HB20: Trung Lam, Hawai‘i Technology Development Corporation

A former bakery owner turned tech economy builder, Trung Lam is positioning Hawai‘i's ocean and space industries as its next competitive advantage.

When the pandemic brought Hawaiʻi’s tourism economy to a sudden halt, Trung Lam noticed something that had never existed at scale before: a critical mass of technology talent living and working in the islands.

“For the first time ever, we had a real density of tech talent here,” Lam says. “People who had always wanted to come home finally could — without giving up very high-paying jobs.”

That moment sharpened Lam’s long-held conviction that technology could be more than a cyclical talking point in Hawaiʻi’s economy. It could be a permanent pillar.

Today, as executive director and CEO of the Hawaiʻi Technology Development Corporation (HTDC), Lam is working to turn that once-in-a-generation disruption into sustained economic momentum.

“I grew up here, went away for school and fully intended to stay on the continent,” Lam said. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Davis, with plans to build a technology career in California.

Life intervened. “I followed the girl,” he said. “We’re married now and have three kids.” At the same time, his parents asked him to return home to help run the family bakery.

After coming back to Hawaiʻi, Lam earned his MBA from the University of Hawaiʻi and spent 17 years working in the family business, La Tour Bakehouse in Iwilei. He applied what he describes as an “engineering mindset” to every aspect of the operation.

Even while working in a traditional industry, Lam remained deeply engaged in the local tech ecosystem.

For years, Lam watched Hawaiʻi repeat the same pattern. “Every time tourism drops, everyone says we need to diversify our economy through the technology sector,” he said. “Then tourism comes back and it drowns out all the momentum.”

Covid, however, broke that cycle. By some estimates, 40,000 to 50,000 remote tech workers spent time in Hawaiʻi during the pandemic, including many kamāʻāina returning from the continent tech sector.

Recognizing how different this moment was, Lam co-founded a nonprofit called ThriveHI to study and engage this workforce. That work brought him into close collaboration with HTDC, the state agency responsible for growing Hawaiʻi’s technology sector.

At the helm of HTDC since June, Lam is focused on strategic discipline. “We don’t have unlimited resources, and every city wants to be a tech hub,” he says. “So the real question is: What is Hawaiʻi’s value proposition?”

His answer centers on sectors where geography creates advantage rather than limitation. “If being surrounded by ocean is usually seen as a challenge,” Lam said, “are there industries where that actually becomes a strength?” That thinking has led HTDC to prioritize ocean and space technologies — fields where Hawaiʻi’s environment, infrastructure and history of navigation align naturally.