How Filipino Founders Can Build Businesses That Last
Frequently Asked Questions
Stewardship defines a founder's fundamental mindset that treats the business not as personal property, but as a trust. It represents a deep understanding that the capital being deployed belongs to outside investors and that the livelihoods of the employees depend entirely on executive decisions made during both good and bad market cycles. This sense of responsibility separates founders who build flashy, short-lived ventures from those who build highly resilient companies capable of lasting through economic downturns.
The Philippine market is about 20 to 30 times smaller by value than deeper markets like the United States, meaning that even a highly successful domestic business will exit at a small fraction of a Silicon Valley equivalent. Because of this scale difference, local founders cannot drop massive tech budgets into a Philippine opportunity and expect the math to work. Successful scaling requires a highly strategic approach to capital, recognizing that it is far easier to avoid spending funding early on than it is to raise double the amount later to cover operational inefficiencies.
Coins.ph achieved the country's largest tech exit at the time—a $95 million acquisition by Gojek in 2019—while raising only $12 million in total funding. The company enforced extreme frugality in its administrative overhead, such as having engineers fly on budget economy tickets with multiple layovers and sharing tight accommodations. They paired this restraint, however, with strategic investments in high-return marketing channels, ensuring that when their spending educated the broader market, their product was positioned to capture the resulting consumer demand.
Rooted in the experience of overcoming tens of millions in personal debt, Great Deals founder Steve Sy built a strict corporate culture that rejects hiring additional headcount as a default solution to operational problems. When managers request more staff to fix workflow bottlenecks, they are consistently sent back to the drawing board to find alternative, system-based efficiencies. This extreme internal discipline allowed the company to keep its operating expenses completely flat while driving massive revenue growth, ensuring the firm remained structurally lean.
A culture of discipline built during profitable years functions as a strategic road that enables rapid growth when a crisis hits. For example, because Great Deals spent years practicing strict financial frugality, it possessed the cash reserves necessary to retain all 800 employees during the pandemic while competitors were forced to downsize. This immediate operational readiness allowed the company to scale up instantly and post a massive fourfold increase in revenue, proving that discipline provides a business with flexible options when other firms run out of capital.
