They say that you get what you give, but a lot of the time you may actually get back more than you give to others. It's part of the warm fuzzy feeling of helping build a community.

Since 2020, we've been a remote and now very geographically distributed team. In a lot of ways, this has significant strengths, and we're fortunate to be connected by the internet to fabulous folks such as yourselves, as well as far-flung team members.

That said, it's always good to get the opportunity to connect in person. Lita, Zach, Paolo and Akemi attended the Ecommerce Agency Summit in Austin, TX, where we were able to share some BBQ, talk shop and collaborate on strategic planning.

We were also fortunate to reconnect with great folks at partner agencies who we hadn't seen in person for years due to Covid, some of whom we first met at Shopify's Unite conference in 2016.

In the spirit of knowledge sharing and fostering community, we've involved in some other projects as well.

Last month Paolo was business plan reviewer and startup pitch judge for the University of Hawai‘i Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship 2024 Venture Competition, which awarded over $100,000 in prizes to enterprising students across the state.

Akemi returned as a mentor and welcomed the new cohort of FoundHer,  an accelerator for Native Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Islander women-led companies.

For the fourth year, we're leading workshops and coaching a E-Commerce & Digital Marketing cohort for the Hawai'i Technology Development Corporation (part of state’s economic development agency, focused on helping grow the technology industry.)

And next month as an investment in continued learning, Lita will attend MozCon, the premiere SEO conference, in Seattle to learn from a myriad of industry case studies and bring back new strategies. At the end of June, Paolo will be attending Shopify's partner developer conference in Toronto to directly engage with the Shopify product development team and learn more about checkout apps, APIs, and more.