HOKALI: A New Wave of Booking Lessons — Cohort 13 Founder Spotlight
Cohort 13 founders Ignacio Viau and Tomas Bisi discuss the vision and mission behind HOKALI, a marketplace for booking onsite surf lessons with local sports businesses and expert coaches. HOKALI, founded in San Francisco, simplifies the process of booking and connects people with local businesses and coaches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Jacksonville, and most recently, Hawaii. The team shares how HOKALI resulted from a passion for surfing, nature, technology, and sustainability, and their plans to expand to additional water and land sports.
How did you meet?
We met five years ago in San Francisco, surfing at Ocean Beach. We are both from Argentina and we were living in SF but had never met. We were introduced through a mutual friend and started hanging out and surfing together, and we became friends.
How did HOKALI come to life?
Ignacio: HOKALI is the evolution of our previous coaching experiences. Tomas used to be a high-performance sailing coach and I used to be a kite surfing and surf instructor. It is also a consequence of living in San Francisco, the mecca for startups. We had these entrepreneurial skills that were pushing us to create something cool and new. Many friends and family members started asking us for surf lessons and where to surf. We realized that there was an opportunity for innovation and we could combine our passions like coaching, technology, and entrepreneurship — .
Tomas: — and friendship.
What were your respective backgrounds before starting HOKALI?
Tomas: I worked for nine years as a professional high-performance sailing coach across the US and Argentina. I competed a lot and that was my main source of income for many years. When I moved out of Argentina I wanted to keep studying so I studied computer science in Silicon Valley and later worked at SmartRecruiters as a product manager.
Ignacio: I graduated from law school but six months before graduating I already had started my first business as a lawyer, which is still running in Argentina. I quit after four years and I started my second business in San Francisco, an Argentinean culinary experience. My business partner was a chef and we ran a premium catering company, selling amazing, unique Argentinean barbecue in California. The business is still running and it was a great experience, starting a business from zero in the food industry.
After that, I worked for two years in a tech company called Webee in Silicon Valley, alongside the CEO. Webee is an IoT company where you can get data through drag-and-drop logic builder solutions. I gained a lot of skills and experiences in technology working near the CEO. After two years, I moved again to an entrepreneurial lifestyle. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have that feeling in your gut that that’s what you want to do to be happy. I had previous experiences of building companies in industries I was not so passionate about and I decided to follow my passions and build a business from there. That’s where HOKALI was born.
Tomas: It is a mix of our passions and all the things we know how to do. We used to hang out and talk about all the opportunities to start a business. Ignacio has all the business development experience and I bring the technology side. Besides being a product manager, I also worked for other companies as a software engineer. We combined forces and that’s where HOKALI began.
Ignacio: If you don’t see us here at the office, it’s because we might be out there surfing.
Tomas: Or sailing, or diving, or kite surfing, something pushing the limits.
How does the culture around surfing vary in the different cities where HOKALI operates?
In Hawaii, it is definitely the tourists who drive bookings, versus in SF, the surfers are mainly locals. Within California, San Francisco is totally different from San Diego. San Diego is a surf city — everyone is doing something at the beach. LA has less of this connection because if you want to go to the beach you potentially need to drive an hour.
But in terms of surfing, it’s the same everywhere. In the water, it’s the same everywhere.
What are some of the challenges with the traditional ways of booking surf lessons?
For the students, the information is very disorganized. It is not structured and it is distributed across many online sites. It’s very hard to understand a sport just by googling and there’s no one place you can go.
For the surf schools, they lack business skills like sales and marketing, so HOKALI is the perfect solution for them because we provide an admin tool to manage daily operations and offer customer support. Everything is on one platform.
How did you come up with the name HOKALI?
One week, early on into the business, we decided we needed to figure out a name. We started by surfing at a spot called Four Mile in Santa Cruz, where we used to go a lot. After the surf session, we went to a coffee shop to brainstorm and gain some inspiration.
We started looking for cool Hawaiian cool names, puzzling around words related to the ocean and nature. We were inspired by Hawaiian names but we didn’t want to copy a Hawaiian name — we were 100% sure of that. We also wanted to choose a name that didn’t match strictly with surfing, because we were already thinking of expansion to other sports. We ended up with two or three finalists and sent out a poll to some friends. Everyone loves the name.
HOKALI was the inspiration that came out of a surfing session. And that’s the mission of the company: connecting people with nature and living a healthy lifestyle. No matter what sport you do — surfing, sailing, or any sport you have a passion for, you go there to connect and disconnect with yourself at the same time. And find inspiration in your life.
Can you talk about HOKALI’s sustainability initiative?
At the beginning, we thought about creating a nonprofit and started interviewing nonprofit directors to see where they needed help. However, we realized we would do better to create a for-profit organization that helps nonprofits. For each lesson we connect, we donate to various organizations. We have a new project coming with a nonprofit, Scholas, where we provide ten scholarships for kids from poor families in Buenos Aires and Mozambique.
We want to connect people with sports and build an awareness about the importance of the environment so they will want to contribute to protecting it. It’s part of our DNA as a company. Students connect with themselves, the ocean, and nature. Some of them become surfers some of them just gain more awareness about the ocean.
We have a daily contribution that anyone can do called the #HOKALIChallenge. Basically, after surfing or playing any sport, pick up some trash on your way out. When you go to your car after the surf session, in the two or three minutes it takes walking from the beach to your car, you can pick up some trash.
What markets are you looking to expand to?
HOKALI seeks to expand to many water and land sports, including tennis and golf. It is going to be the go-to place for lessons. When you arrive at an airport and need a ride, you will always go for Uber of Lyft. Similarly, we want people to think this way about HOKALI, but for sports lessons.
What lead you to apply to Blue Startups?
In Hawaii and as part of Blue Startups, we knew that we could follow all of our passions. Blue’s portfolio and the number of great advisors also stood out to us. We wanted to come to potentiate our business and grow.
Getting into the program was a real challenge for us. We had applied last year, in May, three or four weeks after starting the company, with ten or twenty lessons booked. I remember we had a conversation with one of the mentors here at the program during the interview and he destroyed us. He asked so many good questions that we didn’t have the answers to.
After one year, lots of effort, great traction, and pushing our dream, we applied again and were selected. At the end of the day, if you have a dream and you really want to make it happen, just push and go for it. Some doors are always going to close but one door is going to open.
Finally, where can people interested in lessons here on O‘ahu find you?
You can book lessons at two locations currently, Ala Moana and Haleiwa. Hopefully, we onboard new schools from Waikiki and more schools from Haleiwa. Those are our two best spots at the moment.
To learn more, visit: http://www.hokali.co
