If you read books or stories about Start-up founders, it's a common factor that most of them belong to the middle class or above family.  And, so is the case here in Philippines. I'm not discriminating. But it's just a fact of life. Middle class can afford to not have stable income, which you cannot find in start-up.

Looking at a few local web start-up projects, it made me think that maybe that's why they are having a hard time to get a foothold in our local market is because if you look at the demographics of Philippines in terms of household income, majority belongs to the not-middle class or the lower income families. Implications are:

* Middle class culture is different from the lower class. So the rich kids creating start-up projects may only appeal to the people who somehow have the same taste and culture with them. As such, you already lose 80% of the population.

* Of course, web / mobile apps require gadgets and internet. And, though more families now have computer and internet connection, we still cannot deny the fact that these families are the 'privileged' families, which still do not compromise the majority of the Philippine population.

* This is probably the same to my point #1 -- middle class has that certain elitism, and somehow shows in their project or application created. We cannot deny that we want to maintain the 'coolness' factor in our product. And, if we maintain this kind of attitude, you just lose the 80% of Philippine population.

* There's a great divide of the rich and poor. We might be unconsciously unaware of it. Therefore, how can the rich kids provide a suitable product that will also appeal to the lower middle income if they haven't mingle much with these group of people. Middle class kids go to private schools, lived in a gated community -- what's the chance they ever get to mingle with the other side of the fence. So they only get to share and get ideas from the people that has the same life with them, and as I said, will produce a product that will also only appeal to them.

Probably, one of the reasons why start-ups are easier to do in Silicon Valley or in other parts of the world because majority of their population somehow belongs in the middle class strata.

I don't mean that we are not capable of creating software / hardware applications. The thing is after a team has produced a product, it cannot much go further or move forward locally because it lacks users (customers), it simply just not fit to the general lifestyle of the people. But of course, Philippines is not the only market as long as you have the stamina and the capital.

(This is not finished. I came across this sitting here as draft, and thought of just publishing it.)

I came across a forum about people talking about the salary rates of programmers in the local market. And, I kinda feel sad that some programmers solely measure their success based on the money they get, and not much about how cool the product they are building, or how their product can be changing people's lives. And, I couldn't understand the thought that just because you graduate from this so-and-so course, it's like you already have the God-given privilege of getting high salaries.

If majority of us have this kind of all-about-money-thinking in mind, it will be hard to jumpstart a start-up culture here locally. Because start-up has no money. When you have money, it's no longer start-up.

And, what I mean about start-up is not only about freelancing, but also about creating products from scratch.

Of course, I'm not discounting that we all need to eat, to feed, and to raise the whole barangay. 

Owkei, I'm not really sure what my point is. But 

If you want a business or a venture to be successful or at least level up, figure out if you are a hippie or a nerd? Because as quoted from the book 'Accidental Empires' by Robert Cringely:

'Conventional wisdom says that asking hippies and nerds to work together might lead to doing the wrong things poorly, but that's not so. With the hippies dreaming and the nerds coding, a good combination of the two can help keep a software development project both on course and on schedule. The real problem is finding such superprogrammers in the first place. Often they hide.'

I believe this applies to any kind of projects, journeys, goals, ventures. Well, it pays if you're both - hippie and nerd. =)

<img src="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/owrange/AqNgzETLIvczionXlSRqM1BqlsICwAPCeVrj9aE8PPA5IIhIxVFsezYyO0As/10232009007.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg" />

This is more of how to stop myself from returning to my pessimist old self. Since I quit from my last 'formal corporate' job to take my chance on freelance writing which I ended up giving up also. Now looking at the last 'quitting action' I took, I cannot remember a very solid reason why I did it except that I want to be a 'Jessica Livingston,' or even just an inch-close to her. At that time, that goal sounds so very good and not really hard to do. It sounds romantic and dreamy. Since then, I find myself digging into any thing I can put my hands on hoping to get me closer my very long-shot goal of becoming a Jessica Livingston.

But as days passed by, feeling nothing much out of my here-and-there efforts, I felt I am such a big joke. In short, I no longer know if this is still a worthy cause to pursue because it plainly just sounds stupid to me. As if someone took pity on me, I got a morale-boosting advice from Joel Spolsky's Inc. article, How Hard Could It Be?: Start-up Static, which he also got from Paul Graham who is the Jessica Livingston's husband. It looks like it is very for me. Below is quoted from the article:

"The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized," he writes. "Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck)."

So there, what I need is an unlimited self-generated morale. And, I think this does not apply to start-ups only (though I believe each one of us is a work of start-up itself), but to everybody who is a pessimist. Well, even the optimist can also take this lesson with them.

So to all the pessimist, attach a jumping spring to each of your feet (morale), ala Tigger, so we can easily bounce up when things started to look blurry. Be an unlimited self-generator of morale!

This thought is again sparked by the book Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. Right now, I am on the 11th programmer in the book. Of the 11 programmers, only 1 did not attend college -- Jamie Zawinski. But when 11 were asked if it is necessary for a programmer to be great to have a formal education on computer programming -- meaning to graduate college. Surprisingly, not one of them firmly replied that formal training is a must. But then they cite that education can give you the proper theoritical background of programming, correct terminologies, the scientific or more systematic ways of doing things. Plus, being in school gives you someone to bounce off your ideas who can be your peers, classmates, and teachers.

This formal training vs self-taught education kind of reminds me of my 'writing skill.' I never see myself as a writer since the time I failed the audition to be part of a school paper way back in high school. I majored psychology in college. The only writing training I have back in college was answering essay exams and writing term papers, and thesis.

Then, when I became a mother, I started scribbling my thoughts in my multiply account. Mostly, confusion and pent-up emotions about motherhood/parenthood are things that drive me to scribble my thoughts day to day. Along the way, I just learned to develop my 'writing style' -- how to start a story, its flow, and how to end a story which I am still struggling at. Developing my 'writing style' was just mostly by trusting my intuition that this does not sound so right, this need to be changed, or there must be a better way to attack it and so on. Then, reading others' writing, and pick up a thing or two or a lot from those not-boring writers also helped in shaping up my 'writing skill.'

Then I got myself to be involved in a freelance writing by creating SEO articles. The SEO writing was the closest thing I have of formal training because I was forced to make a decent presentable writing.

So back to my point - formal academic training vs self-taught?

In Coders at Work by Peter Seibel, the programmers view on formal education is that it cannot be used as a definite measurement if one will become a great programmer.So what then?

One thing that exists in all of them is that they always start to learn programming for the fun of it and to satisfy a curiousity in them, until it leads them to dig deeper into the subject, which we can call now as 'passion.' When you have this natural curiosity for something, this will guide you on what to do to satisfy that -- from sneaking into computer laboratories to getting a part-time or full-time job as computer assistants just to get close to a computer, and from reading calculator manuals to computer journals. This might come to a point that other people might find you weird.Quoting L Peter Deutsch, one of the programmers in the book, "There has something a little wrong with you for you to be a really good programmer." This means, one thing common about great programmers is not really the formal education, but their over curiosity that turned into passion towards programming, and the fun that they get out of it.

Like me, who is a 'self-taught writer,' probably the lacking part of my being a 'writer' is that I have no formal training at how to handle correct sentence structures, or different types of writing form, or the correct flow of an article, or how to properly use semi-colons, parenthesis, colons and all those 'special characters.' All I have is the imagination and the intuition of right and wrong which are the only tools I rely on when I put up some post. Then, my great self love for my thoughts is another thing that drives me to just write and write (Ya, I know it sounds stupid.).

So is formal training important? I think humans by nature have the capability to teach and to learn by themselves. But to unleash the full capacity of that capability is that they must find something in them that they are extra passionate about, curious about or something that can give meaning to who they are. Knowing these is something that cannot be provided by the formal training/education. I do not think that you can find the meaning of your life inside the 4 walls of your classroom. The passion for something, the extra coriousity for something are some things that will naturally come out in you, which can only be achieved by 'self-taught.'

So I guess formal training is only an icing in the cake. After you learn or know (by yourself) what you really like, then I guess that is the best time you go and seek formal training for that. Or, else you will be just wasting your time and money on a formal training that does not really provide you with an additional value to who you really are.

So how to know what you really really like, your passion? It is not an easy thing for most of us. The external factors -- finances, culture, people's expectations -- can somehow sometimes lead a person to be confused and just end up with a safe choice. But I came across a question cited by Howard Behar in his book, It's Not About the Coffee, which somehow helped me evaluate myself on what I really like. The question goes something like: 

"If there are no critics or praises, what do you really like to be?"

Let me add to that, "if money is not a question,what do you like to be now?" Try to think about this, and this can be your driving force and your guide on what you should learn -- via self-taught and/or formal training. =)

I remember a topic we have back in our Filipino psychology of Sir Mike Mende, which was about how mostly Filipinos are still in the 'survival-of-the-fittest' mindset. I forgot if this is the correct terminology but it is something about how Filipinos prioritize their means to survive over other social concerns. For example, for poor people who barely can eat 3 times a day, killing a rare bird specie like a Philippine eagle is something acceptable for the reason that they killed it for survival. They killed it in order to live, to save the lives of very hungry people. But if you are a healthy animal rights enthusiast, this is animal cruelty and is unacceptable to you. Social concern is basically a frivolous idea to the hungry poor people.

Now, how is this 'survival-of-the-fittest' relate to the local tech start-up scene? Putting up a tech start-up venture is a trial and error experiment which mostly is about errors. Now, if you are a typical student from a typical Filipino family whose education is funded by 'loans' and selling carabaos and farm lands, the least thing you will do is put up a start-up venture where success is close to non-existent. Right from the start when you go to school, your main aim is to graduate the soonest possible before funds run dry. So you study hard, and avoid extracurricular activities that will destruct you from your main goal. Now once, you are done with school, your next step is to find a work that gives you the hihgest pay. You are not being greedy. You are just being practical that you need to pay all the loans/debts incurred by your education. Plus, the long list of siblings and relatives you need to support for education added pressure for you to get a stable high-earning job.
 
Now some people who got into stable corporate jobs may one time in their lives declared that they want to go out of the corporate and start a business or get into a start-up venture. Or for some, they tried to maintain a start-up venture on their side while working for a company. Not being negative about it, but it is less likely that they can finish their start-up venture. For reasons that:
* Start-up culture is totally different from corporate culture. If you have worked for years in a corporate culture, you might be used to the its culture that you will have a hard adjusting to the start-up culture.
* People from corporate who will soon put up their start-up venture will most likely bring with them their corporate culture to their start-ups, which makes their start-up no longer a start-up. Because start-up is mostly about culture than business.
* Start-up is mostly trial and error repeat infinite times. Now if you enter it at a later part of your life, the possibility of you being burned out is high especially that you already taste success in your corporate life.

But there are few brave souls in the local tech scene that get up to the challenge of getting into the start-up culture. This is the aim of this website/blog or whatever you call it to showcase local start-uppers. In my frustration of being a tech dodo, this is my way of getting as close as possible to being a tech geek. And, hopefully encourage the start-up culture in the Philippine local arena.

This space in the world wide web is named owrange Juiceness after my default username owrange and Robert X. Cringely line, "Juice is my business," in his book Accident Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. Presenting tech news in a 'celebrity tidbits' manner is a way to attract the mainstream to appreciate the start-up culture.