MANILA, Philippines — Business tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan is looking for the next Facebook. And he wants it to come from the Philippines.
Facebook, as the more than 30 million Filipinos on the social network already know, was born out of the dorm room of Harvard University dropout Mark Zuckerberg in his desire to create an exclusive online community for Ivy League students.
At its nascent stages, Facebook was a fledgling upstart Internet company that had barely a handful of people under its payroll who were very eager to break into the US technology scene.
But what drove the now dominant social networking site in the world from collegiate dorm-room hobby to a legitimate technology platform was Zuckerberg’s decision to move the site’s operations to Silicon Valley, considered the birthplace of many technology start-ups in the US, including tech giants such as Apple, Google and Intel.
Such start-up ecosystem found in Silicon Valley in California is what Pangilinan hopes to replicate with the establishment of IdeaSpace, a multimillion peso technology incubation hub which his holding company, First Pacific Company Limited, launched in early March.
“I have been to Silicon Valley several times, in the Palo Alto area, specifically in Stanford University. They are one of the catalysts for the IT revolution in the States,” Pangilinan said in a sit-down interview with InterAksyon.com on Wednesday.
In Silicon Valley, moving away from the usual nine-to-five grind working as a software engineer for a huge multinational company and into establishing one’s own business has become the norm over the years.
It’s “cool and hip” to have your own start-up in the area, remarked Marthyn Cuan, vice president and chief information officer at power distribution firm Meralco, and is one of the proponents of the IdeaSpace program.
“That’s something we hope would take place in the Philippines soon,” Cuan said. “Today, if you told your parents that you started a company, they’re just going say that you’re a bum!”
Spirit of technopreneurship
Reversing this culture of relying on the big-league corporations for employment and inculcating the spirit of entrepreneurship among the youth is one of the cornerstones of the program, the executive said.
In Pangilinan’s opinion, Filipinos have the mettle and creativity to forge ahead of neighboring Southeast Asian countries in terms of developing and launching unique technological breakthroughs.
Filipinos, after all, have come to be known as early adopters of technology. Sometime around the ’90s, the Philippines earned the moniker “texting capital of the world” for sending billions of SMS every year.
Just recently, a business news site declared the country the “social networking capital of the world” for having one of the highest penetration rates in various social networks, chief of them Facebook.
But to leapfrog other nations and promote social progress, Pangilinan said Filipinos need to move from being just adopters and start becoming innovators. “That’s the tough part,” he said.
“We’re already well-known worldwide in singing and acting, maybe it’s time that we develop more scientists and engineers,” he chided.
The problem, according to him, is that Filipinos as a people “do not celebrate success,” particularly business success, which only discourages small upstarts from pushing through with their unique ideas since they do not get the necessary recognition that they deserve.
“We’re always suspicious of business, especially big business,” the 65-year-old industry mogul lamented. “If you look at Hong Kong where I worked for a number of years, if you look at China and even Singapore, they celebrate success, they appreciate people who are successful.”
