A Farmer’s Son

I’ve been in tech all my life. I was born in the Philippines. But I didn’t know who Dado Banatao was.

That changed when Bailey and I started digging into his story—how a boy from a rice-farming village with no electricity became one of the foundational figures of modern computing. Dado invented the PC chipset, the graphics accelerator, and key parts of Ethernet—technologies that power nearly every computer today.

He’s often described as the “Bill Gates of the Philippines.” But the more we learned, the more we felt that didn’t quite fit. Without Dado’s inventions, there may not have been a PC for Gates to build on.

We knew we had to make something. With the help of our friends Briene, Garrett, Wyat, and Chris, we traveled to Manila and then back to Dado’s hometown in Cagayan. What we captured became a short film for his foundation.

It’s a quiet portrait of brilliance, grit, and the kind of humility that doesn’t forget where it comes from.