Company leader
Hoala Greevy
Founder and CEO
Paubox
Hoala Greevy is founder and chief executive of Paubox, which encrypts a healthcare email so the recipient can read it in an ordinary inbox. A Native Hawaiian software founder, he built the first version after a lunch with a nonprofit customer in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Growing Up in Honolulu
He is Native Hawaiian, born and raised in Liliha Valley, a neighborhood in Honolulu, and went to McKinley High School. He earned a bachelor of science in geography and social sciences from Portland State University. In a first semester of computer science courses there, he fixed a payroll bug from a campus job board and made $500 for the work, which is what pointed him at selling software.
Starting Pau Spam
His first job out of college, in 1999, was at Critical Path, an email company in San Francisco, California. He went back to Hawaii to care for his father and in 2002 started Pau Spam, the state's first software-as-a-service company. He holds two patents on email security.
In 2014, after a lunch with Siana Austin Hunt, then chief executive of Make-A-Wish Hawaii, he built the encryption product that became Paubox. She laid out the HIPAA problem of writing securely to hospitals, vendors, and other chapters. "I thought I could do something about it," he said. "Pulled some all nighters, came up with Paubox and launched it into the world."
Moving the Company to San Francisco
He now lives in San Francisco, where he moved Paubox after finding that buyers did not take a Honolulu software company seriously. "I moved to the one city where we'd be taken seriously for tech," he said. He has written more than 700 blog posts on HIPAA-compliant email, and his favorite quote is the Hawaii state motto, Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono, "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness."