Co-built a $100m+ supply chain assurance business, now with Private Equity on next leg. Hawaiian 🤙 trying to make my ancestors proud. Views are my own!
Los Angeles, CA
Joined September 2011
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Andrew Leatuali’i Savini retweeted
Variety's @OwenGleiberman calls #Moana "the best Disney live-action remake I've seen."
It helps that half the film IS animated, that Dwayne Johnson goes full Maui, and that newcomer Catherine Laga’aia plays Moana with a beaming rapture. The remake of “Moana” can’t, and shouldn’t, replace the original. But it earns a place alongside it.
variety.com/2026/film/review…
Somehow Gavin touched indirectly on the Texas-California debate — one I’ve debated myself.
For anyone wondering why it has been harder than expected for pro-Florida and pro-Texas companies to pull top technical talent out of California, the answer is not just taxes. It is community.
California’s advantage is not only its companies. It is the whole ecosystem around the talent: deep labor markets, universities, immigrant networks, cultural infrastructure, food, family, dating pools, professional networks, and a sense of belonging.
That matters. A lot.
Engineering talent — including many Asian and Asian-American engineers who have long been central to Silicon Valley and Southern California tech — often chooses California because it already has the communities that make life feel whole outside of work.
A Korean-American engineer in Hawthorne can get to K-Town or the San Gabriel Valley. A Taiwanese-American engineer in Palo Alto has access to San Francisco, Milpitas, Cupertino, Fremont, and a broader Bay Area ecosystem that feels familiar. That is not trivial. That is quality of life.
People do not make relocation decisions on tax rates alone. They make them based on career opportunity, community, family, food, schools, culture, weather, dating, mental health, and whether the place feels like somewhere they can actually build a life.
Texas and Florida have real advantages. Lower taxes matter. Lower costs matter. Business friendliness matters. But if they want to compete for the deepest pools of technical talent, they have to build more than office parks and incentives. They have to build communities people genuinely want to join.
This is also why California remains so hard to displace. It has the talent, the companies, the culture, the ocean, the universities, the immigrant networks, the arts, the food, and the climate.
California is expensive for a reason. People are not just paying for geography. They are paying for belonging.
Still the best state.
Gavin on why Elon's new chip fab, Terafab, will be successful:
"One, they have a partnership with Intel, which is very important. They're getting access to 50 years of institutional knowledge.
The A teams at the semi cap equipment companies will be working with them. ASML, KLA, Lam Research, Applied Materials.
One big reason Taiwan Semi caught up is those companies wanted them to catch up. They don't like having a monopsony.
And Elon is a living deity in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.
He's going to recruit the best people because the best engineers want to work for him, especially in hardware engineering.
Then next to Terafab, there'll be a Taiwan Town. 'These are your favorite restaurants? I'm going to move them and their whole staff from Taiwan to Texas.' Then we'll have Japan Town. Then Korea Town.
That's just not the way the people who run Intel and Samsung think.
So he's going to have the best talent, the A teams at the wafer fab equipment companies and he has Intel.
And it's different enough that it will not alienate Taiwan Semi."
While I think Google’s Gemini Omni is technically awesome, I can’t imagine anyone other than brainrot aficionados actually cares.
Sincerely — who wants art to be prompted, other than those profiting from children or young people glued to stupid short videos on their phone?
The real world is where beauty and human interest will ultimately progress.
This feels cheap. It feels uninteresting.
We don’t want AI to do our art, we want AI to do our dishes.
Gemini Omni doesn't just build scenes that look real, it reasons about what should happen next. It combines an intuitive understanding of physics with Gemini's knowledge of history, science, and cultural context.
Rolling out today starting with video outputs to Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers globally through the @Geminiapp + Google Flow, and @YouTube Shorts this week.