When we moved into our new office, we were in a momentary quandary about what to do with a good-sized room that was right smack in the middle of the layout. We could turn it into another meeting room - you could never have enough of those. Or perhaps a designated interview room? Incubate a startup idea…
Don't fall into the trap of the small idea. Here are 6 tips on how to avoid doing so. 1) Pick a painkiller I touched on this a bit in a recent post. A painkiller is something someone very urgently needs. He would be willing to pay for it NOW if you could make the pain go…
There was a moment during the actual pitching proper last Saturday's Open Coffee event that I looked at Matt and AR of JGL and said, "I love this...I love it!" It was one of the many times when someone in the audience had the the RIGHT contact or the RIGHT information and then just generously offers it…
Exactly 6 years ago, I was in Cardinal Santos hospital feeling an overwhelming mixture of happiness, fear, and excitement. You see, for the first time, I was holding my son in my arms. And there was something else I was feeling. As I beheld my son, I felt an unmistakable tug of the heart. It was the…
Aside from my work in STORM and Juan Great Leap, I "incubate" firms. It's really just a passion of mine to look for the right ideas, find the right people to pursue them, and then try to build something from nothing. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't. So, if you can imagine, a big part of this…
I watched TURBO last night with my family. The wifey liked it. The kids LOVED it. Unbeknownst to them, I was loving it a little more than I probably should. Why? Turbo is easily the greatest entrepreneurial animated movie I have ever seen!!! (now that's a sentence I'd never, ever thought about writing in this blog) At the…
Posting the last call for this Saturday's Open Coffee event at the 47 East compound! Do register here now and grab the remaining slots before we close registration. What I've observed is, the larger the crowd, the more valuable the process becomes. When someone pitches a large crowd, there is almost always someone who has a very intimate…
Last Saturday, Juan Great Leap and Hybridigm held Dare To Pitch at the STORM headquarters in Ortigas Center. It was a pitching forum where we invited startups to pitch to VC's. No winners, no prizes. We just wanted deserving entrepreneurs to have a venue where they could pitch to institutional investors. At best, they could get funded,…
We've heard it from so many pundits and experts already (including me): there is SO MUCH opportunity now, the time to do a startup is now, blah blah blah. I do agree with this, obviously. Wholeheartedly. Just compared to this same time last year, I've seen so many entrants, foreign and local, angel and VC, wanting to…
(The second of a two-part series on AWESOME CUSTOMER SERVICE, part one can be found here) Before we proceed to rules 4, 5, and 6, let's do some definition of terms first. There are two types of culture in a given organization: there is the EXPRESSED culture, and there is the ACTUAL culture. The expressed culture is…