Meet Our Entrepreneurs in Residence!

HPU community may reach out directly via LinkedIn or email entrepreneurial@hpu.edu.

Paul Gene

Founder, CEO of North Shore Beach Bus

Paul Gene is a tourism entrepreneur and educator with over 30 years of experience in Hawai’i'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 Hawai’i 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. An alumnus of Hawai’i Pacific University (Masters in Business Administration) and BYU-Hawai’i (BS in Tourism Industry Management), Mr. Gene combines strong academic foundations with extensive practical expertise. His background includes serving as Marketing Director for BYU-Hawai’i'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 ccurrently on a sabbatical to dive deep into AI applications in healthcare operations. Conducting market research with healthcare organizations, building cloud-native proof-of-concepts, 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.

Deena White Tearney

Founder and CEO of Pacific Point, a Salesforce Consulting firm headquartered in Honolulu with locations in Colorado, California, Texas, Australia, and Singapore

Deena has extensive experience leading and implementing complex Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects, both as a consultant with "Big Five" firms and in industry, prior to founding Pacific Point. Under Deena’s leadership, Pacific Point ranked three years in a row on Inc. magazine’s 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. While leading and growing Pacific Point, Deena was recognized by Pacific Business News as a 40 Under Forty and a Women Who Mean Business honoree. She is on the board of TRUE, a nonprofit on a mission to accelerate technology adoption and create a more diversified and sustainable economy for Hawaii.

Deena is committed to the Pledge 1% movement and focuses her corporate and personal philanthropy on inspiring youth to pursue careers in technology through sponsorship and volunteer work with a variety of youth programs.

On her podcast, The Audio Project, Deena hosts executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes in inspiring conversations on business, leadership, technology and career development.