Mike Mate: Philippine Startup Fog, Founder Grit & Betting on the Future – E669
Mike Mate, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures, joins Jeremy Au to trace how personal risk shaped his investing philosophy and how grit defines the Philippine startup ecosystem. They explore Mike’s path from history student to lawyer to venture capitalist, and how each transition built the mindset required to allocate capital under uncertainty. The conversation connects AI to past industrial revolutions, explains why Southeast Asia imports frontier technology instead of inventing it, and examines the structural hurdles blocking iconic Philippine exits. Mike shares how consumer demand drives opportunity, why late stage foreign capital decides ecosystem success, and how Filipino founders survive funding droughts through cultural obligation and persistence. Together they argue that the region’s advantage is not hype or capital abundance, but disciplined courage to build through uncertainty.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1axpdKiAOCmljehIdzhq4i?si=6108add2c2ce4723
Youtube: https://youtu.be/0yS7kJZoFAI
"For example, the way we think about AI: the steam engine and the railroad. Before they were invented, you were limited by your muscle power. You could only walk so far in one day. You could only travel as far as your horse could go. When the steam engine and the railroad were invented, your muscle power became unlimited. You could travel anywhere. You could move heavy loads across very long distances that were impossible before. It changed how people understood physical power and what they could do in their world. It opened massive possibilities and changed the world for the better." - Mike Mate, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures
"Now with AI, what does that do? AI changes your intellectual power. Before AI, we could only compute so many times a day. We get tired. We sleep. Our computers could only do so many things. Now AI works the same way the steam engine made muscle power irrelevant. AI has made intellectual limitations irrelevant. In the same way the railroad and the steam engine opened the world for us, AI will open the world and the universe for us. That is how I tie history together. History gives lessons from the past and helps correlate them to what we see in the future." - Mike Mate, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures
"It is forward thinking. As a corporate venture capital firm, our role is to work on things Ayala or Globe are not thinking about. We invested in a cultivated meat company. That is meat grown in a bioreactor. The underlying technology is stem cells. You take stem cells from an animal, place them in a bioreactor, and that becomes the meat. We invest in a company that produces the strongest stem cells in the industry. Their stem cells divide indefinitely and never die. Every downstream producer must use these cells because they are the fundamental technology. Ayala is not working on this today. They are not thinking about it. In 10 or 20 years, Ayala will own a company that underpins an entire global food industry." - Mike Mate, General Partner at Kickstart Ventures