HB20: Richard Matsui, KWH Analytics
Nearly 20 years into a career spanning McKinsey, the Biden Administration, and multiple companies built and sold, Richard Matsui is just getting started at home.
Richard Matsui has been an innovator in the clean energy industry for nearly 20 years – an old tree inside a young forest, as he puts it – and judging by his entrepreneurial agenda, he’ll be at it for decades more as that forest matures.
Honolulu born and raised, Matsui studied at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., was a founding member of McKinsey & Co.’s Global Solar Practice while based in Taipei, founded his first company in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012, joined the Biden Administration’s Energy Department in 2023 to help speed deployment of advanced clean energy technologies nationally, and built and sold an AI company to investors in India.
Meanwhile, after returning to Honolulu in 2020, he has co-founded a couple of nonprofits, is a board member for at least two companies and has launched a pair of new companies in the last year.
All of this while the national political environment and policies have turned hostile toward the renewable sector.
“No entrepreneur would be worth their salt if they can’t make something happen in any environment,” he says, while expounding on the opportunities to apply AI developments to the clean energy sector.
Returning to Hawaiʻi has restored his creative energy after getting “burned out” in San Francisco while running his first company, kWh Analytics. “It’s now the largest independent insurance company for solar, wind and batteries in North America,” he says proudly.
Coming back to Hawaiʻi has been invigorating. “Yes, we have problems, but it’s just a lot more personal here. So that’s what gets me excited about this next chapter, hopefully being able to apply some of the things that I’ve learned from a technology standpoint, a clean energy standpoint.”
Since the pandemic, Hawaiʻi has attracted many tech sector workers who, like Matsui, realized they could work remotely and live almost anywhere.
“We have a fantastic quality of life here,” he says. “We’re in a moment where there are a lot of talented people out there and a lot of talented people with choices. There’s a number that have chosen and will continue to choose to live in Hawaiʻi … . There’s an unprecedented opportunity for startups to be built in Hawaiʻi.”
Toward that end, last month Matsui convened a Kuleana Summit, bringing together a couple dozen Asian-American and Pacific Islander CEOs in the energy sector, with the goal of making Hawaiʻi an “essential hub” where leaders discuss accomplishments and influence a broader national agenda.
“The more that Hawaiʻi can be seen as not just a tourist location but a place where serious people are doing serious things, that’s better for all of us,” he says.
