BORACAY Island, Aklan , Philippines – International technopreneurs are encouraging Filipino startups to be optimistic and heighten their confidence as global investors are now eyeing Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, as their potential breeding ground.
Bowei Gai, a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, who traveled in 29 countries and 36 cities in the last nine months, said that money should be the least of problems for startup geeks, as venture capitalists will eventually follow if good ideas are well developed.
This is one of the messages conveyed yesterday during the opening of the "Geeks on a Beach" forum organized by passionate technology development advocates in the Philippines led by Tech Talks.ph.
The two-day forum, the first of its kind event held in the Philippines in a national scale, gathered close to 300 participants mostly from the information technology start-up community in the country, as well as government executives, venture capitalists, investors, and developers, among others.
Gai said the rise of startups in the Philippines is favored by the country's internet-aware and tech-savvy young generation and significant English-speaking population.
"The Filipino startup community is still in the infancy stage but the country is ripe with opportunities," said Gai, the founder of World Startup Report, which aims to document the world's startup communities through series of reports, identify and empower local startups.
"There is a lot of appetite for international venture capitalists to help start ups, and the Philippines is one of the countries in Southeast Asia that is being looked at," said Earl Valencia, president of Idea Space.
The country’s strength in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) compliments its capability to lure international VCs here, to help fund the good technology innovations being hatched by good Filipino talents.
Paulo Santos, a successful technopreneur based in Singapore, who is also part of a venture fund group in the states, confirmed that the Philippines is one of the markets that the international startup funders or VCs are looking at.
Building up a strong foundation for startup community in technology innovation is therefore very important for the Philippines to develop, aside from advancing its industry-based IT and outsourcing sector.
Meanwhile, the Department of Science and Technology-Information and Technology Office (DOST-ITO) undersecretary Louis Napoleon C. Casambre, vowed to help the development of technopreneurship in the Philippines by implementing and supporting programs geared to empower talents to enter into the global opportunity in technology innovation business.
The "Geeks on a Beach" event is espoused by the over-a-year private-led movement hatched in Cebu to provide an avenue for the startup community to showcase their ideas to the commercial landscape. It started with the series of "startup weekend" events.
The two-day event held in the world’s "best island" Boracay is also supported by Smart Communications, Ng Khai Development Corporation, and other corporate partners.
Tina Amper, president and founder of TechTalks.ph, the lead organizer of the event said that there is need to put the startup community in the front line, as the Philippines potential is huge yet it remains to be an unappreciated sector in the entire field of Information technology here.
"We want the world to know that we have rich talents here in the Philippines," said Amper adding that the Geeks of the Beach event is just one of the major events that will be organized to mark the Philippines’ entry as one of the preferred technology innovation hubs in the world. /JOB (FREEMAN)