About “Filipino investors would like a more active role in running the company and a larger equity stake” – probably because money is harder to come by in the Philippines? Or because there of the undeveloped VC culture?

About mobile shortcodes, the operators really don’t want to give them that easily for business reasons.

About Pinoy Web Startups, let’s get the word out!

It’s hard to find like-minded people when you want to develop a web product/service. My dad doesn’t get it. He’s probably thinking… what happened to the thousands of pesos they invested in my economics and accounting degrees??

It seems to me that Filipino investors would like a more active role in running the company and a larger equity stake. I don’t think that’s going to jive with the independent attitude needed to build a web startup here in the Philippines in the first place.

Plus, what’s troublesome with incorporating a mobile component is the high costs of leasing those 4-digit access numbers like 2968 etc. Probably can’t expect to derive revenue from that coz the telco and companies like Chikka or Information Gateway get the lion’s share.

Help! Can you recommend other Pinoy web startups? I’m trying to document the developments at http://www.pinoywebstartup.com (nothing up yet)

It jolted me to relize that *this* is one major problem I had as a startup techie — lack of capital and lack of access to financing.

I am virtually nobody in Pinas. I was born from a lower-to-mid middle class family. We had no property to speak of. My father is an OFW and my mother is a seamstress and they were both in debt. Banks and financial insti’s would not lend me money (I had trouble as it was trying to open a company bank account!).

The Pinoy system is stacked against startups in general. It’s something i’ve tried to wrestel with and continue to struggle with even as I run Digitall Solutions (http://digitalsolutions.ph).

We have great ideas but we can’t spend time working with them because we are buried with bread-and-butter projects. If we pause to prioritize the R&D, it means paying for salaries without bringing in revenues to sustain us. Classic “isang kahig, isang tuka” or hand-to-mouth existence that we Pinoys are heir to.

we don’t have the kind of financial backing that this kind of experimentation would usually require, so we’re building out our ideas on revenue generated from client-work. the consequence is that any targets we have take 4-5 times longer to achieve, simply because we can’t focus exclusively on it. but that’s not entirely a bad thing either all things considered, because Lord knows we need more real-world experience to really get this right, and often times, being forced to work on other people’s projects is the best way to learn.

Good luck with Project X!

However I see a growing trend nowadays where entrepreneurship IS picking up in the traditional sectors. This, in turn, will start generating demand and market for technical products, hopefully fulfilling your enterprise-centric dream for the future.

This is something I’m going to take up in the near future, and I do have a business-centric “Project X” in mind, which I’ll do with a partner.

I myself am not a money person. Well, I’m not bad at finance, but I would rather focus on the tech 100%. So these posts I make – it’s more like convincing other people to do it! In my product and technology innovation post, I admit that I couldn’t think of an original idea (so far) and am just focusing on the tech right now.

About the pandesal culture, I admit I’m guilty of that when I say, where are the Pinoy Facebook apps? (among other things) when it might just be a Filipino clone implementation of something foreign.

About mobile, that’s where I’m working now, but in employee mode. Big telcos as incubators? I’m not sure about that, they aren’t the best in “new ideas” and they often outsource new stuff to other firms.

Our IT industry as enterprise-computing centric? I wish it were! From my point of view, it seems game/entertainment-obsessed! (Apologies to the game developers).

Other barriers that come to mind — It’s rare to find that critical combination of business acumen and technical smarts in a single person.

Not all technical people know (or are interested in learning) how to run a business, much less keep it afloat.

I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve met who have great technical minds, but have no clue how to manage something as basic as their credit card debt.

If I were an investor, I’d be wary of leaving the running of the business to someone who can’t handle money.

Also, there’s the fact that we live in a “pandesal” culture — you know, that phenomenon where once a pandesal store opens on your street, you’ll soon find half a dozen other pandesal stores on that same street (how else did we end up with auto shops galore on Banawe in Quezon City?).

It’s just too easy to give into the temptation of replicating someone else’s business model, rather than being innovative and offering something new and valuable.

And if you’re a me-too web startup with no ability to innovate, you’ll never be #1 in your category. You’ll just be playing catch-up all the time.

It seems to me that we’re more likely to produce successful mobile-tech startups rather than web startups, simply because the local mobile industry is a thriving, cash-rich business.

Plus we’re a country where there are far more cellphones in active use than computers with internet access.

Thus, a web startup with no mobile component would have a severely limited local market vs. a mobile startup.

IMHO, the big telcos are in a good position to become mobile VCs or to be incubators of mobile startups, because they have ample cash and they’re eager to expand their value-added service offerings. Plus they can provide business or management guidance to young firms.

It would definitely be nice to see Philippine startups succeed in the web and/or mobile space, and add some excitement to our very enterprise-computing-centric IT industry.
Cheers!