How I Met My Co-Founder
My Co-Founder and partner Wayne and I had been friends for years. We first met in New York on Valentines Day of 2014 (not as a date). It was through a friend who I met through a Facebook group for the attendees of a conference we were all attending that week. It was my first night in New York and I was jet lagged so bad I fell asleep half way through Book of Mormon on Broadway. Imagine, we just met and he already heard me snore.
At HPAIR 2014 in Harvard University
We said our goodbyes and saw each other a few days later at the Harvard Project of International Relations Conference in Boston. We enjoyed meeting a lot of other people in the conference, explored the city together and by the time the conference was over, became good friends. In a week or so, we flew back to our own countries, him to the UK and me to the Philippines. We didn’t really think we’d see each other again.
Wayne and I while touring MIT with our friends.
Still, we stayed good friends and through the years kept in touch through occassional Facebook messages and video calls. We both had an insistent love for travel and shared details about our trips, places we’ve been to and where we dreamed of going to one day. We had a joint love for fun, adventure and new experiences. Whenever we had massive turning points coming up such as when I was deciding on a career in a non-profit in New York versus a telco in Manila or when he was considering leaving consulting or taking an MBA, we’d call each other up and get each other’s objective thoughts about it. Talking to Wayne had always made me feel less afraid of making difficult decisions, he would always remind me that things are often a lot simpler than we make them out to be. At the time, we were already aware that while it was a very low maintenance, long distance friendship, it was also a pivotal one. Looking back, the years of our friendship had somehow hinted what we could do together.
It was by chance that Wayne was assigned to Southeast Asia after a stint in Dubai. I already had a trip booked to Taiwan during the time he’d be in the region and he decided to follow suit to catch up with me. Seeing each other for the first time in three years sparked something in me, and I spent the next few months wondering if I was living my life the way that I wanted versus if I was living someone else’s version of success. I realised that if I wasn’t fighting to be the best version of my self and actively finding out what I wanted to spend my life doing, I would be wasting my one shot at a life and career that I would be proud of.
In the months that followed, we eventually started seeing each other more regularly. While before we enjoyed new experiences by ourselves, this time we were experiencing them together. We snowboarded in Australia, had fire ramen in Kyoto, went food tripping in Osaka, watched an F1 Race in Singapore, cooked together in Manila. We went canyoonering, cliff jumping, diving, watched plays, went to art exhibits, ate in quirky restaurants. We found in each other the similar thirst for life, adventure and growth.
Due to several other factors, I ended up leaving my job a few months later (supposedly) to enter a career in foreign service. It was my childhood dream to enter the field of diplomacy, strengthened further by the time I had spent working with the World Youth Alliance which is a UN Accredited NGO that fights for human dignity. However, during the short break I took before shifting careers, I took time to really evaluate what I liked about that career track and realised that I would be able to live the life that I want and get a stronger sense of purpose intersecting with my existing skills in a different path.After I resigned, we would call each other almost every night and we’d talk in theory about the kind of work I would want to have. I ran through a lot of things that I enjoyed: themed cafes, theme parks, quirky food, theater, art, culture. For him, it was mostly a creative exercise to distract him from his data heavy job as a consultant. For me, it was realizing that anchoring my work around something so important to me that I wanted to share. We explored other business ideas too, everything from clothing to beverage retail. When we started spending virtually every night talking about our ideas, they started coming to life on their own.
Although we had our initial hesitation working together due to the fact that we were at this point dating a bit seriously already, our chemistry transcended to our work as well. We knew that we worked too good in a team to pass up the chance of building something we both loved together. One weekend in October, he flew to Manila and asked me two things: to be his girlfriend and start our first company together. That same night, I said yes to both.
He eventually decided to take a case that flew him to Manila, in order to see me more often and test our ideas together. We had narrowed down two businesses that we wanted to explore: a bottled cocktail company or an experience design company. We did surveys, FGDs, mixed drinks, and tried various local experiences.
In December, we decided to choose the idea that we both knew we were willing to gamble on. By January, we had decided to seriously pursue it, build our team and make something amazing together. We ended up creating what is now Tipsy Tales.
Through travel, our minds have been expanded by several experiences we’ve had that have made us laugh, cry and think. I searched for these things abroad because while there were some, there weren’t as many in my own country. To be able to share in that joy of creating new experiences was a mission that touched my heart in many ways. It was a call for creativity, innovation and creating more forms of entertainment locally. Who wouldn’t want to have a career built from making people happy, bringing friends and family together and showing off local artistry and ingenuity?
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