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(Last of
five parts)
It’s easy
for Filipinos to decide to leave the country to seek
greener pastures. It’s much harder for these Filipinos,
used to working abroad and earning sizeable sums, to come
back.
Transforming brain drain to brain gain is indeed a
difficult task. But Francisco “Paco” Sandejas, an
electronics engineer from Stanford University, believes it
is possible.
While
completing his doctorate degree, Sandejas set up the Brain
Gain Network with fellow engineer Mark Loinaz to connect
talented professionals and students worldwide who are
interested in helping the Philippines achieve
competitiveness in the high-technology industries. Loinaz
is credited with developing the world’s first single-chip
camera.
Aware of
the brain-drain phenomenon gripping the country, they
built an extensive database of highly skilled Filipino
professionals to facilitate collaboration among them and
promote technology transfers to the Philippines as well as
promote university consortia to advance engineering
education in the country. The Brain Gain Network now has
1,400 techie and business types. “I call them
technopreneurs,” says Sandejas, who currently heads Narra
Venture Capital based in Alabang, one of pioneering
venture-capital companies in the Philippines providing
funds for technopreneurs who have smart business ideas.
One of
Narra’s pet projects is Stratpoint Technologies, which
develops software for mobile applications for companies in
the Philippines and the United States.
“It’s this
sense of fulfillment that you are really making a big
difference in the lives of more people,” says Sandejas,
rationalizing why he returned to the Philippines in 1997.
Narra Ventures, he points out, now has 12 firms under its
portfolio, like Stratpoint Technologies. “We are still
looking for more start-up companies [to finance].”
Prior to
coming home, Sandejas worked in product management and
marketing for Applied Materials (formerly Applied Komatsu)
in Silicon Valley, which produces flat panels.
“I could
have been richer,” he admits. Still, he feels he would
have only had a limited impact. “By and large, most of us
who came to the US are work rats. And we do rise to
executive levels. But how many lives are you going to
transform? Two, three people?”
In the
Philippines, on the other hand, he feels he is reaching
out to more people. He helped set up research and
development (R&D) laboratories at the Philippine Export
Zone Authority, worked to establish the Advanced Research
and Competency Development Institute that trains engineers
to be competent in skills needed by the electronics and
semiconductor industry, and worked with professors from
Ateneo de Manila, the University of the Philippines, De La
Salle University and other schools. “When you attend these
graduation ceremonies, you know you really have affected
the lives of these kids. In the United States, you are
going to touch the lives of only a few people,” he muses.
According
to Emerson Tan, an associate at Narra Ventures who also
teaches software engineering at UP, the Brain Gain Network
helps bring the faculty and staff of the country’s leading
universities up to speed, with the developments in
electronics and semiconductors, through informal dialogues
and interactions.
“We also
hire some of them as consultants in projects being
financed by Narra,” he says. “That way, those professors
don’t have to leave UP to earn some money.”
Plugging
in
TRAINED in
Stanford University, a hotbed of start-ups, Sandejas hopes
to kick off a similar “ecosystem” that supported the rise
of high-technology industries in
Silicon Valley. It’s all about forming a network, he explains, where
people plug in, get the trust and confidence of each other
and then collaborate on projects, mostly in the high-tech
industry. “The Chinese, Indians, Taiwanese and
Iranians—that’s how they do it, just like a Mafia,” he
says.
Marguerite
Gong Hancock, associate director of Stanford Project on
Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Stanford
University in Silicon Valley, describes this “ecosystem”
as comprising of several elements, including the presence
of excellent universities—like Stanford—entrepreneurial
students and faculty, smart engineers from developing
countries like China, India and Taiwan, high-technology
companies, venture capitalists, hotshot lawyers and
managers with a gung-ho attitude toward producing “the
next big thing.”
Many of
the immigrant engineers and technopreneurs started as
students at the universities in Silicon Valley, notes Anna
Lee Saxenian, professor of urban planning and the head of
University of California Berkeley School of Information.
With limited opportunities back home, many of them stayed
and worked in high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, and
after more than a decade, many of them started their own
high-tech companies, she says.
Having
“marinated” in the
Silicon Valley culture, many of these technopreneurs, venture capitalists
and engineers ended up coming home to their countries to
set up business organizations. Some of them even went back
home for good to start high-tech businesses, while others
formed links and bridges with companies back home to
facilitate the outsourcing of certain stages of their
companies’ value chain.
“These
highly skilled emigrants are now increasingly transforming
the brain drain into ‘brain circulation’ by returning home
to establish business relationships or start new companies
while maintaining their social and professional ties to
the US,” says Saxenian in her paper “The New Argonauts.”
The rise
of Taiwan as an electronics and semiconductors powerhouse
as well as Israel’s strength in software development,
especially in the area of cryptography and defense, she
says, were largely because of this phenomenon.
Israel
and Taiwan now boast of the largest venture-capital
industries outside
North America—$4
billion is invested annually in Israel and $1.3 billion in
Taiwan—Saxenian reports. “Both have high rates of new firm
formation, innovation and growth. Israel is now known for
software and Internet firms such as Mirablis, a developer
of instant-messaging programs, and Checkpoint, security
software; firms such as Acer [personal computers and
components] and TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Corp.] have transformed Taiwan into a center of
leading-edge PC and IC manufacturing,” she wrote.
The
Indians have been quick to copy the same model, utilizing
their linkages with Silicon Valley to become Asia’s hub
for business-process outsourcing; while in the last
decade, the Chinese government has also been luring
Chinese technopreneurs from
Silicon Valley
and other parts of the US to help accelerate its drive for
technological advancement. Since 2005 around 25,000
skilled Chinese professionals a year are responding to the
program.
Barriers
WHILE
Israel, China and India are succeeding in luring skilled
professionals, Sandejas admits that doing the same is
quite difficult for the Philippines.
“There are
pros and cons about coming here in the Philippines. The
negatives are low pay, pollution, bad schools and
corruption,” he explains. “It’s frustrating when you see
people who are really smart and they are not able to
advance. And you see really stupid people cheating and
making a lot of money and doing nasty things to good
people. It really makes you mad. Our elections, for
instance, are just nakakainis.”
Luckily
there are some smart people who have left and do come
back, he adds. And many of them are attracted by recent
positive trends, like improvements in the business
environment and the good performance of the stock market.
But he wishes there are more options for people like him.
“What are
lacking here are the opportunities,” says Sandejas.
“Because if you are already earning $100,000 a year or
more in the US, if you have decent education and you don’t
screw up in your work, you are doing really well in the
US.”
The fact
is that there are fewer financial incentives for skilled
professionals to return. In many cases many of those who
returned did so because they are compelled by their
parents to run the family business.
In
general, the decision to return home, Sandejas says, is
hard to make because they are not going to get what they
earn in the US, unless they are “very strategic recruits”
by large conglomerates like the Ayalas’ Integrated
Microelectronics Inc. or IMI, the Phinma group and the
Lopezes.
“But by
and large, it’s tough [for those who want to return] as
there are only few companies going to the US to recruit
because it’s expensive,” says Sandejas. “And the business
in the Philippines has to make enough profit to handle
such kind of overhead. So now, luckily, there are some
businesses doing that, like Ayala’s IMI, some exporters
and some call centers.”
There are
also not many R&D projects being done in the Philippines,
he adds, making it hard for electronics engineers like him
to find jobs.
“That’s
why I started Brain Gain Network, to find other people
like Mark Loinaz and others,” he says. “I can’t wait for
the big Philippine-based companies to invite me to come
home. I have to network with my friends and their own
network, find other people so we could initiate a start-up
company in the Philippines.”
And his
efforts seem to be paying off. In 2002 he partnered with
Silicon Valley-based Diosdado Banatao, who heads Silicon
Valley-based Tallwood Venture Capital, to form Narra
Venture Capital in the Philippines. Narra was envisioned
to invest in companies developing semiconductors and
semiconductors-related products, converged communication
systems, computing platforms, and software and related
services.
“I always
believe in engineering in the Philippines, but maybe we
don’t have enough product-marketing guys to tell us we
should make cellular phones here,” he argues.
He feels
that it would be hard to compete with Nokia or Ericsson.
So instead of doing engineering, he thinks that the best
strategy would be to link up with smart developers here in
the Philippines to develop software for mobile phones and
personal digital assistant devices or PDAs.
“We can do
them in the
Philippines
because it’s less capital-intensive and there are more
computer-science people here than circuit designers,” he
says. “Accenture has proven that we could have good
software programmers in the
Philippines.”
So with
Narra Ventures, he invested in Stratpoint Technologies.
The strategy, he says, is to bring to the US the
capabilities of Filipino programmers.
“I sell
their services to my friends who are leaders in the
software industry in the US,” he says. “I tell the heads
of these companies, ‘you know me, I’m not dumb myself.
Trust me, I’ll get equally smart people to do the work for
you.’ But I cannot do a disservice to our friends in the
States. I cannot give the quality less than what they have
in the
US.
So I offer them at lower cost and give them the same
quality.
“That’s
what we do at Stratpoint. That’s what Art Tan [another
Filipino engineer brought home by the Ayalas from the US]
at IMI does in electronics manufacturing,” he adds. “Easix
Technologies is doing designs in electronic modules. In
the future there would be other guys coming up with unique
high-technology products.”
With
Banatao—himself a multimillionaire and successful
entrepreneur and engineer in Silicon Valley—advising Narra,
other local business bigwigs such as the Ayalas, the
Lopezes through the First Philippine Holdings, and the
Lhullier Group have joined the group as investors. Banatao
is known to have developed the first chip sets for
personal computers.
“Narra
could invest from $1 million to $2.5 million in any
company,” says Sandejas. “Today we have 12 companies in
our portfolio and we are still looking for more companies.
For as long as we keep on working harder, keep doing
better and do nothing wrong, we will keep on growing.” |
