Making It Work: Launching Founders Live Manila - Marrione Camacho

City leader Marrione Camacho’s launch of Founders Live Manila earlier this month contains a lesson for everyone in making it work despite challenges.

Legends: The first attendees of the first Founders Live Manila

How often do events or projects go exactly the way we planned?

Have you found yourself thrown off along with the other things that went off the rails?

Especially as a founder, when it’s your show, your thing, it’s easy to feel the chaos, and sometimes it’s easy to let it get to you.

But don’t we all know that’s how life mostly works?

Things rarely go perfectly to plan. And so often it’s the unexpected that enriches our outlook in a valuable way we’d never have experienced otherwise.

Perseverance is key

Marrione had won the position of Manila City leader and ambitiously set an early start date for his first event. Cheers to that!

We recommend all city leaders start even before they think they’re ready. The longer we wait to act on our ideas, the harder they are to get off the ground.

Marrione recruited five founders to present, but as that first event approached, several backed out for various reasons.

This is the moment when some crumble, but leaders step forward.

Marrione decided to surge forward. The event would happen, presenters would pitch, people would meet. The show must go on!

What is your true measure of success?

When it came down to it, Marrione understood that getting people together is what really matters when creating community.

It’s not about impressing people with a huge turnout, it’s the authenticity of providing a genuine space to connect.

And those who showed up could feel it. And together, organically, they began to create ownership over their own city event.

Start by starting

Big picture: Marrione got his first event out of the way. The next event will be the second one. The third event can’t happen until that’s done.

At some point Manila will be on its 10th event and that first one will be part of its lore.

Someone will still be attending to tell the story, too.

We don’t know if Manila will ever be huge, or even successful, but we do know for sure that it could never be if Marrione didn’t get it started in the first place.