Why I started Orange & Bronze, and what keeps me going.

Why did I start this company? And what are my current motivations?

I can trace my motivations for starting this company continuing to work for this company to two experiences in college. The first was wanting to be an engineer involved in R&D, but being frustrated at the near-complete lack of opportunities to do that in the Philippines. As an engineer, you had two unattractive choices - join the academe and live on a very meager income, or join a company as a "glorified technician", and hope to move to either management or sales someday.

The second was being a mission volunteer for CFC Youth for Christ. Among my many experiences and learnings there, I witnessed the beginnings of the Gawad Kalinga program, and I basically saw how the idea of one man, Tony Meloto was able to massively change many lives in such a short period of time, through the organization that he led. Upon leaving CFC-YFC, I wanted my work to continue to massively affect people's lives.

So I left college with two goals in mind - to build an organization that would massively affect people's lives, and to be involved in innovative engineering. Orange & Bronze is the implementation of those goals. Orange & Bronze's two-fold purpose is to provide innovative careers for engineers and other knowledge workers, and to affect the society it belongs to in a massive way.

In the "affect society", the area where I think Orange & Bronze can help the most is education. I'd like the profits of Orange & Bronze to be directed towards programs that would improve education, especially for those who have the potential to either be great engineers and scientists of our country, or great leaders (or both).

I'd like to start programs to improve the level of science and mathematics education in the primary and secondary level; programs for teacher training, and the retention and recognition of competent teachers, and encouraging young people to choose teaching as a profession. I'd like us to build educational software that will allow the scarce number of teachers we have to be able to multiply their efforts. I'd like us to provide leadership training talented people in the secondary level, to provide our country with a crop of future leaders. At some point, I'd even like to build and run our own schools.

This is what has motivated me to start Orange & Bronze, and what continues to motivate me to take it to its fullest potential.