
Stories, reflections, revelations. About mission, meaning, purpose, values, love, failure, redemption, the stuff that goes into building transcendent ventures and living transcendent lives.
Stories, reflections, revelations. About mission, meaning, purpose, values, love, failure, redemption, the stuff that goes into building transcendent ventures and living transcendent lives.
Meet Ignite Founders’ founders. Andre A. Yap I’ve shared a lot of me in these pages. Many of them I write as notes to self, and they function as such: beacons and reminders of conversations with my God; I go back to them […]
It was Kahlil who shattered my Monday morning zen from NYC. I got his message in Manila just before 5am, as I was unpacking my energies to start another action-packed week. Noooo. Nooooooo. Barely an hour later I was first in the gym, opened Moro as […]
2008, Papa and I were sitting knee to knee to knee with Prof Christensen, the 3 of us in his Harvard office chatting Schumpeter, bringing Disruptor’s Dilemma to Manila, and being a good human being. The man lingered on me, I could not get over how big he was – in his 6 foot 8 […]
What a sublime contrast in today’s readings. How awesome David is. His star is on the rise, and he has the golden chance now to slay his arch-nemesis, the King Saul who is raving mad with jealousy and wants to murder the hero David who is about to become king in Saul’s […]
For those who stayed for yesterday’s Ignite Fireside, one of the things I shared was how my Jesuit director told me, I suppose with a little exasperation from all my Type A life: “Andre, ask for the grace to see Him as He so tenderly sees you”. Mushy advise for this macho […]
Cape Town, Day 10, South Africa. It is the morning of New Year’s eve, last day of 2017. Renee and I wake late and get into a different kind of breakfast in bed. Me: So, hon, what is your wish for 2018? Renee (thinking)… Me: On […]
There is something writ large here – ’tis in the stars, too brilliant to ignore, too beautiful to deny. On the last day of 2017 we reached the Cape of Good Hope (Southern-most Africa) on the same year we reached Finistere (Western-most Europe) on the eve of my birthday. […]
Not a parable. It happened, Jesus saw it, and he invites us now to see the depths of our own widow’s mite. He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, “Truly I tell […]
It’s Trump, you say, or Duterte, or Kim, or religious extremism, or – I don’t think so. I think it is simpler. The problem is you and I. “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have (accumulated) to whom will they belong? So it will be […]
Say a prayer for Wash SyCip. By far the greatest Filipino I have personally met. We sat down 2x this year, one on one. He gave me 90 minutes of his time last Holy Wednesday, allowing me to speak for 45 minutes uninterrupted (which terrified me). Then he responded with the sort of wisdom that […]
It happened on the eve of my 45th birthday. This was the moment my Camino crossed from epic to sublime – in that dark corner, by myself, in 20 stolen minutes before our final rendezvous, before we had to say goodbye to our pilgrim’s […]
So on the 5th day, somewhere on KM 75, I could finally walk my Camino alone. A glorious, solitary stretch of 7 or so kilometers that was like coming home: a reminder how singularly important solitude is to me, everyday to be alone and zero out the noise and haste and just be with me. […]
Day 4. We’ve breached Km 65. The rains came, and the killer hills soon after. It’s neither as difficult nor as easy as they say. Except the Estrella Galicia; it’s always the same ice cold good at the end of each day’s walk. Walking this much, some things become undeniably clear. Like […]
By now we have walked 50 kms in 3 days, avoided rain, heat, blisters or any encounter with the proverbial wall. I have walked every one of these steps in love, many with Renee’s hand in mine and Cyril’s voice – his poetry and song, his rap and banter and endless stories, his joy and […]
What will you find on the way to Santiago? Today wisdom from a 9 year old, the youngest pelegrino (pilgrim) we’ve seen by far. Overheard somewhere on Km 20 of the Spanish Camino, when a charming new friend asked what advise he would give to adults. […]
What is your sword? Knight, nobleman and soldier that he was, his sword represented all that was good and dear to Iñigo of the Basque family of Loyola in the 1500s. The sword was his past, present and all the future ever held. And that […]
Another whisper. It’s only gotten louder since I first heard it maybe December of last year, until nowadays it is a daily talk point. That our gifts bear our life’s mission; and that our gifts include, as much as our talents and joys, our pains. And today, I had […]
Is this the focal point and organizing principle of every founder’s journey? The Discerment of Gifts? Today’s reading was Abraham willing to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. A man willing to give back the greatest gift given him, and in so doing he realized, far beyond his wildest imagination and […]
This is why I started Ignite Founders. To find these 9 points Jessica articulates that almost fully capture (with one key ommission) the difference between what I want to invest my life on and what I don’t. I have zero interest in entrepreneurs; I want founders. And this is […]
Your gift is your melody. It is yours alone and the world longs to be filled by it. Few of us can sing or write music. But all of us know the power of song and can appreciate this truth about them: The melodies that fill our hearts and lift our […]
Reflections on Slavery Ca. 2017: The Maddening Cruelty and Missed Opportunities of an Indifferent Life. Indifference ends when we get to know that slice of humanity whose pain we are particularly gifted to solve. This is my slice. Exactly 5 Saturdays ago, a scant 24 hours […]
Celebrating 20 years of growth, grace, madness, forgiveness, togetherness. And today, incredibly, we have the same gospel that once upon a time graced our wedding. Remember how it had us at hello? A most beautiful encounter with grace told some 2017 years ago that somehow perfectly foretold the folly […]
It’s our great pleasure to invite you to FOUNDERS CIRCLE 2 May 2017 Discernment: IN SEARCH OF THE FILIPINO UNICORN – OR […]
07.04.2017 A good friend of mine once asked me how heavy a polar bear weighs and with my inability to answer, she responded by saying that it’s heavy enough to break the ice and then pretended to introduce herself to me. I find that a number of workshops and […]
20.03.2017 According to Wikipedia, “the unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead.” I encountered the unicorn during my childhood. I remember collecting stickers and swapping a number of small stickers with a friend for one colorful unicorn sticker. It […]
20.03.2017. Bravo, Allan Tear and Betaspring! Startups need to get more serious, less sexy. The Rise of Revenue First Startups by Allan Tear. Original published here. […]
20.03.2017 I must never be so busy that I don’t have time and space – really it’s about Space – to be, and to have in my heart, radiating from my every smile, the nearness of […]
15.03.2017 I came to serve, not to be served. These were the last and only lines I heard from today’s Gospel. Somebody tell me where I can find the emoticon for embarassing. I was very distracted, my mind still swimming in […]
15.03.2017 People say the grass is greener on the other side, but you never really know where the other side exactly is until you realize that wherever you currently are is not where you want to be. I found myself longing for the other side when I felt that […]
Meet Ignite Founders’ founders. Andre A. Yap I’ve shared a lot of me in these pages. Many of them I write as notes to self, and they function as such: beacons and reminders of conversations with my God; I go back to them […]
07.03.2017. Lent is a joyful season. I sat up when Fr. Mario Francisco opened his Ash Wednesday homily with these words. Speaking of joy, yesterday, I had an epiphany about the Joyful Mysteries – what, after 45 years! It’s how we accept and embrace the Joy. The Annunciation. […]
25.02.2017 A founder’s burden. Well, there are many. But here are two that weigh heavily on a daily basis: Finding the right path. Are we on the right path? Because I’m anxious we aren’t. And Measures of success. Are we progressing as we […]
24.02.2017 Sun and moon and earth and wind and rain – all the world’s contained in every grain. Is there anything you can plant or create or build or invent or startup or innovate – whose grain was not freely given you? […]
22.02.2017 Either we are for peace or we are against it, and I wonder: how many of us are really for Peace, no matter what our Facebooks say. If we really want peace, we have to eradicate the easy definition that it is the absence of hate or violence. We will never […]
15.02.2017 I thought there was nothing to write today, which is ok. I walked out of the AHS chapel after another quiet morning of prayer, out onto the dancing acacias and beautiful sprawling greens of the Ateneo campus bathed in sun on this crisp Feb morning after valentines. I was already starting […]
13.02.2017 Happens every Monday. I wake up to this overwhelming rush of so many uphill climbs. I re-sort my week’s to-do list and I’m staring at 30-some items on an average week; every one of them is a legit uphill climb. I know I must complete them all, and while I pride […]
08.02.2017 I believe the universe is a constant flow of goodness happening through good people (God’s ongoing work of creation, if you will). When our good intentions meet with dead ends and difficulties, either of a few things are true, or maybe they all are: Our intentions may have […]
29.01.2017 Look who paid us a visit this morning. Acrylic on canvass don’t show them, but happy faces do. Two loaves and five fish and who would have thought it was enough to feed four thousand, the multitude made manifest in […]
29.01.2017 LALA Land is no big deal. But for all its contrived, formulaic plot and delicious acting, what makes this worth the popcorn and 130 minutes of my time is its lingering message and those 10ish minutes in the the narrative arc when all the drama was centered on its core dilemma: […]
02.01.2017 After 10 days of blessed debauchery all I wanted when we touched down this afternoon was some quiet time to start my first day of 2017 back home. But Gesu was closed so I walked over to the Jesuit Residence – and THERE, THERE! what a beautiful treat the Lord prepared! […]
01.01.2017 First, a reflection. On love, marriage, fatherhood, business and why I don’t believe in bad years, good years and universally celebrated myths like being your own man, blazing your own trail and other mumbo jumbos of self-deterministic success. Then, 5 very specific resolutions for 2017. 2016 marked 5 […]
28.12.2016 TROJAN EAGLE. Ending the year at work on this rah rah note (on a bullet train, appropriately, with the super boss beside me). A few weeks ago, a favorite client partner confided in me – he is the CEO of a publicly listed company that’s […]
18.12.2016. IGNACIO. Here is my Basque separatist friend (calm down, Nacho Rincón, it’s just an endearment), a few days before he leaves Manila for the old country. I asked him to take my sword and leave […]
06.12.2016 …this time around, papa doesn’t even say hello. He gets right into it, sobbing heavily so that I could just barely make out what he was saying… Excerpted from A TRUE CONFESSION: OF ONE BIG FIGHT AND THE TEARS GROWN MEN CRY (Prologue: When Ateneo […]
05.12.2016 In Ignatian spirituality one of the most cherished paths to discernment that our Jesuit fathers taught us is to invite ourselves into the Gospels, and forgetting all dogma and orthodoxy, just place ourselves in that story’s presence in such a way that we go fully with the flow of what we […]
08.11.2016 Finally! After a spiritual drought that’s felt like a purgatorial 2 or 3 weeks (can’t say for sure), a breakthrough as warm, bright and embracing as this Tuesday morning’s glorious sunshine! This gift was ushered in by my favorite Jesuit romantic, Fr. Bert Ampil – for which I […]
03.11.2016 Tito Gigi was Papa’s classmate, friend and business partner. Then he was mine – a co-founder, shareholder and colleague in the board. We didn’t always see eye to eye about direction, strategy or even what business we were in exactly, but you always treated me with respect; you called me partner […]
06.10.2016 A message whispered directly right about the Consecration during Mass just now. Never have I heard or understood this Gospel as clear as now. And so simple. “Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the door will be opened”. If we are […]
04.10.2016 May the force be with you. HERE is a powerful story – and what a clear lesson about where, how and from whom we draw the force that powers all our life. And how guilty I am of drawing from the opposite, as Martha. […]
25.09.2016 Birthday card came a week early from my CorpTV family. An office tradition I really look forward to when it comes my turn each year. Hand-crafted for every birthday boy and girl, celebrating each one’s individuality, each one’s journey and point-in-time. Ya never know where they’ll peg you each year… […]
31.07.2016 Happy Feast Day to my idol, mentor and soulmate; a soldier whose first endearment (when I was finally willing to accept it) was to teach me to always fight and never settle, even as his most enduring image, installed in the room of every adult male in my family, is of […]
19.06.2016 A Father’s Day Thought. Papa and I get a lot of great new photos every year but this is still the one that brings it home. Every man must have his Camelot. Especially a father and doubly so if you have […]
11.06.2016. I’ve lived a lifetime and a half spoiled by an 8 year old boy and his itinerant storytelling. His gypsy touch brings me to frontier times and spaces I’ve never been or don’t usually enter. Wherever he is, a universe unfolds in his head; sometimes he writes it out and we […]
29.05.2016 Work vs. Leisure. Work vs. Rest. Work vs. Family. These silos are artificial, man-made, unnatural: they are destructive. I am given but one life and I am given but one me. Why do I live in silos and parts? How do I break these chains? […]
16.05.2016. Always good to hang with one of my heroes. Teddy Roosevelt – statesman, adventurer, outdoorsman, author, conservationist, trust buster, visionary, warrior and priest – didn’t so much inspire as he reassured me that desiring, demanding and daring mighty things was neither crazy nor vain. […]
08.05.2016. I cannot accept this national death wish, this mass hysteria of self hate. If surveys are to be believed, millions of us seem to have taken to heart the parting lines of our national anthem: Ang mamatay ng dahil sa iyo. On the eve of our elections, and […]
30.04.2016 10 Points on how I arrived at my choice for President. First, a disclaimer. Unlike many spammers in Facebook I don’t have fortunes tied to one horse or another so much so that I have to shamelessly barrage my friends with black propaganda du jour both carefully and carelessly […]
21.04.2016. A different love letter. To my wife, on our anniversary. Written at dawn, on the shores of Tiberias, after all the hurt. 2,000 years ago. This story holds a special place in my heart, the most romantic passage in the bible […]
08.02.2016. A legend, has gone to the stars. Only a year ago we celebrated your 90th. Thank you for everything, sir. Amicitiam spero sempiternam fore, AMDG. Sharing memories from our reunion a year ago. Toy celebrated his 90th birthday on Feb 11, the feast of our Lady of Lourdes. He […]
16.01.2016. Forsan Et Haec Olim Meminisse Juvabit. Someday we will remember all this with joy. – Book I, line 203, Vergil’s Aeneid. The words are etched on the grounds of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx. I graduated 20 years ago but never really left. Forever […]
09.01.2016 A beautiful mind. He drew as he always did from an infinite well of vision, imagination and an irresistible force within. All the live long day, from Lisboa to Fatima to Sintra to Cascais to Estoril, from Obidos to Nazare, from Porto to Coimbra to Aveiro and Costa Nova and all […]
15.09.2015 Siargao, Mindanao for a week-long leadership retreat, details of which I have been sworn to secrecy. These past five days I am again a little less of a foreigner in my own country. The more I see of our 7,100 islands, the clearer I am that the majesty of the Philippines […]
03.30.2015. He just helped you achieve what you’ve worked so hard and so long to achieve – except he has taken you much farther and given much fuller than you’d ever imagined. You were fishing all night on empty nets and yet at his word not only your nets but your boat […]
15.08.2015 At last, after all these years I met someone I can give my highest accolade to: that I would want to work for him. I am an incorrigible entrepreneur, so used to blazing my own path. If there is not a single bone in […]
03.08.2015 Profound, powerful contrasts in today’s 2 stories – in the first, a man who focused on what he didn’t have, saw the impossibility of his situation and preferred to die rather than serve; in the second, a man who focused on what he was given, no matter how seemingly little, overcame […]
11.07.2015 She is forever darling and eternal goddess of the industry. In beauty and carriage surely, but untouched when it comes to the esteem of peers, and equally of boards of directors at the rate she has CEO’ed one giant name after another. We had been meeting regularly the past 3 years […]
19.06.2015 Van Gogh is Bipolar, and so was he! Renee and I finally stumbled into this mythical place last night called Van Gogh Is Bipolar and had a legendary affair with founder Jethro Rafael, who walked out of a lifelong bipolar pathology by letting loose […]