Francis Kong & ChatbotPH’s Stephen Ku launch a platform for young entreps

Who’s your business idol? Tech people might say Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Abbie Victorino of StyleGenie is a fan of “Girlboss” Sophia Amoruso. After asking this question to young entrepreneurs several times, inspirational speaker and business consultant Francis Kong found out that most of them will mention a foreign entrepreneur.

“If you were to ask millennials who their hero is, they’re always talking about foreign names,” Mr. Kong told SparkUp during the media launch of Project Ripple last October 4 at The Brewery, Bonifacio Global City. “That’s okay, we can learn a lot of things from them. But sometimes foreign names and their accomplishments do not fit our local context. What if we still get these foreign names in but we also have a blend with the local experts? We have a lot of great people, but we don’t listen to them or we don’t know and hear about them.”

That’s why he and events expert Stephen Ku, CEO of Eventscape and co-founder of ChatbotPH (which won at the recent “Startups to the Resque” pitching competition) collaborated for Project Ripple—a platform that blends education with entertainment to inspire passion, purpose and productivity in millennials by making inernational and local thought leaders accessible through online and offline means. They held their first live stream session that day, which featured actress Iza Calzado to talk about how she maintains her passion for acting, PLDT Vice President for Digital Strategy and Distruptive Business Carlo Ople to talk about how he found purpose after years of working different tech‑related jobs, and Forbes Asia’s Thirty Under Thirty nominee and Machine Ventures CEO Shahab Shabibi on how he manages to be so productive at the young age of 21 years old. You can expect more streamed events on their Facebook page as the project progresses, as well as offline events like forums.

“We want to hit as much of the different audience profile as possible,” Mr. Kong said, explaining the reason why Project Ripple won’t be a solely online or offline venture. “We have on‑ground events because there are people who prefer live events. You could compare this to how listening to Spotify is a different experience from listening to a live concert. The feeling is different. We want to fuse the two together because they’re not mutually exclusive.”

“The way we’re doing it is that we’re always on with online content,” Mr. Ku, the younger of the two, told SparkUp in a separate interview, acknowledging that not everyone has had the opportunity like him to connect with local thought leaders like Mr. Kong. “If at any point in time you want to access information we have our online portal: our website and social media. But we believe that you have to experience something live to absorb things. Why do people go to church when they can pray at home? Because they want to be a part of a community—the community makes you appreciate the experience even further.”

He added that there shouldn’t be much of a difference between dealing with millennials and dealing with other generations. “I don’t think you should treat them any differently, because the more you treat a person differently the more they don’t respond to you properly,” Mr. Ku said. “But I think the vehicle on how you deliver the message is what you modify. For example, I’ll tell you about finding your passion by doing something you love and monetizing it. But the delivery to a millennial would be through online, bite‑sized content because their attention span is shorter due to technology. But the message is still the same.”

While the press release for Project Ripple described it as “engineered to be a year‑long engagement through scalable content, both online and on‑ground,” Mr. Ku hopes that this shared passion project between him and Mr. Kong will stay “as long as there are people who need what we are providing.”

“We see that there’s a growing trend on Facebook and social media [for the topics we’re discussing] so hopefully we’ll continue as long as we can,” Mr. Ku added.

“In the future we hope to bring superstars from different fields like music and arts. As for myself, my area of competence is business,” Mr. Kong said, when asked about his future expectations for the project. “We’ll bring these well‑known personalities that you only see on YouTube or onscreen and bring them here live. Hopefully we’ll be able to get them to agree that part of the live event will be converted to digital content, and that their presentation will be under the context of our local condition— global but local— to make us understand that we’re global when we enter the internet but our physical space is still local.”

Project Ripple will be holding its first conference on November 9, at the Samsung Hall at SM Aura, Taguig. Mr. Kong will be speaking at that conference, alongside waiter turned Shakey’s CEO Vic Gregorio, Chairman and CEO of Dentsu JaymeSyfu Merlee Jayme, and best‑selling American author Todd Henry.