Good morning. Like choosing a show to start on Netflix or handpicking a YouTube channel to watch while eating, choosing a career has endless possibilities. But, what’s certain is that you should only pick one you’ll come back to daily, be fulfilled in, and one that challenges you to grow and evolve continuously. Otherwise, you’d just be wasting your time (we already have TikTok for this)! Now let’s dive into a couple career spotlights to help us learn more about different jobs!

Career

📈 Driving Growth: Challenges and Rewards in Venture Capital at Kickstart Ventures (ft. Carlo Yaptinchay)

By Tobias Bautista

Carlo works for Kickstart Ventures, a company that manages the Philippines’ largest tech venture capital funds, investing in early to growth-stage tech startups around the world. Kickstart’s key fund, the Ayala Corporation Technology Innovation Venture Fund (ACTIVE Fund), is a big part of this.

As a Senior Associate for Partnerships at Kickstart Ventures, Carlo’s job is to build and maintain strong relationships between the startups they’ve invested in and partners like Globe, Ayala, and BPI. He also helps strategize with the said startups to collaborate with the Ayala group, making the right introductions to help them grow.

🦾 What is the biggest challenge you face working for a Venture Capital (VC) and what is the most fulfilling part of it?

One of the biggest challenges is having to understand multiple industries and new technologies. To effectively strategize with our portfolio startups, I need to learn about what they do, their unique selling points, what sets them apart, and why they should be chosen over other options in the market. I have to do this for all the startups we invest in, plus understand who they’re competing with.

The most fulfilling part is seeing the impact we make. After working with different startups and helping them close partnerships, you can see immediate benefits like cost savings or increased revenue. It's incredibly rewarding to see the difference we make in these businesses.

🤩 Share with us a career highlight you’ve had?

One highlight was organizing an event where we brought together our partners and portfolio startups. We mixed up the groups so that startups could talk directly with various corporations, creating opportunities for potential partnerships. As a result, our startups generated multiple leads and closed deals with our corporate partners. It was great to see our efforts lead to real, tangible results for our startups.

Photo of the Week x Teacher Spotlight

🤲 Faith and Desperation (ft. Dave Francisco)

Dave is a high school Science teacher in PAREF Southridge School (SR) for 12 years and counting. He studied Biology for Teachers in Philippine Normal University. He is also the club moderator for the SR Media Club called Admiral’s Media Society.

He uses a Canon EOS 750D with 50 mm lens.

🦾 Despite the enormous challenges associated with teaching, what brought you into the profession?

What brought me to this profession is, I think, my desire to make a positive change to society .It sounds cheesy but as a teacher, if you make a positive change to at least one student it can snowball to something bigger. Hoping that that positive change can also make a difference to other people they interact with.

🤔 What would you tell someone who wants to be a teacher but isn’t sure about it?

It's not a money making job. You must have genuine love for the profession or you'll waste away. You must also love learning, you'll do it for the entirety of your profession.

🏫 You’ve interacted with so many students by now. What’s the most memorable thing you’ve learned from a student of yours?

It's better to have a small but quality group of friends than a huge group of strangers.

Games

🎯 Fun Brain Teasers

• Wordle: guess the random five letter word

• Connections: match four words of the same category

• Strands: word search but it depends on the category

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