My Story

Before construction, there was music. I attended Rutgers University on a full academic scholarship through my junior year, then the University of Hawaii. At 22, I was hired to score the feature film “Crystal Eyes.”

I grew up sailing and surfing, and in my early twenties in Honolulu I was writing jingles and scoring a surf film. That’s where the Honolulu Advertiser found me in 1981, still knocking on doors.

I had paid publishing deals with Flying Island Music from 1978 to 1981 and Sony Music Publishing from 1981 to 1984. At 23, I was cast as “Mr. Pibb” in Coca-Cola national TV ads, which earned me my SAG card. I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-80s to write songs. From 1989 to 1992, I worked as a staff songwriter at Chrysalis Music Group on a salaried contract.

I’ve held a California real estate license since 1988 and a broker’s license since 2018 (DRE #01009857). Over those years I bought, sold, remodeled and built homes across Los Angeles. I co-founded True West Realty, which I ran with my partners from 1996 to 2000, and Sandy Garcia Realty, from 2018 to 2020. At both, I hired and trained agents. That work taught me how a project really comes together, from the permit counter to the final walkthrough.

I was founder and CEO of Academy Computer Inc. from 1995 to 2002. We refurbished Apple IIe and Mac computers for schools across 22 US states, Canada and the Philippines. Every one of these businesses came down to the same thing: find a real problem, build the team, and get it done.

My real estate work

Enchanted Islands was the boldest project I had taken on. In 2004, I raised $55 million to build the theme park in Kapolei, Hawaii, and partnered with Governor Linda Lingle and the Teamsters union on a plan to create more than 500 jobs. The concept art below dates from 2003, when the park first took shape on paper. Just before escrow closed, the seller backed out for a higher offer from a resort and golf developer, and that project never got built. When the seller came back in 2007 to revive the deal, I had already moved on to lead GeoGreen Biofuels.

I was founder and CEO of GeoGreen Biofuels Inc. from 2005 to 2011. We made biodiesel from used cooking oil at our plant in Vernon, just outside downtown Los Angeles. Plenty of people said a plant handling that much methanol could never be permitted there. We got it done.

That chapter taught me how to take an unusual idea through regulators and into the real world. It also brought recognition I still value: In 2010, I was honored as Los Angeles Sustainable Entrepreneur of the Year.

The GeoGreen Biofuels story

I served as Chief Operating Officer of Focus Craft, Inc. from 2018 to 2019, running the residential and commercial construction company out of North Hollywood. The Skirball and Woolsey fires showed us what wildfire could leave behind. Construction is where the next idea came from.

My construction experience

One night I was watching another fire on the news with my young daughter while she did her math homework. I flipped the page over and drew a cartoon: a house sinking into the ground, the fire passing over, and the house rising back up. She looked at it and said, “Poppy, it’s a magic house.” My answer was simple: you can’t burn what you can’t find.

The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. A couple of months later I made mechanical drawings and took them to our architect, Aaron Brumer. I half expected him to laugh me out of the room. Instead he pointed out that hydraulics lift heavier things than homes every day in shipping and aerospace, and that modular homes are built light. We started running calculations that night. Soon we had structural, mechanical, electrical, thermal and civil engineers on the team.

The result is HiberTec: a home that lowers into a reinforced underground vault and seals beneath a protective cover until the danger has passed. Nobody rides the house down; families evacuate and the home protects itself.

We had three problems to solve: move the building, seal the opening above it, and keep the water, power, gas and sewer connected while it travels. Each became an issued U.S. utility patent, granted in 2022 and 2023.

How HiberTec worksThe three patents

In the episode of ABC’s Shark Tank that aired April 15, 2026, Mikke Pierson and I pitched HiberTec, and we reached a deal with Barbara Corcoran on the show. The question on that stage was the same one I drew on the back of a homework page: what if a home could simply get out of the fire’s way?

The Shark Tank appearance

I don’t want this to be a luxury for a few people. I want HiberTec to protect ordinary families in wildfire country and Tornado Alley, and to let firefighters spend their time on the fire line instead of defending homes.

That’s the work in front of us. I believe the best businesses solve real problems. I think I was put here to solve this one.

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