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Davao City: Growing a Startup
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What are the pros and cons of founding/growing a startup in Davao City, Philippines?
alabamabirddog
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Objectively speaking there's few advantages and a lot of disadvantages. On with the good ones first! Cost of living is lower than most nearby cities including Manila, SG & HK (meals can be had for P30 to P40 minimum – $0.75)By extension (of the low cost of living), wages and office space are cheaper.The lack of angels and investors will force you to bootstrap, instilling discipline and survival instincts whether you like it or not.infrastructure is stable and fairly cheap (electricity, internet, phone)primarily a PHP dev pool although theres a growing base of Android developersHere are the bad ones Investors are rare and the ones you can find are people with excess money and not necessarily of the angel investor mindsetSo few understands/values equityThere will be no mentors or connectors to increase your startup's luck surface.No local incubators / accelerators to cuddle you on the earliest, most chaotic stage of your startup's lifeIn recruitment, you will be competing with foreigner owned outsourcing companies and call centers.Mobile adoption is very fragmented with the majority of people using Nokia feature phones > Blackberry > iphone / android > Symbian^3Weak hacker/startup cultureOnly 3 or 4 universities churn out passable programmers ( and even then you have to train them for months)A lot of 'programmers' who only have knowledge in WordPress/Joomla/DrupalPathetic UX scene (struggling to name more than 3 people that can do UI / UX and these people are just doing it for web. Mobile app UX? you might as well be looking for a unicorn.) weak creative/curiousity culture < people are not curious to know how Facebook or their MMOs run and just be content in surface knowledge.Putting up a business is not very seamless but this is a countrywide attributeVirtually zero people who knows scalable backend, and other dirty technical stuff.All the corporate offices of big companies you can partner / hustle up with are in Manila. So you have to buy plane tickets and hustle in spurts. Note that most of these pros and cons are common amongst areas NOT called Silicon Valley. 🙂
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ProsCheap cost of living*Cheap cost of doing business* ConsVery shallow local talent pool. I attribute this to the increasingly weak emphasis on CS fundamentals. There is a reason that just about any software company worth their salt design their interviews around testing CS fundamentals and not knowledge of specific languages and technologies. Lack of capital or people willing to provide capital. To be fair, most start ups fail even in the most ideal environments. It follows that the failure rate is similar, if not worse, in less than ideal environments like Davao(or the Philippines in general). * Davao is essentially competing with Metro Manila and Metro Cebu and much of the really good people I know from AdDU are working in places other than Davao. So if a Davao startup is really serious about hiring great people, it has to be willing to pay competitively on a national scale. With this in mind, the cheap cost of living and doing business is tempered by the vast options great software engineers can find in Metro Manila and overseas.