One Filipino’s journey to Silicon Valley and back

Edited at 3.50 pm SGT.

By Earl Martin Valencia, president and co-founder of the IdeaSpace Foundation

“How do we build a Silicon Valley atmosphere here in the Philippines?”

In May 2011, business tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan (or commonly known as MVP) posed this question to a idealistic 27-year old idealistic Silicon Valley based Filipino during one of his trips back to the Philippines. That person was me.

The Chairman of PLDT-Smart, one of the largest mobile operators in Southeast Asia, told me his 10-year old vision of democratizing access to capital to the best science and technology-based ideas in the country.

This conversation was the birth of what is now called the IdeaSpace Foundation — a non-profit organization that promotes tech entrepreneurship in the Philippines.

To become an astronaut, I had to leave the Philippines

Before I go on about IdeaSpace, a little bit about myself:

In July 2001, I told my department chair at the University of the Philippines that I would be transferring to Boston University to complete my Electronics and Communications Engineering (ECE) degree. I had just turned 18 and I didn’t really know what I was doing or thinking.

All I knew was that I had to get out of my home country in order to fulfill my dream of getting a PhD in MIT or Stanford and become an astronaut. My brother, who recently moved to the US a few months before, said that “in order to be the best in the world, you have to compete with the best.”

Another main reason for leaving is the lack of opportunity for ECEs to actually practice R&D in the Philippines. What I loved about engineering is the act of turning imagination into reality, but most of the local opportunities post-graduation were in integration or manufacturing.

Life in Silicon Valley

I did not become an astronaut in the end. During my final year in college, I received an admission letter to pursue a PhD in MIT. Ironically, I decided to accept an offer to join Raytheon, one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. I declined the offer because I wanted to “know” if the corporate world was right for me and to verify if satellites and rockets were indeed my passion.