There is a memory I keep returning to. It is 2017. I am sitting in an office that still smells like paint and cardboard from the move, looking at a stack of papers that used to belong to someone else — someone I built this company with, someone I thought I would be doing this alongside for another twenty years.
Vicente – my dad, was gone. And I was still here. And nobody had given me a manual for what to do next. This company that we built together, I thought my dad, my rock, will be alongside of me as we grow this business.
I remember thinking: I could close this. Walk away. Tell the remaining clients we appreciate their trust. Tell the team we gave it everything. I could go back to something smaller, something safer — something that didn't require me to become a version of myself I wasn't sure I was ready to be.
I didn't close it. But I want to be honest with you: not closing it was not the brave moment people imagine it to be. It was terrifying. And the weight of it showed up not in the big dramatic decisions, but in everything after. The conversations I had to have that I wasn't qualified for. The mornings I had to lead when I wasn't okay. The sleep I lost for months before I learned to sleep again.
That is what nobody tells you about the life you're trying to build. It costs something. Not in the abstract, motivational-poster way. In the specific, concrete, deeply personal way. The currency is different for every person, but you always have to pay.
For me, the first price was comfort. I started OneNetworx in 2011 out of a small garage. The joke was that it was an office. It was not an office. There was no air conditioning. There were days we had more ambition than we had chairs. And the people who knew me before — the ones who watched me take that path — some of them were kind about it. Others weren't. Choosing the garage over the conventional route cost me standing in rooms I used to belong in. That was the price of starting.
The second price was time. Real time. The kind that doesn't come back. Weekends. Dinners. The slow Saturday mornings when the rest of the world is resting. I have missed more of those than I can count. My mother passed five years ago. She was an educator. She understood sacrifice — she lived it herself. But there are still moments I wish I had been less busy, less in my own head, more present in the years we had. That is a price I paid and I cannot get a refund on it. I don't say this to make you feel sorry for me. I say it because it is true, and because anyone who tells you that building a business doesn't cost you anything in the people part is either lying or hasn't built something real yet.
When COVID hit in 2020, the price changed again. The company had survived on a model that required physical presence, in-person meetings, hand-delivered trust. Overnight, that model was wrong. We had to rebuild — not just systems, but thinking. I told myself and my team: we adapt or we disappear. That is a clean sentence to write. Living it is messier. It meant saying no to old ways that felt comfortable. It meant saying yes to things I didn't fully understand yet. It meant trusting people to work from their homes and trusting myself to lead without being in the same room as them.
Most entrepreneurial journeys in the Philippines look like this, actually. You don't get a runway. You don't get a venture fund that gives you eighteen months to figure out the product. You get a problem, a market, a thin margin, and a team that needs to be paid on the 15th and the 30th. You make it work because the alternative is unacceptable. That is a specific kind of pressure. And I believe it produces a specific kind of character — if you let it, and if you are willing to keep paying the price the next season requires.
Here is what I have learned after more than a decade of this:
The price is never one-time. It keeps evolving. The startup price is one thing. The growth price is another. The leadership price — learning to delegate, to trust, to stop believing that your hands need to be on everything — that is a different kind of expensive. And then there is the identity price: letting go of who you were to become who the next version of this requires.
I am still paying that one.
I don't know what version of the life you want is sitting in front of you right now. I don't know if you're still in the garage phase, or the COVID pivot phase, or the moment after the person you built it with is no longer there. But I know this: the gap between where you are and where you want to be is not about information or strategy or the right connections.
It is about what you are willing to stop protecting.
What have you been too comfortable to sacrifice?
