Last August 9 at the School of Design and Arts (SDA) Theater, the first ever Benildean Startup Youth Day was organized by BS-Information Systems (BS-IS) students to help provide young college students the right mentorship, management, and financial skills in building a startup from scratch.
“A startup is basically a self-own business. It starts from scratch; as in, it starts from something small, and grows into something big,” explains sophomore Assistant Project Manager Irwin Dayak.
According to sophomore Project Manager Leandro Villanueva, another purpose of the event is to inspire other students.. “[We] want [to convince them] that [they] should put [their] technical skills into business.”
Leaders, pioneers, and inspirational speakers were invited to conduct a series of seminars and workshop on these endeavor. These included the Mother of E-commerce law in the Philippines, Ms. Janette Toral, who gave a talk about E-Commerce Startup Techno-preneurship, while Mr. Gian Javelona shared his journey on becoming a CEO of OrangeApps at the age of 20. He was followed by CEO and Founder of Peekawoo.com, Ms. Valenice Balace, who taught the crowd how to set up an online business.
Regional Director for Continental Asia at Freelancer.com, Mr. Jorge Azurin, took over the stage as he lectured on building a startup company using a Lean Canvas. Next speaker was Training Manager of Smart Communications Mr. Ronald Ramos who gave an update on the trends in mobile applications development.
The afternoon session ended with President of Success Option Publishing Company Mr. Francis Kong giving the audience an inspirational, motivational, yet fun talk about success, life values, and the art of pitching a business idea.
The afternoon Pitching and Ideation Competition was cut due to lack of time, but was continued online. The competition is still open and is now being handled by IdeaSpace Philippines wherein they will be accepting entries until December this year.
The TIO01 section under Professors Ben Uy and Oliver Liwanag is hoping to hold their event annually starting next year, with Villanueva sharing, “I hope that the next batch of project management students, the faculty members of IS, or even CA, will continue our project. And we are willing to help [them] organize it again.”
The event was open to everyone including outsiders and students from different courses. Those still interested to join the said competition may find the link for the competition in the Benildean Startup Youth Day 2014 Facebook page.
