I Thought I Was Done Dreaming

After returning to Makati, life became simpler in one important way.

I had a family.

I needed stability.

For years, entrepreneurship had always been somewhere in the back of my mind. I had started companies, tried network marketing, built products with friends, and imagined businesses that might someday become something much bigger.

Some worked for a while.

Some didn't.

Eventually, I started telling myself something different:

Maybe this is it.

Maybe I didn't need to keep chasing another business.

Maybe it was time to stop dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur and concentrate on the life already in front of me.

Building a career

So I went back to what I knew.

Software engineering.

I continued working, learning new technologies, understanding different business domains and taking on bigger engineering responsibilities.

Technology kept changing. The web changed. .NET changed. Frontend development changed. Cloud computing arrived. DevOps changed how we delivered software. And eventually AI started changing how we write it.

I kept adapting.

Not because I had some carefully designed 20-year career plan.

Mostly because whenever technology changed, I became curious about the next thing.

Building something else

Outside work, my priorities had changed too.

My son's education mattered.

My family's security mattered.

Instead of putting everything into another business idea, I started investing little by little.

There was no grand strategy behind it.

Just years of working, saving, learning and trying to make sensible decisions.

Eventually, I was able to acquire a condominium unit that could generate rental income.

Later, I was able to build a home for my family.

Nothing extravagant.

I just wanted somewhere comfortable for us to live.

But there was one thing I really wanted to put there.

A small basketball half-court.

Not because it increased the value of the property.

Not because it was part of an investment strategy.

I wanted somewhere I could play basketball with my son.

For someone who spent years dreaming about building companies, perhaps I had started building something else without realizing it.

A life.

Maybe I hadn't stopped

Over time, I continued working and investing.

Property became part of that journey too.

None of this started as preparation for another company.

There wasn't a secret business plan.

I wasn't waiting for the perfect startup opportunity.

In fact, I thought that part of my life might already be behind me.

But looking back, I'm not sure the entrepreneurial side of me ever disappeared.

Maybe it just became quieter.

The young version of me wanted to build something big.

The older version had learned to appreciate building something sustainable.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

More than 20 years later

My career hasn't followed a straight line.

I started as a Computer Science student fixing computers.

I became a teacher when I couldn't get the programming job I wanted.

I started a company with friends.

It closed.

I became an employee again.

I tried entrepreneurship again.

I became a father.

I chose stability.

I returned to software engineering.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped worrying so much about whether my career looked like the plan I once imagined.

Because there wasn't really a plan.

There was just the next problem.

The next responsibility.

The next technology.

The next opportunity to learn.

The story is still being written

Today, I have a career.

I have a family.

I have a home.

I have investments that I built little by little rather than through some overnight success.

And I have a basketball court where I can play with my son.

That's already a pretty good place to be.

I don't know what the next chapter will be.

And perhaps that's appropriate.

Because after more than 20 years of trying things, getting things wrong, starting again, learning new technologies and occasionally wondering what on earth I was doing, I've finally become comfortable with something:

I don't have to know what comes next.

Sometimes the next thing doesn't begin with a grand plan.

Sometimes an ordinary problem appears in your life.

You look at it for a while.

And eventually you start thinking:

There has to be a better way.