Oceanit's Patrick Sullivan: Why he's committed to Hawaiʻi despite policy changes

When CEO Patrick Sullivan founded Oceanit in 1985 in Honolulu, his role was to do everything, including writing the accounting software. The company started as a coastal engineering firm, and over the past four decades has grown into a global deep-tech organization that now accelerates its growth by using artificial intelligence to sift through countless experimental possibilities.

With nearly 150 employees today, including his wife, Chief Operating Officer Jan Sullivan, Sullivan no longer needs to write code for the company. He told Pacific Business News his job now is to coach people.

“I see my job as creating the environment to bring out the best in people. Inside everybody, there’s this special person, and what I try to do is find a way to connect the heart and the head to work on something that requires a fearlessness, so they’ll do the impossible,” Sullivan said.

“My job is to give them that opportunity and to give them the encouragement to take a risk. If I can do that, and then others learn it and share it, we create groups of people that can do impossible things.”

In July, PBN named Oceanit an honoree for the 2026 Fire Awards that recognizes excellence and leadership in technology and innovation.

What problem were you trying to solve when you founded Oceanit, and how has your vision for the company changed?

It’s always been kind of the same. We wanted to solve important, interesting problems. What changed is the methodology and the discipline. The mind-to-market process addresses and articulates the cultural differences between basic research and delivery and execution at scale in the market to deliver products; we do both of those things.

The culture of doing research, we call it a notebook culture, is different than the culture of delivering a product, which is a documentation culture. So, you have the blue zone and the green zone, and they’re connected through the rock-and-roll zone. Rock-and-roll describes it because I try to let people know, they think they know what the market needs, but until they’re in that market, they have no idea, and they’re almost always wrong. …

And the only way you find that out is you go out and get your feet wet, get in the market, talk to real people, build prototypes and have people try things. It’s hard work.

You’ve got two cultures connected through the rock-and-roll zone. You need a team of all kinds of people, and I can’t say that enough. The idea that one person has everything is total nonsense. You really need a team.

What we do work on is a mutual respect, so that people understand how different people contribute, because you can’t do it without their part. You may have done some remarkable science that’s brilliant, maybe even Nobel Prize-level, but unless you’ve got other people to help you bring it to the world, it’s not going anywhere.

You’ve built one of Hawaii’s longest-running technology companies. Why has staying in Hawaii mattered to you?

It’s home. From a pure business standpoint, it would make more sense to be in Texas.

Hawaii makes it really hard to be here — the policies here make it really difficult — and I wish it wasn’t like that, but it is. But this is home, so in spite of what they do, I’m not going to give up on Hawaii. The state could do a lot more to help companies. The market is enormous, the opportunity space is massive, so there’s room for all kinds of companies here.

This story was originally written by Nichole Villegas for Pacific Business News.