By Pola Esguerra del Monte, Multimedia Editor
AS FAR AS the internet is concerned, everyone who enters its realm is “at least 18 years old.” That includes the 13-year-old self of Iran-born Forbes under 30 lister Shahab Shabibi, back when he was lurking at 3 a.m. on Yahoo! Messenger (“My parents didn’t mind; I had high grades.”) to chat with a programmer he was building a company with.
Today, at 22 and finally legal, Shabibi is still a builder of things. After the success of rapsong.ir — that company he started in his teens which became Iran’s first underground music portal — as well as a Tarafdari, Iran’s leading sports social media network with more than five million visitors every month, he moved to the Philippines in 2010 and realized he could use his knack for innovation for a deeper social purpose.
“When I came to the Philippines, it was a very eye-opening moment for me,” he told SparkUp. “When I began studying, that was the time that I started getting a better understanding of what is really happening here,” he said. “And then I remember, I had this moment where I realized that what I’ve been doing in Iran is not so amazing. To make another entertainment website, to make another sports website, is not something that truly changes people’s lives. I found myself looking at more fundamental problems that I haven’t seen before.”
That idea came to him while he was working at Rocket Internet in 2014, where he was tasked to setup carpooling platform Tripda. “People started e-mailing me ‘Wow, this is amazing!,’ ‘I’m saving two hours a day!,’ ‘I don’t need to commute anymore!’ I realized that I had never heard this from any of my users back in my previous platforms,” he said. “That’s when I thought to myself that technology can really change people’s lives. And that’s the time I decided that I want to be here and I want to build a company here.”
That company turned out to be Machine Ventures, of which he is the CEO and co-founder together with Harvard-educated health tech guy Farouk Meralli. “Back in our home countries, these problems didn’t exist and that there was a big calling for us that we should do something here,” he said. “We set up Machine Ventures with the idea of solving real world problems using technology as means to make it very big and scalable. We started looking at what is happening in the Philippines and identified a few key issues: lack of infrastructure, poverty, and lack of mainstream quality education.”
The first product the company hatched is HeyKuya, an SMS-based personal assistant service, that gave job opportunities to men, through food delivery and travel booking, among others, to over 15,000 users. In only five months, HeyKuya was acquired by a similar Indonesian personal assistant service called YesBoss.
LESSONS
The acquisition served as a validation, but it also taught Shabibi new lessons.
“As much as we wanted to be about impact, about solving problems, there is this unavoidable discussion about the financial side of things,” he said. “That really helped us to understand that, we don’t want to just build solutions, we want to build sustainable solutions, we want to build solutions that economically make sense in the way every stakeholder would be willing to continue what they are doing because it is also financially reasonable.”
He reflected: “Another realization that I had afterwards is that it is really sad that you cannot control your company after you sell it.”
With Machine Ventures, however, with him at the helm, the journey was just as tough—perhaps even tougher.
“The Philippines is probably one of the hardest countries to setup a company in,” he observed. “Generally, entrepreneurship is very tough but I would say in the Philippines it is much more magnified in terms of all the other inefficiencies that are out there, like supplier deliveries most likely won’t happen on schedule. Likewise, you definitely can’t pay suppliers easily because you go to the bank and all these processes are very lengthy and very tedious.”
But this reality only toughens him up. Machine Ventures is now composed of 24 people who “the resilience and the ability to not take ‘no’ for an answer.” He says: “We believe in that idea of learning entrepreneurship by doing, and learning by mastery, not just taking a course and passing an exam but literally going through the journey with someone who has done it before, and as you do that more and more, you learn.”
Right now, what keeps him busy is the launch of another new venture, MyKuya, a service similar to HeyKuya, whose mission is to create one million job opportunities over the next three years.
“We are building it as a platform where people can get things done, but on the other hand, it also opens a lot of people to job opportunities, the ability work whenever they want, to be their own boss, to have self-respect and self-dignity in what they do in day-to-day basis,” he said.
With all these plans, does he consider himself a social entrepreneur? “I mean, that’s a buzzword right? If I say ‘yes, I’m a social entrepreneur,’ it would probably get more clicks,” he laughs. “But I would say that as an entrepreneur, I have the responsibility and I’m on a mission to solve problems, and the biggest problems are often social problems,” he said. “And the same way that I’ve tried to solve smaller problems in my own little way before, now we are focused on solving bigger problems, and they happen to be social.”

By Pola Esguerra del Monte,Multimedia Editor
SO HOW have you been since our last interview?
“Ayun,” Ali Sangalang, the writer, answered with a straight face. “Ang yaman na namin.”
Chuckling, Panch Alvarez, the artist, quickly interjected: “Hindi, joke.”
“Naka-Uber pool kami,” Sangalang clarified.
From the first ten seconds of the interview, one can already glean how the founders of Linya Linya, purveyor of witty shirts, work together: Sangalang is the guy who spews humor without effort. Alvarez, his schoolmate-turned-colleague at ad agencies and in Malacañang, sees right through him and interprets his lines through art.
They decided to put their collaborative art on t-shirts bought by the bulk in Divisoria. The two, who grew up wearing Pidro, would hull those shirts to a printer in Parañaque and then onto bazaars in Rockwell. At the end of the day, they’d spend their earnings on booze.
“Ganoon ka-strategic ’yung mga decisions namin,” Sangalang noted.
It didn’t take long before they realized that it takes more than just creativity and a little capital to run a business. That’s where musician Jim Bacarro, who completes the triumvirate behind Linya Linya, came in.
Armed with a supply of 250 shirts — the sum of their initial investment — they set up an online store. In a day, they sold three shirts.
Bacarro, who quit his job in marketing to do Linya Linya full time, had a panic attack. He recounted: “I talked to my wife,” referring to actress and singer Saab Magalona. “I said, ‘Look. I’m really, really in love with this. Can you give me at least six months to see where this goes?’”
Only then did the company have a semblance of a system and strategy. It included getting only fixed salaries (“Sweldo ha,” Bacarro emphasized. “Hindi pa dividends.”) amounting to P6,000 each for a month, enough to pay the rent.
After opening a first stall at the UP Town Center, Linya Linya has grown into a 15-store-strong T-shirt company. Advertisements are plastered at the back of buses plying EDSA, close to their market: the average working Filipino who toils in the lamentable traffic situation but still manages to laugh despite the daily struggle.
Like the pace of buses along EDSA, success will take time. “In terms of what we’ve done, I don’t think we’re there yet,” Alvarez said. “But we’re continuously getting there. We’re getting there.”

By Pola Esguerra del Monte, Multimedia Editor
AT THE height of the AlDub love team phenomenon, Diane Yap and Lauren Gavino, who had been running an online flower shop for only a month then, received an order for 49 stems of red Ecuadorian roses to be delivered at the Philippine Arena in Bulacan, where some concert with ticket sales reaching P14 million would be filled with 55,000 people.
Their response: “If you want, on top of the cost of the arrangement, pay for our gas and toll.”
On that day, Oct. 24, 2015, that three-hour commercial-free episode registered a TV rating of 50.8%, the channel stated citing data from AGB Nielsen, compared to the 5.4% registered by the competitor. Tweets for the hashtag reached 39.5 million. And amid that number of viewers, actor Alden Richards was walking up the stage carrying that 49-rose boxed arrangement himself— the brand name “Petalier” in clear, full view.
Gavino found herself crying in front of the TV.
“Ang kapal ng mukha namin ’di ba?,” the two now laugh, looking back at what they consider their store’s big break. “Sobrang fail namin. We didn’t know who AlDub was.”
But entrepreneurship isn’t a bed of roses, and getting flowers on screen took more than just luck or serendipity. At 11 p.m. the previous night — only a few hours before the concert — their supplier for the flowers backed out. Yet instead of giving up right then and there, they insisted on delivering.
Yap had a backup plan ready. The day before, she had begun contacting all the flower suppliers she could find on Google—pleading “Please po, magbabayad kami.”—all while going around public markets to do surveys for a senator she was then still working full-time for. After finding one, a certain “Dra. Anna” who remains their main supplier to this day, they finally got the flowers by 2 a.m., arranged all 49 stems, then had their personal driver to deliver it to Bulacan. The rest, as they say, is history.
“That’s the first time people saw pretty roses in a box,” Yap said.
Influencer marketing has since been Petalier’s main avenue to drive sales.
A “calculated gamble,” Yap describes. “Sometimes they’re effective, sometimes they won’t post you. So that’s money out the door.”
Still, it works, and the two have also launched a new baby: a luxury balloonery called Blloons.
“We thrive on Instagram. We’re typical millennial business people. Uber doesn’t own a single car. We thrive online,” she said. “You can go far with just online. We’re the perfect example.”
Petalier is an online business. Orders can be placed on petalier.com but queries can be sent to 0977- 841-7738 or mail@petalier.com.

By Pola Esguerra del Monte, Multimedia Editor
FROM MERE slacker uniform, skateboard attire has seeped into the runways of the world’s fashion capitals.
For trans-disciplinary designer Sean Bautista, the skateboard culture is more than just a fashion thing: it is also a vehicle to purvey chicken.
The Comme des Garçons-wearing Ateneo graduate who looks up to David Chang took workshops in design management at Parsons School of Design in New York City before building two original concepts: Tetsuo, an East-Asian casual dining restaurant, and Transit, a retail design concept.
“I’m a fine arts student,” he insists when asked if he ever considered taking a business course. Tetsuo, after all, began as a chicken stall at Ateneo competing for space in the cafeteria. In a week, they met their ROI. After that, they began selling merchandise (imagine, a chicken stall with its own merch), before branching out to events.
“Organically” is how he describes the ideation process. “I and a few friends came together,” he recounted. “I mean we just hung out, we were into skateboarding, music, hiphop… but then we also liked cooking.”
“So from that idea and just trying to be authentic to ourselves, we’ve created a brand that suits or embodies what we thought. Like, embodies our relationship as friends. It starts with the chicken concept because, yeah, we wanted to create something that was palatable to our audience and that everyone would enjoy, but then we tried to elevate the concept and create a bigger personality around it by injecting things that were authentic to us,” he said. “To simplify that idea, we just came from a unique standpoint of dudes just hanging out, cooking together, and being interested in different facets of subculture, and then translating that into a product.”
From its formerly five-square-meter space inside Ateneo, it has expanded into a 50-square-meter restaurant along Katipunan, housing 31 seats. And it is, in fact, things like the playlist, typography, and visuals, among others, that formulate the overall brand.
“I’m able to connect to other people in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was just thinking about the business,” he says. “If I was only thinking about business goals, I don’t think Tetsuo as a product would translate in the way it does.”