Around 3 years ago, STORM was in a rut. We made a sellable product in Flexible Benefits. We were so excited that people were ACTUALLY BUYING our product that we... ...made OTHER products instead of concentrating and building on our winner. I blame my entrepreneurial craziness for this one. Wrote about this a bit for homegrown.ph -…
I had an absolute blast early today with 6 awesome student leaders (sorry Angeli, you don't count anymore) talk about ideas on how to propagate the startup movement in campuses. Basically, the group introduced themselves to one another, ate doughnuts, and then the awesome brainstorming happened. There is one big plan the group is concocting (to be…
(the following is a guest post by multi-awarded entrepreneur Maoi Arroyo) As a junkie of all things startup, I’ve always loved shows like Bloomberg’s TechStars. Whichever season you watch, these entrepreneurship-themed reality shows try to select the best teams as opposed to the best ideas. As Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, famously said: “The view that good…
I'll be meeting around 5 student leaders next Wednesday, 4pm, at the STORM conference room, at Unit 602, Centerpoint Building, along Julia Vargas. The main agenda will be: 1) How to push entrepreneurship and the startup movement in universities 2) How to help student entrepreneurs (Map here) Our conference room seats around 10 people, so there are…
In my 10 years of HR work prior to becoming a full-fledged entrepreneur, I did an awful lot of presentations and gave a ton of job offers. I thought I was pretty good doing these things, so when I made my leap into entrepreneurship, I thought to myself: "Hey whatever 'selling' I would need to do for…
I had another awesome time last Saturday morning at the April Edition of Open Coffee. Here are some of my thoughts and observations on now holding four of these formatted mixers. 1) The Sharing Continues to Amaze Me My colleague AR told me that she plans to write a thesis about how the growing Filipino entrepreneurial community…
In one of his blogposts, Peter, refers to the concept of the Argonaut from the book, Start-up Nation. What are your personal opinions on the contribution of the Argonaut to a Philippine Startup Nation? Joey: I think the Philippine Startup scene is about 10 years away from being labeled as mature. A lot of my colleagues, maybe…
My So-called Career Development For the most part of my adult life, I thought I knew what I had wanted to do. I wanted to pursue a career in HR. I wanted to make money. I wanted to make my resume as impressive as I could possible make it. And so I tried my very best to…
It was around 11:30 am. I just closed the main pitching activity at the recently-held JGL Open Coffee activity and told everyone to gather at the hallway of 47 East to take a quick group pic. And so we did. After that, I told everyone it was free time. You can probably imagine what happens next. Wondrous…
The moment was captured. So real, honest, and simple. It illustrates the warmth and vibrancy of a growing community that supports and is open to collaboration. To all the leaders and feeders in the startup community, may this video fuel your spirits :)