Founder
Alongside Budots Media, founder Bart Sakwerda has started a handful of Cebu-based communities and ventures — smaller bets, the same instinct: build the thing the island's growth needs before someone else does.
Philippines Travel Company — founded 2015 in Maribago, Lapu-Lapu City, serving the booming Philippine tourism market with island tours and, later, chatbot-driven booking and customer service. It shares an office, a launch year and a city with Budots Media's own 2015 Lapu-Lapu move.
Cebu Chatbot Dev Meetup — in December 2017 Bart organized Cebu's first AI and chatbot development meetup, out of DATA OPS Philippines. The group went on to build multilingual Facebook-page chatbots spanning tourism, trivia and civic pages — early groundwork for what is now Budots Media's sovereign Filipino AI effort.
A production house, a travel company, a developer meetup — different fronts on the same bet: that Cebu's growth needs builders, not just spectators.
Cebu Japanese Meetup — a language-exchange community Bart started in 2015 for Cebu's Japanese-speaking and Japanese-learning residents, part of the same multilingual instinct that runs through Budots Media's eight-language production work today.
Connect: linkedin.com/in/bartsakwerda · x.com/bartsakwerda
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