Leader to Expedock (2020 - Present)

I’m the cofounder & chief product officer to Expedock.com - we raised 18.5M USD Seed & Series A to build the global infrastructure of the supply chain.

Before Expedock, I was a budding technology entrepreneur who took on product management roles to pay for salaries of his engineers & so that I could apprentice under masters of the craft.

I run a team of 5 product managers and 2 product designers.

We built the company during the pandemic on a 3 simple premises:

1. We can save 40% of operating income for International Freight Forwarders by using computer vision (AI) to automate the flow of data from images of Freight Documents into structured data at 99.97% accuracy. This was done by offering a service rather than a product on day 1. The strategy of offering a service enabled us to scale very quickly as we could dog food our builds and fix bugs internally.
2. The second most powerful insight we had was instead of positioning ourselves as “someone who puts data into your system”, we positioned ourselves as “someone who can automate your business workflow” or in product speak: we focused on the job to be done.
1. This enabled us to resonate with people and charge more.
2. We focused on automating accounting reconciliation instead of saying we can move data from your invoice into the system.
3. We didn’t only resonate better but we were able to build features that generated more value because we understood the true need of the customer.
3. The final insight that enables us to succeed is the idea that we needed to sell an automation product to the global market instead of selling it to a local market. If we’re saving 40% of operating expense and time for a Freight Forwarder, we needed to sell to higher income markets. For the same job, an operator of a freight forwarder in the US is paid 80,000 USD while an operator in the Philippines would be paid 6,000 USD.

In many ways, we got lucky.

1. The pandemic in 2020 forced everyone to work remotely. It opened up traditional freight forwarders ran by people in their 50’s to jump on a zoom call with a bunch of kids living in the Philippines. The need to automate was urgent and critical.
2. The world opened up to our insight at the same time we arrived at it.

I’m writing this in May 18 of 2024 and we’ve since grown this business to a company that serves 5 of the top 20 freight forwarders in the world.

As we’ve grown the business hundreds of thousands of documents processed, we started to build pure software products that leverage the data we have access to with our customers.

Our value proposition evolved from cost savings to “full stack solution for Freight Forwarders with a Transport Management System”.

The two core products we have serving the global market are:

1. Freight BI - a business intelligence tool that is built by forwarders for forwarders. It’s an opinionated product that empowers forwarders with the set of reports they need to run sales, accounting, and operations effectively & efficiently
2. Shipper Visibility - a product that enables forwarders to deliver visibility on container milestones to their customers (shippers).

The crazy part of this story is we built this global company from our bedrooms in the Philippines so we built the company by staying up until 4 to 5am cold calling customers in the United States and Europe. The company is incorporated in San Francisco but having been born in the Philippines, we became prisoners of geography. I thank the digital age & remote work for leveling the playing field of technology entrepreneurship.

As of May 2024, we’re the only startup I am aware of that exports software to the global market with a southeast asian technology team and founders.

I started this tech startup hero’s journey as a 17 year old in the Philippines (now 28) and i spent my whole career in the Philippines. No study abroad. No work abroad. No access to the best resources and mentors. All I had was a dream, hustle, focus, obsession, kindness from strangers, and love from my wife, family, and friends.

Personally, my current professional goal outside of being the first technology unicorn in Southeast Asia exporting excellent software products globally is to train and mentor the next generation of homegrown southeast asian technology talent. I am sick and tired of hearing there’s no technology talent in the Philippines and SEA more broadly because myself, my team, and the people I’ve worked have proved that to be false time and time again. Somehow we’re supposed to be exceptions to the the rule rather than signal that there is promise.

I’m angry every time I hear “There’s no tech talent in the Philippines. There’s no tech talent in Indonesia. There’s no tech talent in SEA” so I’m going to prove all the spectators wrong.

I’m going to train and mentor the next generation of Southeast Asian & Filipino founders myself through Expedock’s Associate Product Manager program.

It will take time but we're not taking our time. We're not going to be on the beach. We're going to do the work. We're going to launch more products to serve the entire world - 1 Billion Shipments, Documents, and Businesses served!

Give me 4 years. We will train and mentor them with our stories , our experiments, our failures, and our mistakes.

Their story will surpass ours. We will prove everyone who thinks there's no tech talent in Southeast Asia wrong. We are the trailblazers who export excellent software products globally from Southeast Asia. We already do! We’re just going to keep getting better at it!

No more me-too copy-paste companies in Southeast Asia!

No more great businesses with tech valuations in Southeast Asia!

No more services powered by tech in Southeast Asia!