Small, sharp tools for everyday life in the Philippines.

Jetzets builds small, sharp tools for everyday life in the Philippines. Our first, tara, is live. More are on the way.

Jetzets is a company based in the Philippines that makes tara.

A better life, and a few trends

We started Jetzets to give people a better life, and we mean something small and concrete by that. An hour back in your evening. A few hundred pesos kept on a night out. A straight answer when you ask a simple question, instead of six tabs and a paragraph of fine print. Life in a big city is full of small frictions that nobody fixes because each one looks too minor to bother with. We think they add up, and that fixing them properly is worth the work.

We also want to set trends, not follow them. That means building the tool people here did not know they could have, and making it good enough that it becomes the normal way to do the thing. We would like the obvious answer to “saan tayo kakain?” to be a map with every card deal already on it.

What we believe

A better life is made of ordinary days.

Not the resort weekend. The Tuesday dinner that cost half. The Saturday you didn’t spend scrolling. The “tara” that actually turned into a plan. We build for those.

For tara, that means real data, read at the source. Every card deal comes from the bank’s own promo page, read again every night, so the Tuesday dinner is still on when you get there.

The good stuff is already out there.

The Philippines is full of deals, places and small joys. They’re just scattered, buried in fine print, or expired by the time you hear about them. Finding them shouldn’t be a hobby.

For tara, that means official or it does not go up. A chain promo is pinned only when it can be checked against the brand’s own announcement: its website, app, official social account or press release. Every pin links back to the source it was checked against.

Set the trend. Don’t chase it.

We’d rather make something people here haven’t seen yet, and make it properly, than copy what works somewhere else. If it isn’t genuinely better than what exists, we don’t ship it.

For tara, that means building for the phone in your hand and the mobile data people actually have: a map that opens where you are, cards that say what you need in a few lines, and nothing heavy that you did not ask for.

How we work

We build small. One clear job per tool, done well, rather than one app that tries to do everything. We ship only what is genuinely better than what is already out there, and we keep improving it after it ships: tara gets sharper every night, as it reads the banks again and the map catches up with them. The Journal is where we show our working, with tara’s own numbers, dated.

Who runs Jetzets

Jetzets runs jetzetsph.com and makes tara. Its legal name is 5 Sycamore Holdings Inc. Write to us at hello@jetzetsph.com; we read every message.

Michael Sy, co-founder

Michael Sy co-founded Jetzets, the company that makes tara.

Mike is, by his own admission, an accidental educator. After earning his SB and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MBA from MIT, he spent 20 years building a corporate career, only to find that his truest calling had been there all along.

In 2019, he turned that calling into StemLab, a learning center dedicated to math and chemistry enrichment, school support and competition training. What began as a passion project has grown to include a formal partnership with a school’s math varsity program.

As an International Math Olympiad Honorable Mention, Mike brings firsthand experience to competition coaching. He pairs rigor with the warmth of a parent who gets it, helping students see that, with the right guidance, they are capable of far more than they imagine.

Simone Celestial, co-founder

Simone Celestial co-founded Jetzets, the company that makes tara. Simone studied Computer Science and Data Science at the Ateneo de Manila University and builds apps for fun. Among friends, Simone is the one who always picks the spot to eat, and tara puts that into a map: every bank and chain dining promo in Metro Manila and Cebu in one place.

The articles and promo lists in the Journal are published under Simone’s name; every one is dated and built from tara’s own data, and How tara finds and checks deals explains where that data comes from. To reach Simone about something in the Journal, write to hello@jetzetsph.com.

What’s next

We’re just getting started. tara is our opening move, and we’re already working on what comes after it. We’ll only ship it when it’s genuinely better than what’s out there.

All photos on jetzetsph.com are by Pexels photographers; the full list is on the Credits page.