Words by Oliver Bayani | Photos by Ricardo Malit
MANILA – Coming from an accomplished family with bar top notchers for parents and a high school valedictorian for a brother – Nico Jose “Nix” Nolledo was the outlier. While he never failed a subject, Nolledo candidly admits his grades could’ve been better. Admitted to Ateneo de Manila’s Business Management Honors program, Nolledo was later kicked out. He shrugs: “I would score a 33/100 in a Math exam. Another guy would score 100. We read the same books and went to the the same lectures. I was never a party kid. I was never a bad boy. I just couldn’t absorb it the way they did.”
What Nolledo did excel in was starting businesses. In his junior year in college, he opened five small businesses with around PhP10,000 to PhP20,000 in capital, selling bottled iced tea at U.P. Diliman near the Ateneo, a cafeteria in Elizabeth Seton School, to ambitious ventures like setting up a small computer shop at BF Homes, Parañaque where he lived.
Before founding the most successful home grown billion-peso tech company in the Philippines to date, Nolledo initially planned to have a restaurant chain of his own. To learn the ropes, he applied for a job in fast-food companies right out of college. After being rejected a couple dozen times, he landed a job at KFC and started working as an assistant manager at SM North EDSA.
“I learned a lot in KFC because every working part of a corporation is in a store. Your sales or your cashiers when they talk that’s your direct relationship to your customer. Your operations from assembling in the kitchen, cooking in the kitchen, assembling the food in the prep station, that’s all there. It felt like its a microcosm of how potentially a much larger organization can run, and I saw all of that.” It was the education he was looking for.
It was his brother Michael, who was already living in the U.S., who gave Nix the idea to put up PinoyExchange.com, an Internet-based message board where people of common interests can meet and talk. Nolledo was no programmer and had friends set up the initial website and logos, following a crude template he created using Microsoft PowerPoint. “We launched it anyway, but you know the lesson learned there is had we tried to perfect that experience and not launched, we would have missed a very large window of opportunity.”
He was referring to the UAAP collegiate basketball season where PinoyExchange got its big break. He asked his cousin Jude Turcuato, — then a courtside reporter who would later become Fox Philippines CEO – to announce during the games’ half-time breaks that PinoyExchange.com was open for the audience’s comments and thoughts.
“‘Speak your mind, let us know what you think of this game. Log-on to PinoyExchange.com’ That’s what Jude said. That’s when the traffic exploded within a few months, turning PinoyExchange into the largest online community in that time.
“I remember two instances that really opened my eyes to the potential of the Internet. One was: I was sitting in an Internet cafe and the person beside me was surfing PinoyExchange. If I had a camera then, I would definitely have taken a selfie. ” Nolledo says.
“The second thing that blew my mind was when I saw that we hit 20,000 unique visitors per month. That’s Araneta Coliseum full of people visiting something I created.”
“That’s when I got addicted. The future is the Internet. The next Makati is a website.” When he sold PinoyExchange.com to iAyala, an investment arm of the Ayala Group, in 1999 that his vision broadened further. With access to top research, he saw one telling statistic – There were 6 million cellphones and 2 million PCs. Knowing that the cost per unit of a cellphone is cheaper than a PC, and in 2000 Nolledo was convinced that the future of the internet would be in mobile communications. “I left Ayala in 2001. Xurpas was incorporated in the same year in November.”
He calls Xurpas “e-commerce for digital goods,” specializing in developing an assortment of digital products. Casual games and other consumer products has helped fuel the growth of the company, now accounting for 79% of its revenues. The rest (21%) is from its enterprise deals building platforms for telcos and brands. Starting with a paid capital of just PhP62,500 with no venture funding or even loans from relatives, Xurpas has became the first tech company to list its shares in the Philippine Stock Exchange now with a market cap of PhP20.1 billion. The company has already bought a software consultancy firm Seer Technologies and opened a new subsidiary called Xeleb.
Nolledo considers himself as a builder. “That’s also the reason why we never sold our company even though a lot of our competitors over the years have sold their businesses. As we said, by 2020, everyone in the world will conduct their lives through this. Why will we sell now?”
This article was first published in the July-August 2015 issue of adobo magazine.
