Manila. How did I get here? Well, randomly. Someone tweeted me that there was a startup competition and you could meet VCs like 500 Startup’s Dave McClure. As I was in the middle of doing 12 startups in 12 months and I had a lot to show, I thought, why not?
I flew to Manila via Singapore. During my stopover at Changi Airport, I had a coffee to catch up Xiufen, who I met November 2013, on my first nomad “tour of duty”.
She’s a street style photographer and she made some nice pics of me too:
Flying to Manila
The flight took over 3 hours. Philippines is really pretty far out there. On the plane to Manila I worked on my new project: A list of cities for remote workers called Remote List, I had done the ground work for it in Bali and I was planning to launch when I arrived.
The airport looked pretty rundown to me. Especially coming from Bali and Singapore.
I was aware Philippines had a safety and crime problem. Dodgy stuff happened here all the time. Robberies, killings and lots of petty scams. So I was very vigiliant.
Walking out of the departure hall on to the street, tens of shouting taxi drivers came running at me. I told everybody to back off and give me space as I wanted to figure things out myself as this was the fastest way into getting scammed for a ride. But they didn’t back off. I was now surrounded by maybe 20 taxi drivers all trying to get me to ride with them. It was insane.
Then the hero of the day appeared. Officer Robert L. Valenzuela told everybody to GTFO and leave me alone. Yay! Safe. So we made a pic:
Officer Valenzuela told me which taxi to take and checked if it was a proper driver that was going to keep me safe. So friendly 🙂
Driving into Manila took half an hour as it was evening and there was lots of traffic. This place looked so different from anything I’d seen in Asia. If anything it reminded me of South America, although I’d never been, I’d imagine it’d look like this. But then all the writing on the walls was in English, kinda as if you’re in an American movie.
Arriving at my hotel, I had some dinner across the street.
Soooo, food, in Philippines. You could write a whole blog post about that. It’s fried. It’s greasy. It’s fat. It’s meat. And more meat. It’s. Not. By. Any. Means. Healthy.
I asked the Filipino’s what their main food was. They answered “Jollibee’s”. Wait. Jollibee’s is a fast food chain! But they were serious. Apart from that, it was mostly, chicken, chicken, chicken. I mean I loved it though. I had been eating so healthy in Bali’s vegan hippie restaurants, that I was totally down with some chicken.
I went to bed, as I had to wake up early to visit the startup competition.
I was staying in Malate, a fairly ghetto-ey part of Manila:
I didn’t really know. I just picked the cheapest place I could find a hotel. This still wasn’t cheap. About $30/night but it looked clean:
Malate was a poor area. I was fascinated by it though. Just walking around everything you saw was almost worth a picture, like this street scene:
Walking around there, I got weird looks as white kid with a backpack. I was regularly told by Filipino’s to GTFO here because it’d be too unsafe for me to walk. Taxi drivers with entirely confused looks would pick me up and ask me what the hell I was doing here:
Me: Hi
Taxi: What in the #@#$$ are you doing here?
Me: I’m staying here
Taxi: WHYYYYYY
That is, of course, after they fully locked their entire car from the inside to avoid drive by kidnappings. Greaaaaaaaaat!
I can’t say I ever felt unsafe in Malate though. It was just very poor.
So, Malate was sandwiched between Manila and Makati. Manila was the big city and Makati, well, Makati was the wealthy part. Officially it was its own city, but it overlaps with Manila. Makati is completely different from the rest of Manila, or even the entire Philippines. It’s the most international spot of the country. There’s expats, multinationals, banks and more expats. Also there’s rich kids. Philippines has a strong divide between poor and rich (kinda like Thailand). So if you’re rich, you’re immediately “high-society”, you study abroad and then when you come back you may or may not work in Makati. And your parents have Maserati’s. Yes I met kids whose parents had Maserati’s. There.
So anyway, I was saying, we were driving into Makati:
Where the rest of the city was poor and unsafe, Makati was like a modern fortress. It was heavily guarded with armed police troops. Every shop had a guard. Then another guard. And another. Due to regular bombings by gangs, you’d have to open your bag to every guard before entering a building. And they had giant guns. I’d never seen anything like this.
Obviously international trade and business was so important for the government that they built Makati. There wasn’t just banks and offices though, there was shopping malls and an entire nightlife area too with actual clubs.
I visited 71 Gramercy, a rooftop club:
…with a view all over Manila:
After clubbing, I took a taxi back to Malate. I’d now gone from standing in a place full of rich Filipino girls and boys, wealthy expat bankers and international fashion models (yes they were there too, a lot actually) to where the average Manila citizen lived. It was bizarre to experience.
Of course, I wasn’t here to go clubbing or discuss the Gini coefficient! I was going to pitch my startup.
The startup competition was in this university campus building:
Inside was a big hall with a stage where each startup had their own table.
Most startups were giant teams with 5+ people. I was all alone:
I was going to pitch GoFuckingDoIt.com, my latest project from the 12 startups:
It felt a bit like a high school show and tell.
Every 5 minutes, a team of investors and venture capitalists would come by my table, I’d pitch them and then they’d move to the next table. It was great training because you learn to quickly tell the most important data about your startup like users, revenue, growth and future plans. You also learn to adapt to what the person wants to hear and quickly shift. Some people are more interested in the creative side of it, others want to hear about the business side.
Something was itching here though. There was Dave McClure and some of his 500 Startups’ kids that run each Asian country’s funds. But when I started looking up everybody else, mostly everybody else wasn’t an investor. Or even had anything to do with startups. Hardly any had run companies themselves, yet we were all here pitching to them. For what?
It stopped making sense from there. But it got weirder.
We’d been selected from hundreds of startups to be here. The jury picked one winner. I’d imagine the winner would get capital funding. I know this was the Philippines, so maybe $50,000 would already be nice. But, instead, they got a free ticket to another startup event later in the month. Wait, what?
Then the other startups were invited to come up and buy $300+ tickets to THAT event for their startups too.
Wait, WHAAAAAAAAT?
Nobody was investing here. It was like playing startup theater.
The whole day got weirder. It should’ve been about the companies Filipino’s have started, are starting and having these Americans making actual investment deals with actual real money. It was like Filipinos idolizing these American startup people as complete heroes. Laughing at their every joke, in the hope of receiving some investment money, which they probably wouldn’t get anyway. WEEEIIIIIRD.
The event had now moved to A Space, one of Manila’s (or well Makati’s) best coworking spaces. Instead of spending more time in the startup bullshit bingo that was occurring in the conference room next to me, I sat down to do some coding instead.
Lost
I met Aila, who was working for A Space, as an interior designer. She had designed all the offices and the entire coworking space.
(Sorry, this was in the rain!)
Funnily enough, where I had just came from Bali where everybody was “lost”, she was lost too. Looking back now, it must be that I just attracted these people or selectively filtered them to meet them, due to my own lost mental state. Haha.
The internet famezzz
I kept coming back to A Space to work there (yes, they made a pic of me!):
Now, I knew nobody there, and nobody really knew me. Except Aila.
That’d change though. As Daniel Tay had interviewed me for Tech In Asia. It was a small press feature that’d go entirely viral and change my life overnight. That picture by Xiufen that she made just a week before in Singapore came out handy:
I started to get clues what was happening when people started taking pictures of me in the coworking space from a distance. Then random people asked me for selfies to share on Facebook:
Meanwhile that article kept getting picked up by other press. Suddenly, I was on the front page of WIRED:
That project I was working on the plane to Manila called Remote List? Well, I renamed it into Nomad List and in the same week it went to #1 on Hacker News:
And then Product Hunt:
I couldn’t have come up with this kinda of marketing rollout. All in one week. Press about me, then the most successful launch of a startup I’ve ever had. All of this happened while I was in Manila.
I didn’t need a startup competition, this was MUCH better!
It felt like I was walking on air. Lots of famous people tweeted my site out, and I tweeted back at them (with Jackie Yap).
After
A Space was open 24 hours. And I liked to work at night. Luckily, a lot of other people there liked to work at night.
One of the startups working from there was TripFlip, they had received some funding and were doing an app to book travel tours. It was run by April and Jackie, who were super nice. Also lots of developers and engineers would stick around.
We spent a lot of nights just talking about startups and life. It was super fun.
Just like in Bali, making friends here was super easy. I mean, I was here just for a month. We’d regularly have lunch and dinner together after working on our stuff. I was super productive.
I know I should have went OUTSIDE Manila and actually visited the islands and beaches of the Philippines. But honestly, I’d seen so much beaches in the last few months, I liked being in a big city like Manila and Makati.
After this I flew to Taipei and then back to Netherlands, then a trip to Japan with my best Dutch friends and then I went nomad again in Bangkok and Bali.
P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below: