Fiestartup

23/03/2026

Happy Women's Month from the Community at the monthly ALL ABOARD! Mixer 💯🇵🇭

13/02/2026

Here's a flashback to 2025 🎉💯 We put our heads together as a community to form a collective vision for and reinforced our commitment to the growth of our innovation ecosystem. We're thrilled for what's to come and we hope you join us in celebrating homegrown startups in Cebu and beyond 🇵🇭🌏

01/11/2025

Karl Satinitigan helped write the law before he started building through it.

This matters because most founders miss thinking about where the rules come from. They just know capital is hard to access, regulations are confusing, and closing a failed business takes months they don't have. Karl spent 6 years at the Senate of the Philippines under Senator Bam Aquino thinking about exactly these problems. He contributed to the Innovative Startup Act, built a service design team, and trained over two hundred business counselors across the country on how to make the law work in practice.

He went to the University of Chicago as an Obama Scholar and studied international development and policy. Then, he came home and started building. He founded Meron, a circular economy platform for businesses, and Work in Progress, a sustainability consultancy.

Since then he has worked with USAID running innovation policy workshops, with UNDP prototyping the Social Enterprise Bill, with the World Bank on enterprise development, and with WeSolve Foundation mapping how Metro Manila's food system could become circular instead of extractive. He has facilitated workshops in Marawi City, Tagbilaran, Cotabato, and Pasig.

Karl knows that entrepreneurship doesn't happen in a vacuum. The frameworks exist whether you see them or not. Someone designed the access to capital, the regulatory environment, the infrastructure that lets markets form. When those systems are broken, you have a choice. You can build around them or you can fix them.

Karl helps fix them while he builds.

Come hear what Karl has learned about building not just companies, but the systems that let them survive on Monday, November 3.

01/11/2025

Most people specialize. Pamela Belen harmonizes.

She started as an accountant—De La Salle, honors—the kind of training that teaches you to see systems and read what numbers are actually saying about a business. She started at Ernst & Young then BPI, learning how institutions think, move, and make decisions when billions are at stake. Later came Amihan Global Strategies, where she worked on digital transformation across banking, fintech, insurance, telco, real estate, education, and quick-service restaurants, both locally and abroad.

In 2019, she co-founded Umpisa Inc., a venture builder that not only advises on transformation, but builds the products and systems that make it real.

Pamela has won at Startup Weekend San Francisco in retail and at Global South Tech LATAM in fintech. She has been a World Economic Forum Global Shaper since 2017, a network thinking about how innovation scales across borders and economies at different stages of development. She completed the 2021 Alibaba Netpreneur Training Program, learning how commerce and technology intersect in markets where infrastructure is still being built.

Ten years in digital transformation teach you this: the gap between what companies need and what they can execute is where startups either win or stall. Corporate leaders know they need to transform, but often not how to start. Founders know how to build, but sometimes not the institutional logic they're trying to disrupt.

Pam stands in that gap. She speaks both languages.

2 days left with DTI Region 7 Central Visayas and STARTUPISLAND.PH! 🎉

28/10/2025

Here's the thing about building a startup in the Philippines: most of us are doing it blind. We're making it up as we go, betting on instinct, and learning from mistakes we can't afford to make.

Toffer Briones has spent 12 years making sure founders don't have to.

He started at P&G, managing talent across Asia. Then GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, where he co-led forums for managing directors and designed programs for a firm managing billions. He later moved to Cambodia, where he rebuilt Smart Axiata’s talent development model and increased their employee engagement index by six points after three years of stagnation. At Impact Hub Phnom Penh years later, he ran incubator programs across technology, agriculture, healthcare, education where one good idea can change thousands of lives.

Toffer knows what a pitch deck looks like when it’s about to get funded and what it looks like when it’s about to get ignored. He knows which growth strategies scale and which ones just burn cash. He’s seen founders pivot at the last minute and save their companies. He's seen others refuse and lose everything.

On November 3, he's coming to FIESTARTUP not to sell you dreams, but to show you the map.

The future you're building? Someone's already walked that path. They've already made the mistakes, and found some shortcuts. And some of them thinks, “Life is tough, but I'm Toffer” and are willing to show you where the landmines are.

📍 You can spend another year guessing. Or you can spend it on November 3

⏰ Registration closes October 29, 11:59 PM.

👉 This is your shot! Take it: https://tinyurl.com/fiestartup2025

28/10/2025

There is a particular kind of wisdom that only comes from being inside the room when an industry realizes it must transform or disappear, and Ron Castro has spent 35+ years in exactly those rooms.

His experience spans three decades of disruption. He spent a decade at Kodak, managing a $300M portfolio across Asia at the very moment an empire built on silver halide had to reckon with pixels and sensors. He then moved to Goodyear, where he dedicated ten years to regional marketing and operations across diverse markets, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Then came Mineski, a pioneering esports company where traditional business logic didn't apply. Starting as a consultant, Ron rose through succession to become acting Country Manager, Regional Director, and President of a startup subsidiary, learning how to build across domains inventing themselves in real time.

Today, Ron's consultancy portfolio spans fintech, infrastructure, oil and gas, and retail—industries separated by sector but united by a single need: an expert who understands what actually holds when the ground shifts. He also manages the newsroom of The Independent Investor, where he observes and enables the next generation of Filipino founders placing their bets.

Three and a half decades teaches you that industries do not die; they transform. And strategy without ex*****on is just alternative theater. The companies that survive disruption make their defining choices early, quietly, when few have the foresight to think about it yet.

📍 November 3 at FIESTARTUP. Join Ron Castro as he shares what the rooms where it happens have taught him, and about how startups, academia, government, and industry can grow together.

⏰ Registration closes October 29, 11:59 PM.
👉 https://tinyurl.com/fiestartup2025

27/10/2025

Are you ready for FIESTARTUP 2025?

Get down to business when it comes to scaling and startup growth! Bringing together startup founders, innovators and enablers making a mark in Scaling Innovations and Charting the Future of Startup Cebu and Visayas!

Register to get your slot now - https://tinyurl.com/fiestartup2025

powered by DTI Region 7 Central Visayas

23/10/2025

FIESTARTUP IS BACK! Watch this space for details. Registration is now open for startup founders, innovators, enablers and business leaders. See you soon sa Cebu!

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/fiestartup2025

30/06/2025

Last chance to apply! Join Netpreneur Philippines 2025! See details below 👇🏽🇵🇭💯

‼️ Applications for the Alibaba Netpreneur Masterclass 2025 ends today! ‼️

This is your last chance to register and take part in a program that equips Filipino entrepreneurs with the proper tools, strategies, and mindset to compete in the age of smart innovation and lead their businesses into a future powered by AI and digital transformation.

Sign-ups will close tonight at 11:59 PM.

Apply here: https://bit.ly/netpreneurph2025

20/11/2024

See you later at All Aboard! Startup Cebu Mixer with DOHE Philippines and fellow community builders! Let's celebrate the milestones for the year together. 🥳 Let's go and see you enspace Cebu Ayala Business Park.

DTI Region 7 Central Visayas STARTUPISLAND.PH The Independent Investor Quest Ventures Gobi-Core Philippine Fund Nala Woman Republiq Group of Companies The Company CEBU Global Shapers Cebu Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry PH Community

18/11/2024

SUPER BIG THANK YOU to DTI7 RD Nannette Arbon for the unwavering support to help accelerate growth in the local startup ecosystem. 🇵🇭 What a successful Fundraising for Founders Program from Fiestartup workshop to Geeks on a Beach Delegation meeting stakeholders, enablers and investors. Salamat GOAB team for hosting this year in Cebu! 🥳

Kudos to the dynamic and collaborative team behind this effort. Gobi-Core Philippine Fund Quest Ventures Nala Woman Republiq Group of Companies DOHE Philippines together with The Independent Investor STARTUPISLAND.PH The Company CEBU