糖心破解版

14 startups from StartupIsland.ph Cohort 8 celebrate their graduation alongside mentors and DTI Region 7 officials at the program’s demo day ceremony in Cebu, May 28, 2025.

When fourteen startups from across seven regions in the Philippines gathered for StartupIsland.ph Cohort 8’s demo day on March 28th, they represented six years of systematic work by the Department of Trade and Industry Region 7 to build startup support infrastructure outside traditional tech hubs. This government-backed program has produced fifty-seven graduates while expanding from Central Visayas to include founders from Iloilo and Davao, creating something distinctive in how it approaches mentor relationships, regional positioning, and founder development. What follows is an exploration of what happens when sustained attention meets authentic market understanding, when founders choose to stay rooted while building globally competitive companies, and when institutions design support systems around depth before scale.

The Proximity Promise

I was told the edge is in proximity. That if you locate yourself close enough to capital鈥攁s in the right cities, the right buildings, the right rooms鈥攊nnovation will flow cleaner, more lucidly. You will build with the precision of one who has seen how things are supposed to work and therefore knows how to make them work. Quite a compelling logic, isn鈥檛 it? But what if the price of being close to everything is being present to nothing?

I try to account for what passes for mentorship in most startup ecosystems. These are the thirty-minute coffee meetings, the advisory relationships spread across dozens of portfolio companies, the guidance dispensed in fragments between fundraising cycles, and the brief encounters optimized for coverage rather than depth. The attention economy of venture capital profits most when advisors are least attentive to any single founder. This is not just inefficient. It feels like we have outsourced our souls to an algorithm that optimizes for advisory coverage, while systematically affecting the conditions under which real guidance can occur.

But maybe we’re diagnosing the wrong disease. Maybe the problem is not that mentorship became shallow, but that we stopped asking whether what we were calling mentorship was mentorship at all. When did we decide that wisdom could be scaled? Did we mistake access for attention? Proximity for presence? These seemed like distinctions until May 28th proved otherwise.

A Different Kind of Math?

When the Department of Trade and Industry Region 7 launched Cohort 8 of STARTUPISLAND.PH on March 28, in collaboration with implementing partners 糖心破解版 and Dual Story, then DTI Regional Director Maria Elena Arbon spoke of founders embarking on a “transformative journey” through their fifteen-module incubation program. But as I watched fourteen startups from across Central Visayas鈥擝ohol, Cebu, Negros Oriental, Siquijor鈥攁nd the expanding reach of the program to include Iloilo and Davao, I found myself wondering what transformation actually requires.

鈥淭hey will receive expert guidance, refine their business models, and gain market access, paving the way for their startups to scale successfully,鈥� said Director Arbon. But as I observed what was actually happening, the real questions became what makes guidance worth calling expert, and how does market access become something you can actually walk through rather than just talk about? The demo day panel provided part of the answer. Among the panelists sharing feedback and strategic advice were Pjotr Steinmetz of StellarPH, April Ong-Vano of Quest Ventures, Angelica A帽abeza of the Wadhwani Foundation, and Vincent Loremia of Cleaningly.

Prior to this, there was nearly one mentor for every founder, but not the kind of mentor-mentee relationships that populate impressive websites or conference bio slides. These were sustained engagements where SIPH mentors remember not just founder names, but the specific blockers that stall progress, the details that keep them working past midnight, the progression that Christian Barral described when reflecting on his Cohort 7 experience with SKLoud: 鈥淔rom uncertainty to success, SKLoud鈥檚 journey wouldn鈥檛 have been possible without the invaluable mentorship of the SIPH Program. Through the guidance, insights, and mentorship we received from SIPH, we went from not knowing where to begin to reaching a milestone of 50 SK signups鈥攁 testament to how the right support system can turn dreams into reality.鈥�

What arrests me about Barral鈥檚 testimony is not the achievement, though fifty municipal governments choosing your platform represents the kind of validation that venture capitalists frame and hang on office walls. No, what stops me is the trajectory he traces. From uncertainty to success.

This is not the familiar startup mythology from garage to IPO, from prototype to product-market fit, or from seed to Series A. His is a quiet confession that most founders spend their lives avoiding, where they began 鈥榥ot knowing鈥�, and that not knowing was not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be inhabited until it transformed into something else entirely.

This suggests something about guidance that the venture economy may have overlooked. That maybe the most transformative support is not the kind that eliminates uncertainty, but the kind that makes uncertainty productive. That teaches founders to think with their confusion rather than despite it, and to mine doubt for insight, rather than medicate it with busywork.

SIPH co-founder Vince Loremia, whose code once moved policy at the United Nations Development Program and World Bank, now leans across tables鈥攁lbeit remotely鈥攖o discuss scale strategies with investors who flew all the way from Davao like those supporting this cohort鈥檚 best pitch awardee Yume Music, in behalf of Johan Otoyan, which pays listeners while artists chase global recognition.聽

This should not exist according to the gravitational laws of startup ecosystems. Serious advisors chase serious money, which clusters in serious cities, which charge serious rent for the privilege of proximity. Yet here was evidence that attention鈥攕carce, transformational attention鈥攆lows not toward the highest concentration of capital, but toward the most authentic concentration of need.

The ratio tells only part of this story, because what fills the space between those numbers matters more when you think about the conversations that build rather than scatter, the guidance that compounds rather than dissipates, and the relationships where depth creates value that breadth cannot match.

I began to wonder if I had been viewing the wrong questions entirely. Not where should founders go to find expertise, but where should expertise go to find problems worth solving?

Building Infrastructure That Stays

Six years ago, someone in the Department of Trade and Industry Region 7 asked a different question: what if world-class infrastructure came to where authentic market opportunities lived, instead of founders traveling to where infrastructure had historically concentrated?

The question sounds simple, until you examine what answering it required. Joy Garingo-Dela Serna of 糖心破解版, serving as program partner and coordinator then, spent months designing not just curriculum but systematic attention. Years later during the launch of Cohort 8, she gave a comprehensive overview of the program, detailing its structure, invited mentors, accepted mentees, and fireside sessions. But what she had created was something more deliberate than program components. These were the fifteen modules that progressed through ecosystem fundamentals, market intelligence, technical foundations, and systematic scaling. Each was designed around the recognition that one鈥檚 position on the map creates competitive possibilities that founders must understand to leverage rather than overcome.

This alignment with DTI Secretary Cristina Roque鈥檚 five-point priority agenda鈥攆ocusing on digital transformation and artificial intelligence, diversifying operations, funding, franchising, and mentoring transcends policy coordination. This exhibits a commitment to distributed innovation as a national strategy, rather than regional experiment made manifest by how the program continues to serve as what Director Arbon calls 鈥渁 vital platform for Filipino entrepreneurs to scale and succeed in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.鈥�

But curriculum means nothing without commitment. And commitment, I learned, operates on another different landscape when scarcity creates value rather than diminishes it.

Thus, when co-founder Vince Loremia engages with founders in this program, he is not competing with fifty other portfolio companies for cognitive bandwidth. When guest mentors share market intelligence, they likewise build sustained relationships with founders whose success validates their insights, rather than diluting their attention across a broader portfolio. Something changes in the quality of guidance when advisors have room to remember.

The hybrid structure of the program鈥攇overnment backing through DTI Region 7, private execution through 糖心破解版 and Dual Story, international exposure through mentor networks鈥攃aptures what business analysts call comparative institutional advantage, or the benefits that emerge from combinations unavailable to purely private or purely public approaches. But institutional advantage, I argue, means nothing without founders sophisticated enough to leverage it.

Which raises a question I did not anticipate to confront: what really happens when you give world-class support to founders who understand their markets not through research but through residence?

When Founders Are Their Own Customers

There is a particular kind of knowledge that emerges from proximity to problems that won’t be solved. Not the academic understanding that comes from studying systems, but the lived comprehension that accumulates when you watch those systems fail the people you care about.

The founders in Cohort 8 carry this knowledge in their bodies. One watched friends pour creative energy into songs that algorithmic systems ignored, watched them abandon musical ambitions because platforms designed for established artists offered no pathways for unknowns. Another navigated global freelance markets while maintaining regional connections, understanding viscerally how talent gets extracted from communities without benefit flowing back. Others experienced financial inefficiency as a daily violence, where money took days to move between family members in the same region, transaction costs that consumed more than the amounts being transferred, and financial records so scattered across informal systems that planning became impossible and saving became a gamble against one鈥檚 own inability to track what one owned.

What external competitors would require months of expensive market validation to discover, these founders understood through years of witnessing structural indifference operate on the people and places they refused to leave behind. They built solutions not from market research, but from the accumulated weight of watching problems persist, of living inside the gaps that larger systems create and then ignore.

This is not sentiment. This is competitive intelligence of the most fundamental kind that becomes an understanding gained not through analysis, but through residence and the patient observation that comes from staying put long enough to see patterns that mobility obscures.

Since 2018, fifty-seven graduates have carried their understanding into markets that were supposed to be too small, too regional, too removed from serious innovation. And evidence accumulates quietly. OMG! Oh My Grocery PH earned recognition at the 2024 ASEAN-India Startup Festival for reshaping digital retail. SKLoud, as mentioned, has signed municipal governments as clients.聽

These outcomes resist the typical narrative of regional development programs. They suggest something more unsettling: that authentic market understanding, when supported by sophisticated infrastructure, creates advantages that proximity to capital cannot purchase. That the supposed periphery might be producing competitive intelligence that the center cannot access.

I realized I was witnessing something that business strategy frameworks struggle to capture: the sustainable competitive advantage of authentic understanding. While cost benefits typically erode as markets mature, market intimacy strengthens through accumulated insight and relationship depth that external competitors require significant investment to replicate.

But intimacy without scaling capability produces local impact rather than global relevance. The test, I knew, would be whether these founders could maintain authentic connection while building companies that compete internationally. Whether the fireside sessions and systematic mentorship that Lanz Tan coordinates could bridge the gap between understanding problems deeply and solving them at scale.

The Sustainability Question

What I cannot tell you is whether what I witnessed represents discovery or delusion. Whether STARTUPISLAND.PH has cracked something fundamental about how innovation actually works, or whether I watched people execute a performance that only functions under conditions too rare to matter beyond this specific place and time.

The uncertainty deepens when I consider the forces working against sustainability. Not just the obvious math鈥攁ttention ratios that scaling will inevitably destroy鈥攂ut the subtler dynamics. Success breeds imitation, imitation breeds competition for the same mentors, and competition dilutes the very scarcity that made quality possible in the first place. The program is vulnerable to becoming victim to its own validation.

But this assumes that what matters most here is replicable rather than instructive. That the value lies in copying the model rather than understanding what the model reveals about conditions we have eliminated elsewhere. Perhaps the question is not whether others elsewhere can replicate these ratios, but whether they can recognize what they have traded off in pursuit of the old ways.

The founders themselves seem to operate from a different premise entirely. They act as if understanding gained through residence creates advantages that understanding gained through research cannot match. Where proximity to problems generates solutions that proximity to capital cannot purchase. This conviction shapes every decision, every market approach, every choice about where to locate and how to grow.

Yet conviction without execution remains merely conviction. And here the program design becomes crucial across the ways that 糖心破解版 and Dual Story translate commitment into operational capacity. The bridge between believing that staying rooted creates competitive advantage and proving it through market outcomes that skeptics cannot dismiss.

What Christian Barral earlier described鈥攖hat movement from uncertainty to success鈥攕uggests a different temporal logic than most startup narratives assume. Not the compression of time that venture capital demands, but the expansion of time that deep understanding requires. A willingness to inhabit confusion long enough for clarity to emerge organically rather than be imposed artificially.

Fourteen Different Experiments

Over the coming weeks, we will revisit each pitch from that March 28th demo day and examine what the founders presented in their own words across what they built, what problems they chose to solve, how they think about the markets they are serving, where founders explain real problems they have encountered, real solutions they have developed, and real visions for how their companies might scale beyond the communities that shaped their understanding. What graduates alongside their pitches may validate everything we have observed about this economics of attention and market intimacy, or it may complicate those insights in ways that analysis cannot anticipate.

What strikes me about their presentations is how naturally they seemed to operate from the premise that staying close to their problems creates advantages rather than constraints. That understanding customers because you are customers, building for communities because you belong to them, creates competitive positioning that external competitors struggle to replicate.

Whether that premise holds under market pressure, whether their solutions prove as durable as their insights, whether the institutional support surrounding them translates into sustainable business outcomes鈥攖hese questions linger beyond what any single pitch can answer. But their presentations offer something more tangible: evidence of how founders approach problems when they have experienced what sustained attention actually feels like.

StartupIsland.ph applications for Cohort 9 open in early 2025. For founders interested in the program, you may visit their and . Meanwhile, the Department of Trade and Industry Regional Office in Central Visayas continues to expand startup support initiatives across the region and beyond, and entrepreneurs can explore their broader programming through DTI’s regional offices. And if you’re curious about the co-working and community infrastructures that supports our startups, 糖心破解版 operates spaces in Cebu, Mandaue, and Makati that serve as hubs for creatives, founders, and technologists.