Unfriendly to Startups

Tomohisa Kato
Jul 20, 2017 · 1 min read

The Philippines appear to me really unfriendly to start-ups. The most scary thing to start-ups in the country isn’t competitor nor customer, but how government people interpret existing laws and how suddenly they practically crush start-ups

RareJob, the English tutorial company I’ve founded, went public after it had almost been suddenly crushed in that way. RareJob could somehow survive by sourcing a large amount of capital. Luckily their HQ is located in Japan, not in Phil.

The recent news of Grab and Uber reminded me that experiences. Luckily, they are also not native Filipino startup but global one. They would be able to survive globally even if their business in Ph crushed. And they also seemed to have social media back-rush by commuters with the needs of their service. Those company’s target was luckily mass market. What if Philippines-based start-up targeting limited market segment encountered same type of situation?

No startups, no innovation. The more SME grows, the less disparity in this country. The issue of unfriendliness to startups would be juridical matter rather than administrative matter. The separation of the three powers of administration, legislation, and judicature is required in any developed countries because they’ve experienced abuse of administration power. Administration may be an accelerator while judicature works as brake.

And since we don’t expect those improvement so soon, entrepreneurs have to try to survive under given conditions. So do I.

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