Every founder who has ever closed a shop knows the particular quiet that follows: the unpaid bills, the unsold stock, the friends who stop asking how business is going. According to reports, entrepreneur Bryan Soriano lived through that quiet not once but three times before the venture that would finally stick — a Filipino snack brand called J’s Crispy Chicken Isaw.
The story, shared publicly by the Philippine Star, is a familiar shape told in an unfamiliar setting. It is not a tale of a garage-to-billions software prodigy. It is about a man, a fryer, and a beloved street-food staple — and the stubbornness it takes to keep going after the market has said no three times.
From the curb to a brand
Isaw — grilled or fried chicken and pork intestines, threaded onto skewers and sold from smoky carts on Philippine street corners — is one of the country’s most democratic foods. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and it carries a deep sense of place. Building a brand around it is both an obvious idea and a risky one: obvious because everyone already loves it, risky because everyone already sells it.
According to the report, Soriano’s earlier attempts at business all collapsed before he found his footing with J’s Crispy Chicken Isaw. Rather than chase a category with no competition, he leaned into one saturated with it — and set out to make his version distinct enough, and consistent enough, to earn a name. The nickname that followed, the “Isaw King,” suggests he managed exactly that.
The specifics of what those three earlier ventures were, how much he lost, and how long the rebuild took are not detailed in the material available, and it would be wrong to invent them. What the sources do make clear is the arc: repeated failure, a refusal to quit, and a fourth attempt built on a proudly local product.
Why the “failed first” story keeps recurring
Soriano’s experience is not an outlier. It is, in fact, one of the most well-worn patterns in business — so common that entire genres of writing exist to catalogue it. Business.com has long maintained roundups of famous entrepreneurs who failed repeatedly before succeeding, and outlets from Forbes to the Daily Monitor regularly publish guidance on how founders can recover after a collapse.
That guidance tends to converge on a few durable ideas, as reflected across the current crop of coverage:
- Failure is information, not a verdict. A serial founder writing for Entrepreneur describes how a first major setback shaped the way he later built stronger companies across more than 22 ventures — treating the early loss as a lesson rather than a full stop.
- Rebuilding a reputation is deliberate work. Forbes has laid out concrete steps entrepreneurs can take to repair a brand image after a public failure, framing trust as something you rebuild rather than wait to regain.
- Comebacks are structural, not just emotional. The Daily Monitor frames the turnaround from collapse as a process — reassessing what went wrong, protecting cash flow, and rebuilding methodically.
What makes Soriano’s version land is that he didn’t need a boardroom to apply any of it. He needed a product people already loved and the discipline to deliver it well, over and over.
The unglamorous middle
The part of these stories that rarely gets told is the middle — the stretch between the last failure and the first sign of success. It is easy to compress “three failed businesses” into a single sentence, but each of those closures represented months of work, invested savings, and, presumably, moments where quitting would have been the rational choice.
That middle stretch is where most would-be comebacks quietly end. It is also where the honest, human version of entrepreneurship actually lives. Across the wider news cluster, the same theme surfaces again and again: a young entrepreneur telling NST Online they lost all their savings and are rebuilding from rock bottom; a former food-delivery CEO whose company reportedly once generated millions now working as a delivery rider. These are not failure stories so much as they are stories about what people do next.
The willingness to start over is not unique to any one country or generation. We’ve written before about how midlife is quietly becoming a new startup season, and about how a single practical step — like rebuilding a life around a bank account — can restore the footing a person needs to try again. Soriano’s isaw brand belongs to that same broad family of second and third and fourth acts.
A brand rooted in something real
There is a reason the “proudly Filipino” framing matters to the way Soriano’s brand is presented. Isaw is not a product he had to explain to customers. It arrives already loaded with meaning — memories of night markets, of shared skewers, of food that costs a few pesos but tastes like home. Building a business on that foundation means the emotional work is half done before the first sale.
It also raises the stakes on execution. When you sell something people already have strong opinions about, quality is not a differentiator — it is the entire game. The “Crispy” in J’s Crispy Chicken Isaw is a promise, and promises around beloved street food are unforgiving. That Soriano earned a royal nickname suggests he kept his.
What we know, and what we don’t
In fairness to the reader, the publicly available material on Soriano is limited. It confirms that he endured three business failures, that he went on to build J’s Crispy Chicken Isaw as a Filipino snack brand, and that he came to be known as the “Isaw King.” It does not confirm the timeline, the financials, the number of outlets, or the scale of the business today. Those details remain unconfirmed, and this piece resists filling them in with guesswork.
But the core of the story doesn’t depend on the missing numbers. What carries it is the shape so many founders will recognize instantly: the failure, the humbling, and the decision — made quietly, without an audience — to build one more time. Tennis champion Serena Williams, quoted in the same news cycle, reportedly said a champion is defined not by their wins. Bryan Soriano, frying isaw after his fourth attempt at building something that lasts, seems to have understood that long before anyone handed him a crown.
Photo by Andretti Brown on Pexels
