Aaron Kamakawiwoole
(CEO and Founder)
Aaron grew up in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, though he spent two years in Massachusetts when he was young (and literally left his mark on that place when he was five—it was a harrowing experience, he doesn't talk about it often), which was his first exposure to the East Coast.
At the age of seventeen he attended Patrick Henry College to start his degree in Government with an aim toward going to law school following his undergraduate studies. Around the end of his junior year in college he discovered that he had made a grave mistake in not majoring in Literature, and by the time he graduated had taken around 21 credits in Literature, with an emphasis in children's literature and the art of storycraft.
After taking the LSAT (and thinking clearly and honestly, as he would later recount), he decided that law school was not for him, and found himself building houses in Texas following graduation. This gave him ample time for three things: thinking about what it takes to build a balanced, well-grounded structure, the importance of storycraft, and how much the human body can sweat in 100+ degree temperature.
In August of 2011 he returned to Patrick Henry to work as an admissions counselor for the school, and in his spare time he kept writing stories, building characters, and dreaming about a medieval fantasy world called Zurn.
It was during his time as an admissions worker that Aaron also saw the increasing cost of college tuition affecting families that he had come to work with, and his conclusion was quite simple: if there was more scholarship money available to struggling students, they would be more readily able to go to the school they wanted to attend. This was the primary draw toward starting the Zurn Foundation in 2015.
Then tragedy struck: a plane in Chicago was grounded and he was forced to spend a night in the airport while on a trip for work. With nothing to do save dream and use Microsoft Word, he found himself asking his friends if they'd be open to helping him build and test a roleplay game called, "The Warriors of Zurn." After eighteen months of hard work, beta testing with new players and new faces, and a lot of edits to those documents, Zurn Central was born.
As an entrepreneur he enjoys talking to gamers, watching battle report videos on YouTube, hiking, drinking milkshakes, biking with beta testers to get ideas for game mechanics, babysitting nephews and nieces (of which he has ten), and dating a wood nymph as imaginative as he is.