"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

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.

05:10 Investment banking exposed the limits of deal work: Closing transactions felt empty because he never saw what happened to companies after.

10:00 Venture capital demands emotional endurance: Allocating high risk capital requires custody of LP money and deep founder trust.

12:20 AI mirrors the steam engine moment: Technology removes intellectual limits the way railroads removed physical limits.

14:50 AI growth is exponential not gradual: Decades of change now compress into a few years.

18:30 Consumer startups define the Philippine opportunity: Strong demographics exist but iconic exits remain missing.

21:20 The valley of death blocks late stage growth: Series C companies stall without foreign capital.

25:00 Filipino founders survive through grit: Cultural obligation to family and employees fuels persistence under pressure.

Jeremy Au: Hey, Mike, I'm really excited to have you on the show. You are a general partner for Kickstart Ventures, which is investing so much in the Philippines and Southeast Asia ecosystem. Mike, could you introduce yourself?

Mike Maté: Hey Jeremy. Very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. My name's Mike Maté. I'm one of the general partners at Kickstart Ventures. Kickstart is a corporate venture capital firm. We're backed by Ayala, the Ayala Group, which is the oldest conglomerate in the Philippines, and Globe Telecom, which is the leading telco in the Philippines. Our mandate is really to find technologies in the Philippines, in Southeast Asia, and really across the world, and bring them back to the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and help those technologies scale with the help of our LPs. At the same time, we bring this kind of innovation to the forefront of our LPs' consciousness.

Jeremy Au: And I think obviously you have such a career as a lawyer and as an investor, but I wanna go back all the way to your Duke University days. Back then you were doing political science and history. So what were you thinking back then? What did you think your career was?

Mike Maté: I'm gonna date myself a little bit. I did my undergrad at Duke, like you said, and that was during the dotcom boom. I had started classes and I was ready to do finance work. I was in economics doing all of that, and then one day I walked into this medieval history class. I said, "Wow, this is like the most amazing class I've ever been in". I really fell in love with history, and I shut down all my economics and finance and I became a history major. So I did a history major and political science as well.

Then I guess when I was graduating, I sat there as a senior thinking, "Oh man, what am I going to do with my degree?" I guess I'll just go to law school. My daughter was just born at the time, so I came home to the Philippines and I did law school here in Ateneo Law School. This was also because you can't practice law in the Philippines if you don't graduate from a Philippine law school. So I went home and did law. But the economics and financing were always percolating in my head. After I graduated from law school, I worked at a firm called Romulo, which was one of the leading law firms here in the Philippines. I did capital markets and M&A for a few years.

Then I found my way to Harvard where I did my Master's in Law. At Harvard Law School, they bring in famous alumni every week or month who are very rich and famous, and they talk about their lives. Most, if not all, of those alumni were no longer practicing lawyers. They were coming there and saying, "I'm living this fantastic life, but I'm not a lawyer anymore". So there was something in my head like, "Why am I here studying law when all these guys are no longer lawyers but have used their legal training to do whatever in their career?"

After Harvard, I worked in San Francisco for a bit at Morrison & Foerster in the M&A group there. I got a little bit of a taste of the startup scene. I worked on this deal where SoftBank invested in Sprint, which I think was the biggest acquisition in the US at the time. Then I came back to the Philippines, back to my firm Romulo for a few years. But again, these kernels were popping in my head like, "Why are you doing this? You really want to do other things". I was fortunate enough after a few years to get a chance to do investment banking at BPI Capital. BPI Capital is the investment bank of BPI, which is under the Ayala Group.

It’s kind of full circle for me to be back in the Ayala Group, where I started my finance career. I was very lucky that they took a chance on me—this lawyer who had zero finance training and zero knowledge about anything. The president of BPI at that time was Bong Consing, who's now the CEO of Ayala; a gentleman called Ed Montenegro, who was the president of BPI Capital at the time; and Eric Luchangco, who was my direct boss and is now the CFO of the bank. I went in with no training. I studied very hard and took myself very seriously. After a few years, I was leading the debt capital markets department for BPI Capital.

At BPI, we did the largest management buyout at the time for a firm called Megawide. But in investment banking, you do the deal and then it's done. You don't know how the company is doing afterward. I was missing that and wanted to see how these companies were doing, which led me to the buy side. I got an opportunity to move to investing at a private equity firm called Seawood based here in the Philippines. I got to sit on the board of some cool companies like Akaroa King Salmon from New Zealand. Then after a few years, Minette and Dan, the managing partners here at Kickstart, brought me in from the dark side of PE and into venture capital.

Jeremy Au: Wow, definitely a lot of experience there. What did you learn from your law experience?

Mike Maté: To be honest with you, law is really great because it grounds you and gives you a structure. It tells you how to understand regulations, which is very helpful now for understanding, negotiating, and structuring contracts for deals. Moving into private equity and finance, you learn about numbers, operations, and what makes a good investment. Then you go to the VC cycle, which is a completely forward-thinking role. It's grounded in law and finance, but you really think forward.

As a corporate venture capital firm, we think about things Ayala or Globe aren't currently doing. For example, we have an investment in a company involved in cultivated meat. The underlying technology is stem cells from animals grown in a bioreactor. We invested in a company that makes the best stem cells in the industry—cells that divide indefinitely and never die. Downstream producers in the entire industry have to use these stem cells as the fundamental technology. Ayala isn't doing that today, but 10 or 20 years down the road, they will have a company that is the underpinning of the food industry for the world. So law and finance provided a good foundation for exciting VC work.

Jeremy Au: How has that transition been? There is quite a transition in your own skillset from being a lawyer to being an investor.

Mike Maté: I don't practice law now, but if I'm talking about a deal with a founder or we're leading a deal and it gets hairy, I understand the structuring concepts very easily. Being a lawyer helps with negotiation and structuring contracts. I work very well with Jackie Pajaro, our internal legal counsel at Kickstart, because we have a quick understanding of what needs to be done.

However, lawyering and investment banking are very deal-oriented, and you let go at the end. Law school didn't prepare me for how difficult VC actually is. We are capital allocators for a very high-risk asset class. We have to be good custodians for LP funds and almost like a time-traveling wizard—like Merlin or Gandalf—who knows what's going to happen in 10 or 20 years. You have to have a deep relationship with founders to make sure they thrive, and at the end of the day, you have to make a return. It's emotionally, financially, strategically, and mentally difficult, but it’s fun.

There are fun things in VC I wasn't prepared for either. We have a company called Kicks Crew, which is a global marketplace like StockX or GOAT. They are big in the US and the Middle East, and they are very close to NBA superstars. We are about to lead a new deal with them, and our co-lead investor is Dwyane Wade. We had a call with his team at eight in the morning in the Philippines. My camera was off because my face was all messed up, and Dwyane Wade comes on and asks, "Mike, why's your camera off?" I told him it was eight in the morning, and he goes, "Oh, so you're ugly in the morning". I had to dress up, put a hat and glasses on, and try to look decent. So those are the fun experiences.

Jeremy Au: You mentioned having to be like Gandalf to predict the future. You also love history. How does that interact?

Mike Maté: History is very helpful because people say history repeats itself, which is kind of true because history tells you fundamental truths about human beings and how that interplays in the world. Technology has always been a facet of history that allows big leaps forward in human evolution. The first most important technology was fire, the second was the wheel. Those things, now with AI, allow you to change how the world works.

Think about the steam engine and the railroad. Before them, you were limited by muscle power—how far you or your horse could walk in a day. When the railroad was invented, muscle power became unlimited. You could bring heavy loads very far distances, which changed the way people thought about physical power and changed the world for the better. Now with AI, your intellectual power changes. Before, we could only compute so many times a day and we'd get tired. AI makes your intellectual limitations irrelevant in the same way the steam engine made muscle power irrelevant. So I tie history as lessons from the past and correlate them to what we see in the future.

Jeremy Au: I love that historical parallel. It took hundreds of years for the steam engine to be systemized. What is the path forward for AI?

Mike Maté: Everything now is exponential. If we had done this podcast last year, we probably wouldn't even have talked about AI. I was at a conference in London where the speaker, Jamie Davies, said AI is like a child we birthed. A year ago it was a baby, now it's a toddler; in six months it's a preteen, and in 18 months it's going to be a full-fledged adult. While the steam engine and railroads took a long time to lay down, the exponential growth of AI means adoption will be quicker. Everyone talks about a bubble—what's the view in San Francisco?

Jeremy Au: It's like the dotcom boom. You know theoretically it’s coming, but you’re too busy hustling. You can't stop working in the middle of a bubble or you'll get eaten by everyone else.

Mike Maté: Every other article I read today is "Is AI a bubble?" It probably is, but the "railroads" of AI are going to be there.

Jeremy Au: There were bubbles for railroads too. How do you see this playing out in Southeast Asia, specifically with the localization layers?

Mike Maté: As a firm, we look across the world. We follow where the technological centers of excellence are, and by far, the AI center is the United States and China. We don't do China for language reasons, but we are very interested in the US as the hub of the AI world. Our job is to bring those technologies from North America into Southeast Asia and help them grow with the help of Ayala and Globe. All the AI academics and engineers are in the US and Canada.

Jeremy Au: What approaches do you see for localizing AI to the Philippines?

Mike Maté: We had one of the first AI companies in the Philippines called InnoVantage (ia), which did AI chatbots. It was one of our first exits from our second fund, acquired by a company called Sprout. He localized an AI chatbot for the Philippine setting, and it was one of the few exits from one Filipino company to another.

Jeremy Au: What verticals are you interested in for the Philippines startup market?

Mike Maté: I have been looking at the consumer space for the past year or two. In the US we look for AI, in the UK for climate tech, and in the Philippines, we look for consumer-related startups. The demographics are a great story—a young population growing rich, a high GDP rate, and 95% digital penetration.

However, there is a hurdle with the Philippines consumption story and the startup story in general: we haven't had an iconic Philippines startup exit. We did a study with DealStreetAsia showing that in the first half of 2025, startup funding was $86 million, surpassing Indonesia for the first time. But in the second half of 2024, it was $200 million, and for the year it was roughly $400 million, which is the lowest it's been in years. Foreign direct investment is down 22%. Money is going to Singapore, Vietnam, or the US because the dollar is strong. We are also missing GDP targets for the fourth year in a row.

Additionally, the middle class, which is 60-70% of purchasing power, is mostly low-middle to middle-middle class. This means purchasing power of $500 to $1,000 a month. There is a huge gap between that and the $100 million ARR needed for a unicorn. GCash and Maya have done it, but few others have. Our capital markets are also less liquid—the Philippines Stock Exchange daily turnover is about $120 million compared to nearly a billion in Indonesia and 200 billion in Hong Kong. So consumption is a great story, but there is an invisible hurdle to get above.

Jeremy Au: How does the ecosystem cross the hurdle?

Mike Maté: Crossing the "valley of death" between Series C and Series D requires foreign capital. At Kickstart, we can support companies to Series C, but we can't be the only one, and we can't bring you all the way to IPO. We need more people to believe in the story and bring in foreign funding.

Jeremy Au: You've also talked about "technology fog" in the Philippines.

Mike Maté: That was about the "startup winter," which is now more like a "startup fog". It's not as bleak; you can see a silhouette of a lamppost at the end. We finally surpassed Indonesia, but Indonesia had a very low base. There is early-stage funding in the Philippines because there are good stories here, but it’s blurry how we get to later-stage funding and that iconic Philippine IPO.

Jeremy Au: When you think about this fog, what is confusing?

Mike Maté: It's a macro story. The dollar is strong, so asset allocators go where returns are better. Philippine rates are down as we cut rates, making debt capital markets less interesting. There is geopolitical uncertainty and internal governance issues we are working through.

In terms of startups, GCash is a 10-time unicorn primarily because of B2C consumption. It tapped into the massive Philippine market, and that can be copied in other consumer-facing industries. Filipino founders also have "grit". North American startups get easy funding, but in the Philippines, founders have to bootstrap. They put their own money in and show they can build the business.

There is also a sense of obligation. Filipinos have a Latin American-style extended family culture where employees are thought of like family. Founders feel they can't fail because they can't let down the people who rely on them—family and employees. This pride and obligation push them to find ways through even when they are on the brink. You see this happening now in the bad days.

"Brave" is showing courage in the face of something scary. For me, it was transitioning from a history major with zero finance background into investment banking. I didn't know how to use Excel or read audited financials. My son was just born, and I was on track to be a partner at my law firm. Investment banking offered a lower-level start, and it was very scary because I didn't know if it would work out. I took a bet on myself. I jump into the pool with my eyes closed.

I've always felt like the dumbest person in the room, so I tried to improve myself all the time. In my second year of investment banking, I took the CFA level one with all the young graduates. At that point, I had already taken the Philippine bar and the New York bar, and I wondered what the hell I was doing taking a third certification. But I was brave enough to try to overcome that fear.