A Father Who Built a Village
This Father’s Day, we celebrate Richie de Quina — Chairman of RED Entertainment, Inc. and founder of Village Pipol — and the quiet, steady kind of fatherhood that builds people up.
Every Father’s Day, we tend to picture the same scene: a dad at the head of the table, a hand on a shoulder, someone who shows up year after year without asking for applause. But fatherhood is not only a role inside a home. It is a way of leading — of nurturing, protecting, and believing in people until they believe in themselves. Few embody that double meaning as fully as Richie de Quina.
To the wider public, Richie de Quina is a businessman and media entrepreneur. Today he serves as Chairman of RED Entertainment, Inc., and he is the founder of Village Pipol, the Philippines’ first free travel, lifestyle, entertainment, technology, and news multimedia magazine, launched in 2007 under the tagline “Your Guide to the Big City.” What began as an idea — two people playing around with the layout of a first issue — has grown into a brand that has marked more than eighteen years of telling Filipino stories. Earlier in his career, he also served as Vice President for Marketing at the local mobile brand MyPhone, a chapter that helped sharpen the instincts he would later pour into building his own company.
But titles only tell half the story. Behind the boardroom is the same posture you see in a good father: someone who makes room for others to grow. The most telling thing about Village Pipol is not its longevity — it is the number of writers, editors, photographers, and young creatives who found their start there. Richie did not simply hire talent; he raised it. He handed first bylines to people who had never been published, trusted cover decisions to editors barely out of school, and turned a magazine into something closer to a family that happens to make media.
Anyone who has watched the brand up close knows this rhythm. Through the magazine’s covers and spotlights, its anniversaries, and platforms like the VP Choice Awards, the pattern repeats: a young person is given a chance, then given room, then given credit. Leadership, in his hands, looks less like commanding from the front and more like clearing a path so the next person can run down it. It is the same generosity that good fathers practice without fanfare — investing early, expecting little in return, and finding their reward in someone else’s success.
Balancing the two is its own kind of discipline. Running a company demands toughness, deadlines, and hard decisions; fathering the people inside it demands softness, patience, and grace. The rare leaders manage to hold both at once — to be exacting about the work and tender about the worker. That balance is perhaps the most fatherly trait of all, and it is the thread that runs through everything Richie de Quina has built.
That is what fatherhood looks like when it shows up at work. It is patient with mistakes, because a father knows that growth is messy. It celebrates other people’s wins louder than its own, because the point was never personal credit. It builds something meant to outlast you — a “village,” as the name itself suggests — because the truest measure of a leader, like the truest measure of a father, is what stands on its own after you step back.
There is a beautiful symmetry in the word he chose. A village is not one person; it is a community that looks after its own. Over nearly two decades, Richie de Quina has been the kind of figure a village needs — steady when things are uncertain, generous with opportunity, and quietly proud as the people around him rise. He has fathered careers, mentored dreamers, and given an entire community of Filipino creatives a place to belong.
This Father’s Day, then, the tribute is twofold. We honor the leader who built institutions that employ and inspire — and we honor the deeper, gentler work that leadership shares with fatherhood: showing up, lifting others, and loving people enough to let them shine. Happy Father’s Day, Richie de Quina. The village you built is your finest portrait of a father.
— With gratitude, on Father’s Day
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