of different technologies. You can extract some of the energy out of it, but it turns out to be a little more expensive and harder than we all thought. But if we hadn’t tried we wouldn’t have advanced it. …

The other part of Ulupono that’s really important is we are here for the long term. Our business strategies are actually done by the decade, not by the year, … because the very essence of what Ulupono’s trying to do is change your daily life.

The food you eat, the energy you have, what car you’re driving, what’s driving that car. Hopefully, one day, how the planes fly back and forth.

This is basic infrastructure. Infrastructure takes a long time to put in place, but once it’s in place it lasts for 50 to 100 years.

So the change we make at the beginning of this century will probably last for the rest of the century. But it may take us 10 or 20 years for these changes to occur.

But that’s the scale of transformation that we’re trying to achieve. …

Q: I was going to ask you about the dairy farm. What’s new about that business model?

A: What’s new is that our former dairies were actually feedlots. Ironically, they were much more polluting than the one we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is very regenerative.

But it’s new, and things that are new in today’s society can invoke fear and misunderstanding. …

One of the things that’s happened is that, over the last 20 or 30 years, we repurposed land from agriculture to resort development. We didn’t quite anticipate that … there would be buffer zones around that development.

And so I think part of the challenge is recognizing that we’re going to have to be more respectful of the plans that we create, between the interface between resort and agriculture.