Courtesy of Mobii
Courtesy of Mobii
“I just took a leap to be honest.”
Mobii founder Vince de Vera came back to the Philippines in 2022 and immediately realized that not only is it difficult to get around Metro Manila, it’s even more challenging to explore areas beyond it as a balikbayan. The trip was necessitated by the death of his father, whose request was for his final resting place to be in his motherland.
Wanting to take his and his family’s minds off their grief, Vince planned to take his mom and his younger siblings on a road trip to rediscover the country that they had left when he was only seven years old. Unfortunately, tragedy was compounded by further adversity when he soon realized that the vehicle he rented through Facebook was a fraud. The feeling that he was taken advantage of at a moment of vulnerability made Vince determined to find a way to help eliminate these types of scams. He recognized the mobility challenges in the country and how he was best placed to create solutions for it.
Distance Learning
“I built my first computer at the age of nine,” Vince shares. Relying on YouTube and magazines to serve as his guide, Vince would take his dad’s toolbox to tinker with his computer. While he was always interested in technology, design, and engineering, Vince didn’t always have the resources to acquire the latest gadgets or to take classes and formally learn about them.
Living in San Francisco, Vince dropped out of college because he and his family could not afford even the lower cost of community college. While leaving school to help support his family, he stayed connected to his friends taking computer science across the Bay Area. After working as an electronics sales associate during the day, Vince would join his friends for their classes at UC Berkeley and San Jose State University.
“I’d sit with them at lectures even if I wasn’t a student. I would go at night and sometimes, if time would permit, even during the day,” he admits. “I was super embarrassed to ask them if I could listen in but I mustered up the courage and asked one of the professors if I could stay in the class and the rest is history. I made friends with some of the professors, as well as students I met along the way. I’d ask them to grade my work, telling them that I wish I could be in school but that I didn’t have the money.”
While selling electronics and computers, Vince used the retail floor as another opportunity to learn and network. Customers would turn into advisors when they’d ask what a young man like him wanted to do. Looking back, Vince shares, “I’d answer that I wanted to be a software engineer. They’d tell me that I work for this company and that company and that we should talk.” This opened the door to personal mentorship from Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley alumni. Turning small talk into big opportunities, Vince says, “I’m an introvert at heart but with the right motivation and energy, I just go after it.”
Vince eventually entered the tech world through Silvercar, Audi’s premium car rental service, where he was a supervisor managing San Francisco operations, while also piloting a software application designed to improve efficiency and cut down costs. This was followed by his big break in the autonomous industry.
Vince was part of the quality assurance engineering teams at Cruise, a preeminent manufacturer of autonomous vehicles, and Embark, a software company developing autonomous trucks. He also worked at Lyft, a leading rideshare platform and major competitor of Uber. Honing his engineering skills further, Vince was testing and developing both the software and hardware for Cruise’s self-driving cars and Embark’s self-driving trucks, and dabbling in robotics for Lyft.
Never one to sit still, in 2014, Vince made the leap into blockchain and virtual goods with the intention of trading and exploring possible use cases for them. Vince became a founding team member of Mint State Labs, a company that specializes in developing technology for gaming and entertainment. As the startup’s lead product manager, his work was key to empowering creators with the tools to build and distribute their own blockchain-powered products and experiences.
At Mint State Labs, Vince and the team became part of a cohort at the well-known TechStars Accelerator program. Not long after its launch, Mint State Labs was acquired by web3 entertainment company Orange Comet. “We created a lot of things—products for virtual reality and augmented reality that are tied to the blockchain,” Vince says. “The funny part is that we were never able to launch a concrete product before we got acquired. We just got acquired because of the engineering firm that we had become.”
While riding a career high, it was just as the acquisition was being finalized that tragedy struck. Vince lost his father and suddenly found himself back in the Philippines.
Unchartered Territory
Always seeing opportunities amidst setbacks, Vince took the aggravation from getting scammed and the inconvenience of getting around Manila as a challenge to use the engineering skills he developed in Silicon Valley to create solutions for his fellow Filipinos. With the acquisition and his professional roadmap now wide open, Vince decided to pack up his life in California and move back to Manila.
“I forced myself to do this because I was scared, right? The more I thought about it, the more I wasn’t going to do it. I just started getting rid of everything in my apartment, sold my cars, and bought a ticket to Manila. I moved back within a month,” Vince shares. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever done but it was also the most exciting. I just took a leap to be honest.”
Tragedy may have brought Vince back to Manila but it was his courage and optimism that made him stay. Upon taking that leap of faith in 2022, Vince immediately navigated what was to him an unchartered territory of a tech career in the Philippines. Less than a year later, he launched Mobii.
Mobii is a peer-to-peer car sharing platform and Vince’s solution to the mobility issues that he personally experienced in the country. Think of it as Airbnb for your car but with AI technology for identity verification and soon-to-launch insurance options to protect both car owners and renters. His vision is to develop Mobii into an all-encompassing travel platform, turning it from an Airbnb into the likes of an Agoda.
Balikbayans like Vince, as well as foreign tourists, can download the app to easily rent a car, with or without a driver, straight from the airport or wherever else they are. Whether it be for a single trip or for multiple days, Mobii users can find convenience from renting their vehicle of choice at a price that’s more affordable than traditional options.
Vince also sees Mobii as an opportunity for additional income for office workers whose cars are left unused during working hours. Instead of having a car sitting at home or in a parking lot all day long, owners can rent it out and earn. On the other hand, renters can get in a car and go, sparing themselves from having to queue for hours on end to get on public transportation.
Mobii isn’t just for those in Manila. Vince believes that whether you own a car or not, you should be able to explore the Philippines freely and easily. Mobii users can now also rent a vehicle or lease their vehicle in Cebu, Davao, Pangasinan, Bacolod and many other areas throughout our seven thousand plus islands. Now, driving to dormant volcanoes, rice terraces, crystal clear waters, and white sand beaches is just a tap on your phone away.
Contemplating on his career thus far and how he was pulled back by his Filipino roots, Vince recognizes how much of a full circle moment it is for him to be back in the car rental industry and back in his country of birth. “The best part is that I’m now taking every single experience that I had in these industries and merging them into one platform,” he says.
Seeing the Philippines as a sandbox where so much technological advancements can be built, Vince is determined to not only use his knowledge, experience, and skills to further build Mobii. He’s committed to sharing his knowledge, experience, and skills to aid in the advancement of the tech scene in the Philippines. His ambitions and engineering ventures go beyond the mobility space, extending to various industries. “I want to help here in terms of making the Philippines a recognized tech hub,” he explains.
Reminiscing on his dad who was the very reason he travelled back to the Philippines in the first place, Vince shares, “One of the biggest reasons why I’m doing this is also to keep my promise to my dad of starting something great. I want to make him proud, wherever he is.”
