If you’ve been reading the past few columns, you’ll note that I’ve focused on Hawaii’s young entrepreneurs.
However, startups are not confined to youth. Older entrepreneurs don’t stop reinventing themselves, and even mature companies and products can be subject to innovation.
Vasper is the brainchild of Peter Wasowski, a 60-something who sold his California medical device company and moved to the Big Island to retire. Restless and recovering from arthritis, he wanted to mend his body. He ended up doing that by developing an exercise technology that harnesses the regenerative power of lactic acid — the stuff that makes your muscles burn during a workout.
His system stimulates the release of growth hormones and delivers the benefits of a two-hour workout in 20 minutes. At first glance his gear looks like conventional gym equipment, except he fits his subjects with radiatorlike vests around the arms, chest and quads that cool the body while you exercise.
From all reports it does wonders. NASA was so impressed that they are looking at Vasper to keep astronauts in shape on future space voyages. Back on Earth, Wasowski’s clinics at the Cades Shutte building and at several mainland locations are helping everyone from executives to injured Navy SEALs rehabilitate. The net effect: mended bodies, more energy and better sleep. What more can you ask for?
Human resources outsourcing company Altres (www.altres.com) is not exactly a startup, nor is its CEO, Barron Guss, some college kid. Look under the hood of this firm and you’ll see they are reinventing themselves as a startup software company.
How did that happen?
About four years ago Guss realized that the commercial software Altres was using to process payroll checks, employee benefits, time attendance and health insurance wasn’t cutting it. He decided that if he couldn’t buy what he needed, he’d create it. It was a gutsy move, but he knew what he wanted: a user-friendly interface targeted at ordinary employees rather than management. The company had some background in writing code but nothing on the scale it would take to get the job done. Several million dollars and a dozen programmers later, HR Symphony was born.
"We woke up one day," says Guss, "and realized we were a cutting-edge software company."
Not only has HR Symphony increased his own company’s productivity and profits, but it’s created a new profit center. Guss says mainland HR companies are now interested in licensing his product. Not bad for a company that’s been in existence longer than Microsoft.
Doug Levin, founder of Cheqbook, has his share of gray hair to go along with his 20 years of experience as a (Maui-based) certified public accountant. Two years ago he founded the company, which makes accounting software, because the off-the-shelf products he was using weren’t all that good. The industry standard, Quickbooks, from Silicon Valley-based Intuit, was "amazing when it first came out," said Levin. However, as cloud computing gained momentum, none of the accounting software made the grade. Like his counterpart at Altres, Levin decided he could develop his own software. Finding good talent on Maui can be a challenge, but he was lucky. He recruited Ben Ward, an experienced chief technology officer who already had launched two other successful software products. Two years and $750,000 later, Levin had a polished product with innovative technology, such as crowd-sourcing to categorize transactions, and a color-coded system that highlights which transactions need attention. The firm currently has 172 end users, and Levin is set to go national to compete with the big dogs.
I think it’s safe to say that the lesson with all these companies is that what’s old can certainly be new again.
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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.
