Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964)
Filed under the name Emilio · March 23, 2026
Emilio Aguinaldo led the fight for Philippine independence and became the country's first president, which, when you actually sit with it, is the founder-of-a-nation version of quitting your job to start a company, except the stakes were literal independence from colonial rule and not, like, a Series A. He lived to 1964, which means this guy who fought a revolutionary war also somehow lived to see space-age technology, which is a wild amount of history to fit inside one lifespan. I think about that kind of timeline a lot, honestly, because my own parents' generation went from a very different Bangalore to raising a kid who does backend fintech code and stand-up comedy in Austin, Texas, and that's a smaller leap but still a real one. Founding a country is objectively a bigger flex than any startup I've ever pitched, and mine at least didn't have people literally shooting at it. Respect to anyone who fought that hard for the right to just exist as a nation.