Category Archives: media

Uncovering Fake

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Forbes revealed earlier this week that the Wall Street giant is suing 30-year-old Charlie Javice, founder of Frank, and Frank’s chief growth officer Oliver Amar over claims that the pair sought to boost the fintech’s user numbers by creating 4.25 million fake accounts. The startup only had 300,000 customers, according to the lawsuit filed late last year in the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

“Javice first pushed back on JPMC’s request, arguing that she could not share her customer list due to privacy concerns,” the complaint continues. “After JPMC insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth.”

The suit alleges that Javice and Amar asked Frank’s director of engineering to create fake customer details after JP Morgan requested details on users as part of the takeover talk. After the engineer refused, Javice was then alleged to have paid a data science professor $18,000 to create millions of fake accounts using “synthetic data.” JP Morgan opened an investigation after test marketing campaigns to Frank’s users following the acquisition were “a disaster,” the suit says.

Forbes

According to some reports, an employee from JPM saw that the list contained exactly 1,048,576 rows, the maximum allowed by Microsoft Excel. Then JPM sent emails to all those in the list, many bounced back.

The question now is, why didn’t you do that during due diligence phase? The data room has been open to you for goodness knows how long and a simple test like that could have saved you USD 175m and your face.

The bigger question is, how do you even come up with the valuation of startups that do not have any assets, no tangible evidence that the business does really work? I remember talking to people doing due diligence, talking from a farm or in the middle of a plantation, or who just come out of a factory. Of course I couldn’t quiz them about the details but journos and due diligence workers must ask, how well do you even know the business? Does it even work/generate cash? Why do you base your valuation or important metric on the number of downloads or users? How much loans have you even disbursed and how much is the repayment rate? Have you watched the business cycle for several months? When are the lean months/period? Why?

I just had a conversation with a bunch of investors and one of them said his hobby is to sit in a restaurant, order food, observe the people, the customer turnaround, how the waitstaff operate…the entire day. For several days, months, etc. He does this for every business they are looking at.

We have a sister company that does due diligence/reputational investigation and they hire freelance journalists and other research professionals–to do the job on the ground because we’re good at that. We also have the inside knowledge/dirt–things that are super important but unpublishable–about companies and their owners after years of being on the ground. I was talking with one of the guys there and with their boss about some personalities or issues that are familiar to me as they had a lot of due diligence requests for this particular company from clients. They know their stuff. They know I know my stuff as well.

I had qualms about some business owners that I interviewed. I had talked to a founder of one tech company that on paper looked so good and would really attract a lot of ESG funds. But since this is just a bootstrapping company, I gave it the benefit of the doubt because what if this company becomes big? I quizzed the founder about how his business works. What is the thesis, why the world needs his company? What is it trying to solve? How are things quantifiable? How do you even give values to such intangible commodity? How does it generate revenue? Why should people use your product/system? Who are your competitors and what makes you different? Can others replicate your technology/system? I had the story published but I left the discretion to the reader if they want to check out this technology or not. I had quizzed the person beyond what was pushed in the press release.

Then I met him in Singapore and the PR kept pushing for this meeting. I talked to him and asked for an update since we last talked. He gave me a glowing account of the people he met, the offers he had, the partnerships he had forged, etc. etc. I asked him about the plans after getting the seed funding, which to me sounded so…ambitious. I took everything in stride and I told him I cannot write an update because I need to see for myself what the real progress he has achieved a year from now. I need proof of concept. I need real backers who had done their due diligence. I think that was the most responsible thing for me to do.

What were my red flags? He has a PR firm even before he has a real business, even before having a physical office in Singapore. Ok, granted that he is moving his business out of his home country but still…it left me uneasy.

I don’t know but I have a thing about having PR before a business is really proven.

So the biggest crime committed by media is that we tend to glorify the ubermensch-type of CEOs through listicles peddled by the likes of Forbes. The Forbes Under 30 had Frank CEO Charlie Javice on their list. This publication also had Harsh Dalal on their list and he turned out to be one big scammer. TechInAsia called out his bullshit because he could not substantiate claims and this publication kept doing their own investigation and published it. He has since been removed from the list.

I searched if we had his company in our database. OMG we did! I brought this up to our compliance team and legal department. After deliberations, we removed the story from our database.

It’s not far-fetched that we could be tricked by smooth-talking people, especially in Southeast Asia where you can conjure up crap from air and sell it like gold. I said always maintain that jadedness in you and not fall into that trap and spot bullshit. Know the sectors you’re covering.

I was reminded by this story I was editing about an Indonesian VC that was so inconsistent that I had to check all the websites (which they didn’t have), I had asked my contacts if they heard about this firm and the business that they claim to be operating, etc etc. I had news stories remotely related to his claims translated so I could understand what was that all about. Everything didn’t make sense and their LinkedIn profiles were laughable. I told my bosses I could not have this story published. That reporter who interviewed the company is no longer with us.

Another particular company stands out. It’s Solar Philippines and the local media has been publishing stories about this wunderkind, Leandro Leviste, who was in his early 20s at that time, was already a CEO of this renewable energy company. The reason why anybody was listening to him was because his mom was a senator. But after interviewing him one time, I found him to be a fluke. He had no substance. I did have one story about his company published and that deal did push through but then you know, I don’t want to…I simply didn’t believe him. I had sources telling me stuff about this company. After he had his company listed on the PSE, this story came out. The story was so powerful that the stock exchange made the company explain what the shit was all about.

Meanwhile, this guy, Joseph Calata, was just out of this world that I never interviewed him. Good thing because he was such a character (and he even invented his own cryptocurrency as payout for his minority shareholders when they got delisted 🤦‍♀️). In the end, the SEC had Calata Corp delisted in 2017 after being found to have violated 29 PSE rules. Calata even threatened to sue my friend for writing facts, things that the PSE already stated were questionable. I put the blame on the investment banks that had been the underwriters of this company’s IPO.

GUYS, DID YOU EVEN DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE???

But again, it all boils down to the banks’ (JPM and those local ibankers underwriting these questionable IPOs) desire to close a deal. Because there’s this intense pressure to chase deals so due diligence takes a back seat.

So now I do think the first line of defense is the media. If you stop glorifying these under 30 wunderkinds, then you’re doing the world a favor. Do your job of asking the right questions!

Chaos

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Driving along Skyway 3 from south going to direction of Nagtahan, I saw a long convoy of Philippine National Police – Special Action Forces. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Yesterday was rife with tense undercurrent as memos coming from various Philippine National Police (PNP) camps/regional offices started surfacing in group chats and private messages like this below.

This was sent to me by a friend asking if this was true.
A long convoy of Philippine National Police – Special Action Force. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

So I had to ask my network of national beat reporters regarding this. One of them said PNP held a press conference and of course they denied that this was not true. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) also denied such thing in a press release.

However, my source inside AFP said the resignations were true as the senior officers got disgruntled with the flip-flopping of Marcos.

LOOK: Military welcomes Andres Centino as AFP chief – again

A fellow reporter and I were throwing theories at each other, thinking about the power struggle between Duterte (whose AFP Chief was Centino and was a holdover) and Marcos (Bacarra is Marcos’ appointee who got unseated by Centino again).

One of the messages passed on to me by a reporter said:

From a lawyer na anak ng retired general

-What is not fake, is the fact that the AFP CS, Lt Gen Bacarro, has just been replaced by Gen Centino. Gen Centino the CS AFP carried over from PRRD’s administration, was earlier replaced by Lt Gen Bacarro, who was appointed as CS AFP, by BBM in August 2022. Bacarro was scheduled to retire on Sept 2022, but because of the new law fixing the term of the CS AFP to 3 years, Bacarro’s term as CS was until Aug 2025. However, Bacarro could not be promoted to 4-star general as Centino, a 4-star general, was set to retire on Feb 2023, and under the law, the AFP should only have one 4-star general. Hence, the anomaly of a 3-star CS, with a 4-star general-former CS on floating status until his February 2023. Then after the New Year, Centino who is not yet retireable, is surprisingly appointed by BBM to his former post as CS AFP, replacing Bacarro. Parang pawardy-wardy ang galaw ng gobyerno. So what gives?

And one of the national defense veteran reporters in my network said:

The last message sent to me was this.

The facts:

  • there was a memo from the PNP about destabilization in the AFP which required them to be on red alert. The memo was pulled out same day.
  • 3 DND USecs resigned the other day
  • Bacarro was compulsory retired and Centino was placed back as CSAFP
    Allegation:
  • unrest and destabilization in the AFP
    Theory:
  • PNP sowing misinformation to redirect the current issue (request for mass courtesy resignation of all Colonels & generals of the PNP) away from them.

Some of my friends and my even my sister said, let them implode so that both Marcos and Duterte camps destroy each other and the Philippines will benefit. We’ll just eat our popcorns while we see the meltdown.

Never have I experience this kind of negligent government that just let the prices of onions and other basic vegetables go nuts (PHP 750/kg of onions!) while the harvests up north get stuck and are not transported down here in the south to stabilize prizes. Because Marcos never cared about such things anyway. He’s just in this for the perks of the presidency as the entire family gets diplomatic immunity as they were not able to travel for decades due to the conviction handed down to them by international courts. He’s now preparing to travel to Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum, an event that he does not even understand. He’s just there for the junket trip.

My little haul tonight from my suki UP veggie vendor. This is ridiculous. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

My PHP 740 only got this much of veggies and this does not include onions because there are no onions available! Lord, how are the poor feeding themselves?!

Yesterday, I just wrote here that I’m staying in this country because I’m happy here but staying means I’m forever having this toxic relationship with the Philippines. Like I’m not leaving because of some messianic thing, being a journalist with a higher calling shit, etc etc.

It’s stupid, really. I don’t know what I’m doing but this is shit, man. If all of the people like me leave (educated, with a voice, have the means to change things), who will be left to help in nation-building? My maid, who will be finishing her college education in 2024 with my financial help, would be able to lift her family out of poverty, since I pledged that I would be supporting her education until she graduates even if we’re going to part ways by May.

This is just like what my parents did for my nanny, who finished college, got a job at the university as a tech staff with my parents’ help. She was able to help her parents send siblings to school, went home to her province, went to school again and got a permanent position in her local government unit. She was able to send her kids to UP and both are already professionals while she is now the head of the local registry in their LGU. Not only that she was lifted out of poverty, but it had a multiplier effect so her extended family also got out of extreme poverty since she sent her siblings to school and was able to buy land for farming.

You see, small things like this make a difference. What I’m doing for my maid now is just one of the many we’re doing for our fellow countrymen. I also have a platform; I can help change things, small things, little by little.

Fuck it! I don’t know why I’m justifying to myself my decision to stay in this wretched country. I guess I’m so bothered by the opinion of others who have no idea how I was raised.

But then, my guilt towards my children is eating me up alive.

Adjunct

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And just like that, I was roped in to re-join my undergrad college to be an adjunct faculty member. When they learned that I would be transferring back to my hometown, my friend, who is the graduate school secretary, said I’m now in the list of prospective adjunct faculty members. 😂 They need media practitioners with extensive field experience to teach undergrad and grad courses.

How did I end up in this situation? We were drafting the training curriculum for “data journalism for practitioners” with the institute of computer science and this snowballed into something bigger… so I ended up having my ass being hauled back into academia.

This data journalism training is a separate matter since I also need this as I have zero coding and data viz experience (except for the basic HTML coding that I learned by myself 22 years ago). I need this for my current job since we are now going big on data analytics. Dashboarding and machine learning need more intensive training i.e. non-degree or degree program so I have to devote more time for this.

What have I gotten myself into again???

I told my friend that maybe when I retire from the field I can go full-time into academia. In the meantime, I cannot commit (checking papers is hell on earth for me) since it looks like I need to be in Singapore every two months. Our managing director in HK is asking me to go back in mid-January. When I was teaching in UP Diliman from 2013 to 2015, I had difficulties in managing my time during my last semester since I had to travel overseas quite a lot. It’s unfair to my students.

I can only devote xxx number of days per semester these days because I need to fix the Southeast Asia bureau and that’s a Herculean task. On top of my editing duties and journo duties >>> chasing stories.

What have I gotten myself into again? 🤦‍♀️

Eventually, I will need to get myself into a PhD program overseas. Ugh. A sandwich PhD program could work.

Ghad, I need to hire an accounting service for tax because this complicates matters. I hated filing it when I had two different tax forms.

TO BE CONTINUED…

We arrived here at home at around 3:30 pm yesterday and haven’t been out since then. My girls had been boasting to me that the cats preferred them over me as these critters had been sleeping on their beds instead of mine. I, who had spent four days alone this Christmas to feed them and clean their poop boxes, did not get any cuddles from these ingrates. 😑

But, but, but…

I fell asleep early. Around midnight, I felt a very warm blob on my left side. It’s Kimchi!!! Cuddling with me, finally.

Red eyes from sleep.

I took this photo and sent this to the girls via Messenger to prove to them that my cats still love Mommy. 😘

Schadenfreude

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Karma is out there to bite your ass.

This person, whom I refuse to name on this blog, is the primary mother troll who had released his troll farm on me a few years ago when I criticized a government agency (which allegedly employed him as an attack dog a.k.a. social media handler) regarding an infrastructure project bidding.

For two weeks they tried to destroy me online. Even attacked my company’s social media assets, much to the shock and confusion of our APAC and global headquarters.

I do believe the universe will be out to get you if you haven’t been nice.

My friends and I are ROFLing now.

Speaking of trolls, I once again dodged the prinicpal of these creatures by leaving the conference venue early today. I AGAIN didn’t check the program—it was only during the welcoming remarks did I learn that Marcos is supposed to speak this afternoon. 🤦‍♀️ So the conference delegates were told to avoid going in and out of the area by 2 pm because the Presidential Security Group needed to check and secure the premises.

I used our PH reporter’s media pass that’s why I had a different name on my tag. Our PH reporter is in another event across the metro.

I left at 11:30 am. Good thing I was able to ambush interview my targets early.

I really can’t stomach the thought of being in the same room as this thief.

I just can’t.

I have covered past presidents and sat through some of their speeches but the last two presidents… 🤬 Nope.

I quickly escaped to SM MOA (since I was just at Marriott) to write my stories, buy Christmas gifts, and then I took Skyway so I can fly back home.

Or so I thought I could get back home quickly.

It still took me two hours to get home. I left at past 3 pm, I arrived at past 5 pm. 🫠 And to think that I already used Skyway to bypass Edsa or C5 to reach QC. 😵‍💫

I just want to stay put in the next few days… Traffic jams are so bad that they suck the soul out of you.

All coffee/dinner with friends would have to be pushed back after Christmas. It’s just insane to be on the road these days.

Zero skills

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Let’s sum up my Monday with this email exchange, shall we?

woman in red t shirt looking at her laptop
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Me: requesting for an interview with this firm because of a new development.

External PR: responds and feeds me questions to ask in the interview.

Me: sending my own questions and say if the firm is not ready to answer my Qs, then there will be no interview.

Toink!

This is not a Philippines-based PR. Thank goodness, PR people here in PH are much better.

When I received that email with the questions feed, it took me a few minutes to process what the PR firm wants me to do. Then I was flabbergasted (“how dare these guys!” *deep inhale*). Then anger had set in. Then later I had this urge to laugh hysterically due to the absurdity of it all.

This is exactly the reason why there is zero journalism skills in Singapore. I mean, the PRs are even feeding journalists questions to ask during an interview. 🙄

And also this is a reflection of how clueless Singapore-based PR firms are when it comes to how real journalists work (and not the state-controlled hacks). YOU. DON’T. FUCKING. DICTATE. TO. A. JOURNALIST. WHAT. QUESTIONS. TO. ASK!!!

If you are pushing a certain narrative, you give the journalist who is going to do the interview a press release with your narrative/the client’s narrative. You leave the journalist the choice if she would use it or not. If the journalist is lazy, she would just take it, hook, line, and sinker.

This is why we jokingly say that Singapore journos are copywriters—they just copy the press releases. I receive 50 press releases in 24 hours (from different time zones) and I see how the regional (Southeast Asia) media outfits publish them. Some have journo bylines but the copies that have been published are just rehashed/paraphrased PRs. No new inputs to make them exclusive or fresh.

The PR firm has not come back after I replied to that bizarre email (in the most diplomatic way I could). It still hangs if the firm wants the interview or not.

And that, folks, is how the rest of my week will go.

I just want to have my Christmas vacation!!!

Kimchi, very comfortable after doing her zoomies at 3 am. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I must to go Marriott tomorrow for a conference and grant me, O Lord, patience. LOTS AND LOTS OF PATIENCE because that annual conference is always known to be chaotic.

Keeping it real

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I just discovered Haley Kalil this week and she’s funny.

I always get invited to press conferences with two tables: One for media and one for influencers and vloggers/bloggers. This is very true for presscons of consumer-facing companies like telcos and real estate. I often wondered about how do these people even keep up with making content everyday, setting up cameras and shoot themselves walking back and forth to give a false sense of, yeah, this is how I live my everyday life.

Apparently, it is a full-time job and they even have managers. I think if you are a “content creator” (a new job description I learned this year) and have your own wares to peddle like Nicolas Fairford, who has launched his own brand of tea wares, you have another revenue stream. However, for content creators who rely most of the time for sponsorships, you don’t have a choice but to lie to your viewers that you do indeed use their products—the more sponsorships, the more revenues you have. Even if their products suck. And if you are a content creator who relies mostly on ad revenues—you’re better off with your day job because Google sucks the life out of you as I read that unless you are the top 1% of xxx (can’t remember if it’s your country/market/or Youtube), you will not really make money that could pay your bills.

By the way, Haley is gorgeous. Like Cindy Crawford x Angelina Jolie gorgeous.

Grief is love holding on

This is the thing I told my friend who is grieving for her father, who died while in ICU in the US. She couldn’t fly there on short notice and it’s little use since they will be bringing his body back anyway since her parents are really based here.

I told her I have no comforting things to say because there’s nothing else in this world that can make her feel better, based on my experience. So just let grief overwhelm you, I said. Don’t pressure yourself to be ok because it’s not ok. Don’t think about how long it will take you to grieve. Don’t let other people dictate how long you will grieve, I told her.

It’s a pain that will never go away. We just learn to live with it. Nobody will understand your pain because your pain is yours alone.

B sent me a video of her last conversation with her dad while in the ICU (which was not permitted but was made possible by her sibling who slipped the phone inside the room–probably the sibling was a nurse). I told her to save it on the cloud because she will be watching it everyday for a long time. I said I saved my father’s text messages to me (hey, early 2000s!) on my phone and held on to them for years until my phone got snatched from my bag. I even lost his phone number. One time I was so overtaken with grief I sent that number a text message. It was a comfort to me, pretending that I could still message him.

“Until now, 17 years have passed, there’s still a dull pain somewhere in my chest when I remember that. I feel like crying now. It’s something that never goes away,” I told B.

“In a way, that’s comforting to know. I don’t want to forget him,” B replied.

“Grief is love holding on. You will hold on to everything,” I said.

I told B: I have a friend who messaged me out of the blue one night and asked if he was already going insane or something was really wrong with him because it was already a year since his dad died but he was still crying and grief-stricken. He quit work because he really took it hard.

I told him that no, he’s fine. He’s not yet insane. There’s no timetable for grief. I told him that I was also jobless for a year when my dad died. I decided to be a full-time graduate student so I can just coast along and grieve. I only felt the urge to go find work when I found myself scrounging for money to buy myself airtime/SMS load for my phone. “Don’t mind other people; your grief is yours alone. We hold on because that’s what we only have left now. And it’s ok.”

Then B said: This helped a lot. Salamat.

I have other thoughts about how I lived with grief after a loved one has died and grief over losing myself over someone who didn’t deserve me at all. There are many types of grief: there are those that it’s ok if we keep it for the rest of our lives (death) and there are those that we need to get out of (love and betrayal) because, I don’t know…It doesn’t feel right anymore. There may be others but on top of my head are these two that I know.

I will just write about it some other time because it would be emotionally draining but at the same time cathartic. But I’m not for it right now.

I just want to relax and watch houses that I will never have.