Jay Jaboneta, Chief Storytelling Officer of HungryPeople
Jay Jaboneta is a hungry man. He eats at least a 100 books a year, loves chocolate and sometimes can't live without coffee. He has worked for companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (including Metrobank Card Corporation), and Diethelm Keller SiberHegner (DKSH). He has worked as a sales manager managing over 70 people, managed category management and retail operations for a range of brands for a national supermarket chain, and as a portfolio manager got cardholders to spend more. He has in many instances, climbed insurmountable “mountains.” In his past life, he has graduated on top of his class, has built an entire organization of young entrepreneurs from scratch in his university, and was born again after “drowning.” As much as Jay loves to read, he also loves to write. His main goal in life is to stay hungry, stay foolish (Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Graduation Speech). Learning comes as much (if not more) from mistakes and failures than from victories and successes. He believes in God and practices Zen Catholicism – his own brand of Catholicism. He believes life is a complicated phenomenal mystery and that it can never be explained in totality. Jay loves to help people, companies, non-profits and brands breathe life into their brand story. He believes remarkable people and organizations deserve the attention of the world. HungryPeople The HungryPeople Idea The idea for HungryPeople was born almost 11 years ago back when I was still in college. A lot of people today ask me why I started HungryPeople. The content is good. But what is your purpose?, they ask. In 1998, I entered college and one of the exciting new fields at that time was the Internet. So I came up with website names that I think was cool to own. One of the names was HungryPeople. In the 11 years that passed since 1998, I forgot about this list of website names that I thought was cool to own or to start (see earlier post on this topic). At around October this year (2009), I got my copy of Jonathan Fields' career bible entitled “Career Renegade.” It inspired me so much to share what I know with the world. That maybe someday I can also build a business around my passion – which is really to read very good books, share what I learn with others and hopefully apply it and succeed in life. Books are my passion in life. I “eat” them. I've read over 1,000 over my lifetime (I'm just 28) – that's a lot of books. I used to devour my grandparents' Encyclopedia Brittanica, Popular Science books back in elementary and high school. Since I entered college, I tried to eat 100 books per year and I've hit that target since I started working (the reason was because now I already have the money to pay for it myself). But still, I was putting too much in but no output. So one night while I was reading Career Renegade, I happened to open my computer and browse through my college files and found my website name list again. After a short election on Facebook between smellyshoes and hungrypeople, hungrypeople won. So I started a blog on posterous (Why posterous? That's another story.) – HungryPeople.posterous.com! And the rest as they say is history... No! The rest is just beginning for me. And for YOU. As I want YOU to journey with me. HungryPeople is not just about my passion. It's about conversations. HungryPeople loves to connect YOU to experts and vice versa. We'd like to start conversations with everyone on the planet. We'd like to help YOU succeed by asking the questions to people who've succeeded before and are still succeeding in their own little way. One of the core goals of HungryPeople is to be the platform for the “People Behind The Books.” As YOU can see, most of the people we've interviewed are authors and writers of their own respective books. Some people don't have the time and don't want to give the time to reading their books but are still interested in what they have to say – that's where HungryPeople comes in. But that's not the only goal of HungryPeople. In our amazing interview with Seth Godin (see interview here), he shared with us some secrets on spreading ideas. And we believe @ HungryPeople, we spread good ideas. That hopefully will help YOU, our readers, in your journey in life. At the core of our philosophy is that failures lead to success. Lastly, HungryPeople takes a leaf from Steve Jobs 2005 Commencement Speech before Stanford students where he ended his speech by quoting his favorite line - “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” In conclusion, HungryPeople is a cool way to talk about our failures and what we are hungry for. So that we can succeed. Are YOU hungry? Read HungryPeople. Because at the end of the day, we're always hungry for something. Or if YOU are really hungry? Let's eat! Jay Chief Storytelling Officer The HungryPeople Tribe
