Jay Hernandez

He was born in General Santos City, grew up mostly in Manila — moving around, as families do — and ended up back in his hometown, a city at the edge of southern Philippines, far from everything that was supposed to matter. No formal instruction, no mentor, no real access. Just slow internet, a pirated copy of Photoshop, and the kind of obsessive attention that doesn't need permission to develop. He was building things on web forums and Gaia Online before anyone called it design work — forum signatures, graphics for communities that existed entirely online. The digital currency he earned there was small. The practice wasn't.

At 17, he made a decision that wasn't common in the Philippines — a country where the path is clear and deviating from it is treated as failure. He dropped out and moved to Manila alone to work. Not as a rebellion. As a calculation. School wasn't moving fast enough and survival was immediate. He moved into the slums first. Took every project available — graphic design, web development, anything with a deadline and a payment. When animation could open more doors, he learned After Effects and Flash. When video editing meant additional income, he learned video editing. None of it was passion in the romantic sense. It was a person building tools in real time because the alternative was falling behind. No safety net.

Then after three years, a deliberate bet — film school in Cebu City, a place where he knew no one. The first time he chose something not because the path was clear, but because everything else had stopped making sense without it. He moved cities again, enrolled, and before he even graduated, the work spoke for itself. A personal video he made for a school event got him scouted by an events company. He spent the next year producing cinematic teasers and event aftermovies, flying between cities, doing the work of someone with far more experience than his age suggested. He stopped only because graduation and a thesis film demanded full attention. He finished both.

Manila again, immediately after. A production house with roots in feature films and a commercial arm that worked on real briefs with real budgets. A year of understanding what professional production actually looked like from the inside — the pace of it, the discipline of it, the gap between film school and the industry.

Then Singapore. 2016. No plans. He was 25 and arriving in a city that operated at a different register entirely. Six years at Weber Shandwick producing campaigns across Singapore and APAC — adidas, Mastercard, Emirates, hotels.com, and others. He worked on projects across Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand. The adidas Sport18 campaign won Gold at the SABRE Awards Asia Pacific. The Acuvue x TWICE production won at the PRCA SEA Awards. When the pandemic shut down traditional production, he mastered livestreaming, virtual production, and UGC — which kept businesses moving when most people were waiting for things to return to normal. Six years of Singapore. It's where the scale of what he was capable of stopped being a question.

Coming back to Manila wasn't a career move. He'd gotten married in Singapore — met someone there, built a life there — and decided that raising a family in one of the most expensive cities in Asia wasn't the plan. The first child needed to be born somewhere that made sense. Manila made sense back then.

The job he took wasn't the safe one. Tier One Entertainment was an esports and gaming company — an industry he'd loved his entire life, but never the most stable. He took it anyway. What it gave him was a team to build — and the scale to build it well. Fifteen people at its peak. Creative and broadcasting departments that grew into something genuinely functional and full-service. Campaigns for Samsung, PlayStation, McDonald's, Riot Games. A podcast that became one of the most listened to in the Philippines. A documentary series. This is where leadership happened at real scale, with people who actually cared about the work.

When his son was born, he recalibrated. Amplify was a deliberate step down in intensity — a creator-first agency running high-volume TikTok and social content for clients across APAC. He built their production workflows, ran QA, and in the process became fluent in a medium that had quietly become one of the most important in the world. He knew what he was doing and why.

When his son was old enough, he went back toward the edge. YGG Pilipinas was Web3 and gaming — two worlds he understood — and the work was the YGG Play Summit, the largest Web3 gaming event in the region. He built the creative team, ran the direction, and delivered something he could be proud of.

Then another move. Vietnam this time — Da Nang, his wife's hometown. His son old enough to relocate, his wife ready to build something together. They opened a marketing agency. At this point calling it spontaneous misses the point. Every move has followed the same logic: go where the challenge is, build what isn't there yet, don't wait for certainty that was never coming anyway.

Nothing was handed over. Everything was figured out. That's still how he works.