Next big tech start-up may come from Philippines

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines can produce the next “unicorn” – tech start-ups that rapidly turn into billion-dollar technology companies – if Filipinos adopt a “can do” mindset.

Winston Damarillo, balikbayan Silicon Valley tech millionaire-turned-information and communications technology (ICT) executive, said that creativity and innovation were not an issue for the Filipino “technopreneur,” neither is the lack of venture capitalists or local financiers.

Damarillo, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2010, participated in the WEF summit last January in Davos, Switzerland.

“The gap now is not capital, not even geographical – it’s intellectual and cultural,” Damarillo told The STAR in a recent interview at the boutique office of his Amihan Global Strategies (AGSX) – a strategic consulting firm specializing in digital enterprise transformation for the largest corporations in the ASEAN region – at the Zuellig Building in Makati City.

Damarillo, after earning his industrial engineering degree from De La Salle University at 19, worked in top IT companies in California’s Silicon Valley. At 20, he landed a job at Intel. By 30, he had started open source application software company Gluecode, which was bought by IBM in 2005 and is now an integral part of the IBM Websphere division. He later set up and sold two more software firms: Logicblaze, bought by Iona Technologies in 2007, and Webtide, acquired by Intalio in 2009.

Damarillo went back to the Philippines several years ago and was tapped to head PLDT’s venture capital unit. He was recently named chief strategy officer of the PLDT Group. He continues to head his own tech ventures Exist, Acaleph Storage and MorphLabs.

“They should have an entrepreneurial mindset, and they should be gung-ho. The type where they say: that’s what I want to do, I can do that, I’ll find a way for me to do that,” Damarillo, now 45, said.

“Everybody thinks that what we lack is capital. I really don’t think that’s the case,” Damarillo said, stressing that if one is good then this would attract capital.

Damarillo said that at the WEF in Davos, the forum’s founder Klaus Schwab lectured on what he called the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution, a digital one that began in the middle of the last century, characterized by a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.

Damarillo said that the Philippines and its technopreneurs should make an effort to have a lead role in this revolution that is shaping the future and disrupting and changing industries, in the process forcing old conglomerates to evolve or fade into obscurity while causing the birth of new companies and the so-called unicorns.

“They were really geeky at this year’s forum,” Damarillo said. “What we lack here are more entrepreneurs. And so we need government encouraging more entrepreneurs.”

Damarillo now dreams of turning the Philippines into a “Silicon Islands” by bringing the best technology from Silicon Valley to the region and empowering tech groups and mentoring students and young professionals in the industry to achieve scale and reach their potential.

The self-described serial entrepreneur said that in his current DevCon initiative started in 2009, he wanted to spread the message to Filipino technopreneurs to “aim high, build something big.”

“Our economic expansion is bigger,” he added. “We are going up in consumption; in developed countries, it is stable or going down.”

“That means the innovations that will happen will happen here,” Damarillo said. “So the question is, are we the ones doing the innovation or are we just mere watchers and consumers of the innovation? “My call to action to my fellow entrepreneurs is: we should do the innovation.”