Written by Kevin Choa /Â Photography by Arielle Choy
Startups are all the rage these days, with so many small companies suddenly making a giant impact on the things we see and buy all the time. We’ve all seen those photos of their owners getting paid to live out their dreams online and can’t help but feel some jealousy. It’s bad enough that starting up any business or going into a career path based on your passions is so expensive and full of seemingly useless legalese that you have to put it away for good.
If you’re one of those people who had to abandon their passions for practicality reasons, this MOU signing last June 4 might change your life and your views on the business world forever.
It’s official! The DOST and Ignition will be partnering up to turn Filipinos into technopreneurs.
With a new partnership and funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Ignition Innovations hopes to simplify the process of establishing a successful startup through the Ignition Venture Studio. This gives startups a hands-on style of business consulting, mentoring, and coaching on any given growing pains the business might have; all at acceptable terms and at affordable rates, if not for free.
Ignition CEO Paolo Villonco said that the experience owners get is as if it had another co-founder to help them out. Inspired by Stanford University’s Venture Studio, Ignition hopes to lend as much technical and skill-related expertise to help tech-based startups get off the ground and transform Filipino scientists and engineers into entrepreneurs. The Venture Studio has since expanded and now offers all of its services to any interested startup, tech-based or not.
One of the many artworks featured in Ignition Venture Studio. Ignition has since expanded from helping scientists to helping artists as well.
Ignition Innovations CEO Paolo Villonco gives a brief history of Ignition Venture Studio.
Engineer Raul Sabularse discusses the DOST’s commitment to funding tech-based startups.
Let’s be real. A signing is more or less exactly what you’d expect: a couple of speeches from both sides followed by the actual signing. It’s not as if this signing featured anything that would instantly spawn a successful business at an instant.
Nevertheless, this one taught me one of the most important life lessons ever; you may not be an entrepreneur, but it pays to have an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s that desire to find and use all means to get exactly what you want that makes life worth living and pushes people to continue doing it. To have an entrepreneurial mindset isn’t just that, though; it’s the desire and inclination to put forward every new idea you have and turn it into something successful, just because you know it can succeed.
Coming from a family concerned with business above most other things, it’s fair to say that I’ve constantly been bored to death by family members and relatives discussing so much about it all day long. It’s gotten to the point that I had to read up on basic stuff just to avoid that boredom.
What I can say about this whole experience of dealing with them is that you can’t learn the drive to succeed, another key takeaway I got from this signing. I can sure learn all of the technical knowledge about whatever goes into the business news they were talking about, but I couldn’t fully learn to love it as much as I’d love my other passions.
Help is just around the corner. All you need to do is ask for it.
This new partnership between Ignition and the DOST is living proof of it. All the help you will need is easily accessible, while everything else is entirely up to you. It’s not just a life hack for businesses, but also for life in general.
There might have been ideas labeled as too complicated, silly, or impractical in the history of doing business, but there’s a reason why Grab, Facebook, and Netflix have all become so popular that our lives depend on them at some point. These are all products of owners and founders with a vision to set up their business, with the help of all the technical know-how they learned along the way.
A great rule to live by: don’t call it a dream; call it a plan.
At the end of the day, behind every successful startup is a plan; a plan to turn some crazy idea into reality. It’s not just simply the dream of its founders to do something; it’s their intentions and their actions to get it done. This is something so many people forget in pursuing whatever it is they want.
As painful as it is, a dream is worth nothing unless it’s acted on. For anything you’re passionate about, don’t call it a dream. Call it a plan and act on it. Instead of dreaming about changing something about the world, do it yourself. After all, people who pursue their passions can change the world, regardless of who they are and wherever they come from. Whether it may be in the field of business or not, there is no industry that can’t benefit without passionate minds working in it. This is by far the most important takeaway of this signing, something that not only works in business, but also anywhere else I’ll ever be in life.
Looking to pursue your startup dreams? Our friends at Ignition Venture Studio are very much happy to help you. Reach out to them using any of the contact details below and they will surely reach out to you!
Ignition Venture Studio
North Penthouse, Marajo Tower, 312 26th St., Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
Mondays to Saturdays, 9AM – 7PM
944 6200
Website:Â https://www.ignition.biz
Facebook:Â https://www.facebook.com/Ignition-Venture-Studio-271406199969580
