Hiring in the Philippines at Series B and beyond

A widely used rule of thumb puts the crossover somewhere around 10 to 15 people. It is a rule of thumb rather than a rule, and the real drivers are specific.

Your own Philippine entity generally requires around USD 200,000 in paid-up capital under the Foreign Investments Act and up to 5 months of setup. Against that, at scale you gain direct control of employment, potentially lower per head cost, and the ability to run local finance and human resources properly.

The practical consideration most often missed: an entity requires a local finance and people function to operate it. That is 1 to 2 more hires and an ongoing compliance obligation, and it should be in the comparison rather than treated as overhead that appears later.

Many companies establish an entity while continuing to employ through existing infrastructure during setup, rather than pausing hiring for most of a year.

Below roughly 5 people, a founder or a manager abroad can coordinate. Above 10 they cannot, and continuing to try produces a team where every decision waits for someone in another time zone.

Two routes. Promote from within, which works where the person wants management and can do it, and those are separate questions worth asking directly. Or hire a lead externally, accepting that a new manager over established colleagues needs deliberate support.

What does not work is a coordination layer with no authority. If the local lead cannot decide anything, you have added a relay rather than a manager, and the strongest people will notice within weeks.

This is the failure that matters most at scale and it is rarely named.

The pattern: the Philippine team executes reliably, is well liked, and is never in the room when the decision is made. Roadmap is set elsewhere. Architecture is decided elsewhere. Promotion paths top out at senior individual contributor.

The consequences arrive on a delay. The strongest people leave first, because they have the most options. What remains is a team that executes competently and does not challenge anything, which is then read as confirmation that they should not be in the room.

What prevents it is structural: genuine decision ownership for a function, representation in planning, promotion paths that reach management, and at least some roles where the Philippine team is the centre of gravity rather than support.

At 3 people you can price individually. At 30 you need bands, and their absence produces internal inequity that surfaces the first time colleagues compare notes.

Bands should be benchmarked against the market you are competing in for that role, which for internationally recruited positions is not a national average. Domestic wage statistics describe the local employment base rather than roles being recruited by international companies.

Statutory costs remain roughly 11 to 16 percent depending on seniority, falling as a percentage as salary rises because the main contributions cap out, so a team weighted toward senior roles carries a lower blended percentage than a junior one.

Documentation. A 5 person team runs on shared memory. A 30 person team across a time gap cannot, and retrofitting documentation is considerably harder than building it.

Performance process. Security of tenure means dismissal requires a just or authorised cause with the correct process, and the evidence comes from documentation created as events happened rather than assembled afterwards.

Onboarding. At volume, ad hoc onboarding produces inconsistent capability and the variation is not visible until it is expensive.

None of these are urgent at 5 people and all of them are painful at 30, which is the argument for starting them at 10.