Rico Gonzalez

Biography

Rico is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of xchange, an impact-first social enterprise incubator in the Philippines, investing in and mentoring high potential early-stage social enterprises, to help them become financially sustainable and achieve scale of impact. He likewise serves as the chairperson of the board of Ashoka Philippines. Through both these roles, he hopes to bring about the growth of a robust ecosystem for social innovation and entrepreneurship in the country.

Rico began his career as a teacher of philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University, before becoming an investment analyst at Asia Equity, the first foreign-owned investment house in the Philippines. In 1997 he moved to Hong Kong to work at JP Morgan and subsequently at Cazenove where he supervised a team of analysts covering Asian financial institutions. In 2003, Rico returned to the Philippines where he, together with his wife and their partners, ran Information Gateway, a pioneering mobile content company that grew to become one of the largest players in the space. Here he gained much practical experience around running and scaling an enterprise under emerging market conditions. In 2009 Rico began to focus his efforts on building the social enterprise sector in the Philippines. He got his early exposure to the sector as the initiator of the Ateneo Center for Social Entrepreneurship where he served as director until his departure in 2011. He founded xchange with his wife that same year. Today, supported by a small team of professionals and based on insights and challenges from their active engagement with the enterprises in the portfolio, they continue to collaborate on initiatives and experiments to address the still substantial gaps in the start-up ecosystem for social enterprises.

Rico is a Chartered Financial Analyst and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy from the Ateneo de Manila University.