We are the people who send money home before paying rent. Who raise other people's children with the same tenderness we give our own. Who show up at hospitals across the world and make strangers feel held in the worst moments of their lives. We pour out our time, our energy, our warmth — instinctively, and at scale.
That quality is real. And it's extraordinary. But somewhere along the way, the world learned to harvest it instead of invest in it. The system around us turned care into export. Into labor. Into a quiet, profitable arrangement where Filipinos pour their best years into someone else's vision — and the Philippines never gets to ask the question that actually matters: what would we build if we kept our best people?
This isn't anyone's fault. It's a pattern — one that started decades ago and became so normal we stopped noticing it was a choice.
I think we're standing at the edge of a different choice now. And the window won't stay open forever.
We've been here before
In 1974, the Philippine government formalized the export of its own people. The Labor Code turned overseas work into national strategy — pragmatic, necessary, brutal in hindsight. The country needed dollars. The world needed nurses, engineers, sailors, domestics. What began as a stopgap became an identity. An entire economy learned to function by sending its strongest away.
By the 2000s, the BPO boom offered a new version of the same deal: stay in the Philippines, but serve foreign companies on foreign schedules, solving foreign problems. Better than leaving. Still not building.
Each time, the Philippines stood at a fork. Each time, we took the path that sent our talent outward — not because we lacked ambition, but because no one had built the infrastructure for ambition to stay.
AI is tearing that fork open again. And this time, the math is completely different.
The gate is dissolving
Intelligence is becoming a commodity. Not in some distant, theoretical way — right now, this year, faster than anyone predicted.
A student in Quezon City today can access the same models, the same code generation, the same design tools as someone sitting in Palo Alto. The moat that kept the best tools locked behind the right zip code, the right school, the right network — that moat is draining in real time.
For decades, the clearest path for a hungry young Filipino was to leave. Go where the tools are. Go where the rooms are. Go where someone already assembled the opportunity.
That gate is dissolving. And what's emerging on the other side isn't just access — it's a question the Philippines has never been able to seriously ask: now that anyone can build, who will?
Here's what AI will never commoditize: taste. Judgment. The instinct to see a problem clearly and care enough to solve it right. The patience to build something that actually works for real people in a real place.
Filipinos are quietly, absurdly well-positioned for this. Not because we're smarter. Because we've spent generations learning to pay deep attention to people — and that turns out to be the one skill the machines can't touch.
The night I stopped looking away
I've spent the past four years working alongside some of the best AI companies in San Francisco — helping bring tools like Cursor and Notion into the hands of builders across the Philippines.
There's one night I keep coming back to.
A room in Manila. Twenty students. Most of them had never written a line of code six months earlier. One of them — nineteen years old, from a state university with flickering Wi-Fi and overcrowded lecture halls — stood up and demoed something he'd built in three weeks: a tool that compressed a broken, two-hour university enrollment process into ten minutes. It wasn't a prototype. It was live. Thousands of students were already using it.
The room went quiet. Not the impressed kind of quiet that happens at demo days in San Francisco. The kind of quiet where everyone understands, at once, what just shifted. This kid didn't need to leave. He didn't need a visa. He didn't need a venture capitalist or a Stanford degree. He needed a room with the right tools, the right people, and the quiet permission to try something.
I've watched it happen again and again since — Filipino developers shipping products that make seasoned engineers in the Bay Area pause and ask, wait, who built this?
The lesson is always the same. Not motivation. Not training programs. Not speeches. Just the room. The talent was never missing. The room was.
Once you see that, you can't look away. And you can't leave.
The gap that will swallow us if we wait
The Philippines has 30 million students. Most of them are absorbing lessons that won't matter in ten years.
That's not a criticism of students or teachers. It's an indictment of architecture. Our education system — built for a different century — still teaches for compliance. Memorize, regurgitate, graduate, apply for a job that asks you to follow instructions written somewhere else.
Meanwhile, the ground is moving fast. AI will compress most routine knowledge work within a decade. Call centers. Data labeling. Template coding. Back-office processing. The work that employs millions of Filipinos right now.
In ten years, millions of Filipinos will wake up fluent, capable, and obsolete — unless we build something better before the floor drops.
That's the gap. Not talent — we have that in staggering, almost offensive abundance. Not ambition — spend five minutes with a Filipino builder and you'll feel it in the room. The gap is infrastructure: the systems, spaces, and pathways that turn a curious person into a builder, and a builder into someone who can sustain a life doing meaningful work without getting on a plane.
We have the people. We don't yet have the rooms.
What I'm building
Not a program. Not a course. Not a government initiative with a five-year timeline and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
A living ecosystem. A loop: explore, build, show your work, find your people, build again — bigger this time.
Spaces where education means standing in a workshop creating things — AI as co-pilot, community as backbone — not sitting in a lecture hall absorbing theory you'll never apply. Where readiness isn't measured by a test score or a diploma, but by a portfolio of problems you actually solved.
This ecosystem doesn't live in one university or one city. It grows the way open-source software grows: through people who experienced it, believed in it, and carried it to the next person. Node by node. Room by room.
Why I stay
People ask. Why build from Manila when the money and the networks live somewhere else.
The honest answer: I tried the other version. I saw what happens when Filipino talent shows up in rooms built for someone else — we adapt, we excel, we make ourselves indispensable. And then we spend our careers maintaining someone else's architecture.
The Philippines has 110 million people. English-fluent. Globally online. Deeply community-oriented. Young — the youngest median age in Southeast Asia. A diaspora spanning every continent. A cultural instinct for collaboration that most countries pour millions into trying to manufacture.
And still, the default path for a brilliant young Filipino is: get a degree, get a job, serve someone else's roadmap. Not because that's what they want — because no one ever showed them the other door.
I'm building the door.
Not with speeches about thinking bigger. With tools in their hands, builders around them, and the space to discover what they're capable of. The ambition shows up on its own when the room is right. Every single time.
What care becomes when it scales
The Philippines is a nation of care. That hasn't changed. It shouldn't.
But care can grow beyond service.
Picture a Filipino team building a health platform that actually works for the barangays — not some imported system awkwardly bolted onto communities it was never designed for. A student in Mindanao creating tools that solve problems no one in Silicon Valley even knows exist. A generation of builders who stay — not because they can't leave, but because staying is finally the more exciting choice.
Care doesn't have to mean tending to someone else's world. It can mean stewardship. Building the things your community needs, with the craft and attention that only comes from understanding the people you're building for — because they're your people.
That's the shift. Not from caring to competing. From caring for others to caring enough to build for ourselves — and, eventually, for the world.
This is what talent flourishing looks like. Not talent leaving. Not talent surviving. Not talent waiting for permission. Talent choosing to stay, choosing to build, because the room finally exists.
The window
I have a few hundred builders who show up every month. Partnerships with companies who see what I see — that Filipino talent is absurdly undervalued and the correction is coming. A growing stack of proof: shipped apps, deployed systems, real problems solved by real people who six months ago didn't know they could do this.
Some of them will build startups. Some will build careers. Some will build tools for their schools, their barangays, their families. All of it counts. All of it compounds.
I don't have a ten-year plan. I don't have a pitch deck with a hockey-stick chart. What I have is something I can't walk away from — because once you've sat in a room and watched a kid realize he doesn't have to leave his country to build something that matters, you don't get to pretend the system is working.
The window is open right now. AI is rewriting the rules of who gets to build, and from where. That window will close. The advantages will consolidate, the tools will get captured by incumbents, and the gap will harden into something permanent. We've watched it happen before — in 1974, in the BPO boom — and both times, the Philippines adapted instead of led.
Not this time.
This generation gets to decide: do we keep exporting our care, or do we finally build with it?
Fifty years of sending our strongest away. Fifty years of being the world's most generous labor force. Fifty years of talent leaving because staying never made sense.
The rooms exist now. The tools are here. The people are ready.
I've already decided.