10 years of venture capital in Vietnam.

Binh Tran

0:00You know, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, we're in between those 2 cycles: great time to invest, terrible time to fundraise. It's a healthier reset, right? The founders, it's harder for them to fundraise. What that means is that the people who are actually out there building and fundraising, it's 'cause they have to. It's 'cause they want to. It's not because the capital's easy. But again, I am still very bullish in terms of where this is headed, whereas before there was maybe naive optimism. Here I have really tempered and confident optimism.

Quang Do

0:40Mr. Binh.

0:42You are a well-known person in Vietnam in the venture space. But for the world and for the Overseas Vietnamese global community, for those who don't know you, how would you introduce yourself?

Binh Tran

0:55I am somebody that has sat on both sides of the table. I've been a founder, and now I'm an investor. So for me, I spent most of my career in tech. I have an engineering degree, and I have spent most of that time building products, teams, companies. In the last 10 years, I crossed to the other side, the dark side, to become an institutional investor. So I've been here in Vietnam since 2020, but have been investing in Vietnam since 2015.

Quang Do

1:37Take us back a bit. Judging from your accent, you're American-raised? Where did you grow up, and what was home like?

Binh Tran

1:46I left Vietnam as a toddler. At the time, my mom had 4 children. We left 2 weeks before the fall of Saigon, so we're very lucky to be on a plane. Ended up in Arkansas where our sponsor families were, and then migrated to California. I think our household grew to 6 kids, but at the time my mom and dad were just trying to make us feel that we could survive in a country that wasn't built for us, right? They couldn't speak the language, so they were working multiple jobs and trying to make ends meet until they could start a new life for us. But growing up in the US, it was, I would say, just a traditional Vietnamese household. Vietnamese inside the house and American outside, so a bit of living 2 different lives. But I think I grew up in a very supportive, hardworking family environment.

Quang Do

3:04How did that builder, engineering, entrepreneurial side develop over time?

Binh Tran

3:12A lot of it is probably coming from my mom. My mom was always trying to figure out ways to make money, to provide for us. She tried all different things, from being on a manufacturing assembly line to starting her own garment business, doing things from scratch, figuring things out, and doing it in a way that I think inspired us to embrace the unknown and just try something. And at the same time, being a loving mother who was there to guide us and provide that safety and comfort that one would expect from a mom. So doing both with 6 kids, what an incredibly hard job. So probably the biggest impact has been my mom.

Quang Do

4:22And you were into video games to the extent that you made video games. Tell us about that.

Binh Tran

4:29Well, my journey to tech started earlier.

4:32And so while my mom had such an impact on me as a person, it was my aunt who had a big impact in my career. I was 13 years old, 1987 or so.

4:48I wasn't even born yet. She bought an IBM XT. It's one of the first personal computers. There were earlier personal computers, but this is the first one that had a little bit more user friendliness. And so I started just exploring, being curious. With that, I started modifying source code for some of the software that was available to me, and that was bulletin board services, which is the predecessor to the internet, right? You had to be able to go on modems and go on these boards where people can converse and share and have discussions. So my first experience in tech was basically modifying this source code, which is written in C. And that inspired me to continue with a very clear mindset that I needed to do software. And so when you picked your degree in high school, computer science was clear. And did your parents...

Quang Do

6:07Like, was it so clear for you immediately? It's very clear.

6:11We see a lot of American Overseas Vietnamese who go into medicine, who go into law...

Binh Tran

6:17Every one of my family, the 6 kids: I have a lawyer, A doctor, a dentist. There's no one that took a 4-year route like me. So I was a loser to my parents. They did not want me to go this route. And the industry wasn't that exciting either, right?

6:42It was so early. When you graduated, there were jobs, but it wasn't clear that this was going to be a really great career, right? But it was something I needed to do, I had to do. It was me.

Quang Do

6:57Tell us about that journey, the games and tech in general.

Binh Tran

7:02So some of my earliest jobs after graduation were... And where did you study? UCI.

7:09So at UCI, you would have a class come into computer science. People would say, "Hey, what's this ICS? Let me try it." And you're spending a majority of your time in this underground dungeon in front of a computer. A lot of people don't realize this: the lab work. You're spending all that time in there, it's a beautiful day outside, and here you are in front of this terminal, right?

7:35It wasn't for everyone. And every quarter you'd see half the class drop off. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed being able to write code and figure out an elegant solution with code.

7:52Things like that. Once you're writing code, you get this fulfillment of coming up with a solution that I think most people who don't write code don't really understand. It is a creative endeavor. Anyways, so I graduated, and One of the earliest jobs was basically computer games. Not computer games, console games. Like Nintendo, PlayStation? Nintendo, PlayStation. So there's a company in Santa Monica called Player One, an independent game studio.

8:31And I didn't know anything about writing video games. John Carmack had written a book about 3D engines and how to make a 3D engine. So reading that and learning from scratch. So I joined as a junior programmer under the wing of other experienced engineers. And so that small team: for a game you typically had 3 to 5 engineers or programmers, and it would last 2 years. And so a lot of growth in terms of learning how, not just how to code, but how to make a video game. I was one of 3 engineers on a Nintendo 64 title called Legendary Journeys, where I put myself in as a 3D video game character. I believe I'm the very first in the world, in history, 3D Vietnamese video game character. And I don't know if any Overseas Vietnamese came up with something before that. That title came out in 1997, I believe. And then we published a game called Dead in the Water.

9:47It was dead in the water when it went on sale, but it was a really fun game. It was a PlayStation 1 game. I don't know if there are old people out there in the network, but Twisted Metal was a really fun game. It was Twisted Metal on water. So I published those 2 games and worked on a few Dreamcast prototypes, but that was my first real shipping of a large-scale product.

Quang Do

10:17What time was that?

Binh Tran

10:18So a few years after college. So I graduated in 1995.

10:24And it was during that time that you saw the dotcom explosion, right? Not an explosion, but people were getting BMWs for signing on to a company, right? The demand for engineers was massive. And so that's when I said, "Hey, why am I in this industry where it's quite abusive?" Independent game studios didn't have the distribution power.

10:52And so you had to go on a milestone-based type of payment system to be able to get paid. And you'd work 80 to 100 hours a week. When my counterparts were getting BMW signing bonuses and not working as hard, you start exploring that. And so I started learning about databases, the internet, a few other things, and then I joined a management consulting company, a software consulting company, sorry. And some of the earliest jobs I was on were just with small and medium enterprises, building software.

Quang Do

11:34And then you started companies. One of them was Klout.

Binh Tran

11:39Well, before that I had worked at a software company building for the auto repair industry, and that's where I met my co-founder of Klout. And so at the time, Joe came up to me and said, "Hey, I've got this idea for creating this software for public schools, public school systems."

12:01He's got a friend who's a school psychologist. There's this big need. I said, "I don't wanna do that. Oh, that sounds boring."

12:08"That's not exciting." He kept at it for months. Finally I said, "Okay, I'm gonna build just a small little prototype and let's see what happens." We built this, he goes to the trade shows, and sure enough, all the school psychologists are like, "Oh, we want it, we want it." So it gets me excited.

12:28And so we actually form a company and start selling this thing. It turns out the sales cycles are much longer. It's not the people who are actually using the software that are buying it. It's typically the school administrators.

12:41And so someone who buys the product doesn't use it. There's a little bit of a disconnect. The thing about selling to public schools in the US though is that the sales cycles are massively long. They set up a budget, and you have to go and get vetted, and it's a multi-year sales cycle.

12:57But once you're in, you're in. So this is a side project. We built this company. It starts selling. It starts selling, and next thing you know, we're in 1,400 school districts.

13:08And it's still running on the very earliest versions of the product I built. And so for me, it was pretty interesting because this company ran for over a decade and collected checks from public schools without really any type of maintenance or work. It just worked. And so I didn't come out of there with life-changing money, but it was such a... Well, first, you learn a lot. Public schools are such a great customer if you can digest and absorb how long the sales cycles are. And that company we actually sold back to one of the other partners a few years ago.

13:50So it just kept running. Anyways, it was during this time that Joe decided to leave California. He moved to New York. And I stayed on with this company here, which eventually got acquired. So after the acquisition, here I was in an organization that was bigger. I like small organizations. It was a bigger organization where I had a lot of free time. I was bored, right? And Joe came back from New York to visit me in LA, and we grabbed lunch, sat at this farmers market and ordered a burrito. And he told me about what he was working on, and like literally within 30 seconds I was like, "Hey, I wanna join you." That's what I told him. And this is a few months before the global financial crisis, Lehman, In 2008. So we were off to the races then and started building Klout.

Quang Do

15:05Continue from here. Tell the story.

Binh Tran

15:08So Klout, the idea was that social media just exploded user-generated content. People needed to understand what that was, and the signals of how your content could create some action: whether people were following you, whether they shared your content. It was just an incredible explosion of data. What Google had done with webpages and search, we wanted to do for people. We wanted to apply Google's PageRank to people. And so that ambition was very exciting and technically challenging. And so Joe was the CEO, telling the story and providing the narrative. I was the person building it. And so we struggled in the first year and a half or so, trying to raise a round. We were taking checks as small as $5,000, right? And it took us almost 2 years to close that first round. 2 years? Wow. Just remember, after the global financial crisis, not a lot of people were deploying capital.

16:33But it was such an incredible time because, I don't know if you remember that time, Facebook had the social graph API, which is, "Hey, use it for free." A free way to acquire 100 million people.

16:49It was incredible. The Twitter firehose: we were one of the first people to actually get the Twitter firehose. At the time it was 12 or 15,000 tweets a second. We didn't have to pay for it. Data was free.

17:03It was incredible. And so we started building this, and there were a lot of intersections of technology that made it happen. One was open source technologies. The other one is distributed technologies. We didn't use cloud because AWS wasn't set up. It would have been much more expensive, so we set up our own petabyte clusters.

17:27Our own machines, basically. And we use open source distributed technologies. which was really early at the time. At the peak, we were ingesting 300 terabytes of new data a day. We were serving 4 or 5 billion API calls a day. So that ramp-up was very fast. Kleiner Perkins was one of the top VCs in the world.

17:56Andreessen was not that well-known or accomplished yet. But the top dogs were Kleiner and Sequoia. So when you have a firm like Kleiner lead your Series A, B and C, that means they have deep belief that you're gonna create some return. And so that name, that type of backing and our traction allowed us to hire some of the best in the Valley. And so that ride was a rollercoaster. We were very controversial. We put a number, which is basically a game, next to your face.

18:48And little did we know that it would take off so fast. People were telling us that they lost a job because their Klout score was computed incorrectly.

Quang Do

19:03There were real-life implications to the score. How would you respond to this now? How did you reconcile?

Binh Tran

19:12Well, at the time, influencer marketing was still very much an experiment. Now it's a massive industry. And for us, it was more than just trying to capture the influencer marketing. Our goal was to try to change advertising. Change it from paid media to earned media. The idea was that if you're naturally passionate about, say, running marathons, you post and create content about how to be an effective marathon runner, right? That's authentic, real advice coming from someone who's not getting paid.

19:51And to me, that was something that was really valuable. And I think if we could build a world where we could connect these people with a Nike, for example, and do it in a way where it didn't bastardize those incentives, right? I'm gonna create content because I care about this industry, I care about this craft or something, right? And hey, maybe Nike will do something to help my audience, right? Be more engaged or something.

20:28But not from a pure financial perspective. That was the goal. We ended up scoring on a daily basis over 800 million people. Microsoft at the time had a search engine called Bing, which was competing with Google. Google crushed Bing, but at the time Bing was experimenting with a lot of different things, so they would surface our Klout profile. So if you search for a topic, web pages on the left, people results on the right. So we powered that. There was a lot of backlash, I think. We published a few scoring changes and everyone... If you search for some of the headlines, people were really nasty.

Quang Do

21:15How did that feel to you?

Binh Tran

21:18It's understandable. Like, I don't wanna be reduced down to a score. And I think some of the complaints were like, "Hey, I don't even create content. I have a really low score." You just feel bad about yourself, right? And no one wants to know that. And the reality is that we were moving really fast. We should have taken a lot more care in having more principles around people who didn't create content. We did lay out a lot of principles around what this influencer marketing industry would look like. But ultimately, during that journey we were acquired, and the company that acquired us didn't continue investing in it, and it was shut down in 2018.

Quang Do

22:08For you personally, the backlash and that whole rollercoaster ride, how was it for you?

Binh Tran

22:14It was fun. Oh, man. It was a wild time. First, San Francisco at the time wasn't known for tech, right?

22:25Tech was just getting started in San Francisco. Twitter's office was a tiny one in South Park. Most of what you'd consider Silicon Valley was Palo Alto, San Jose, south in the suburbs.

22:39And so the city itself was going through a little bit of a transformation. Around that time I moved to San Francisco, and tech became a thing, right? A lot of folks who left the finance industry, they found a place in tech. And that epicenter became San Francisco, so the city became very tech. You started thinking about tech bros, and tech became more mainstream, with the advent of Facebook and everything else.

23:13And so it transformed the city. I call that period the tech bro period. And it was a lot of good and a lot of bad. The early years I'm very fond of, because there wasn't that amount of money. It was all this data around you, and people building because it was cool and fun and creative. Some of that's back now because of AI, but you still have such an incredible amount of money there that changes things.

Quang Do

23:45Take us back to when you sold it, or the period when you sold it. How was that for you?

Binh Tran

23:54Selling it was a rollercoaster ride in itself. Getting the MOU, then the press leaked, and you see it in the press, everyone in the office has it on their screen, and you haven't told them yet. But at the end of the day, it's not what most people imagine, some euphoria and all that. It was just relief.

24:23It was years of this rollercoaster ride and then change in the company. As part of that acquisition, I set my expectations saying, "I'm not gonna stay with the company." And so as soon as the company transitioned into the new organization and everyone had an offer, I would leave. So it was not what people expect. And then what's funny is when it hit the news my mom called me and she's like, "Is everything okay?" It wasn't a positive thing. Exiting for 200-plus million wasn't a positive thing. She's like, "Hey, do you have a job?" "Are you still gonna have a job?" That's Vietnamese parents for you.

Quang Do

25:14And then somewhere there, Vietnam came into the picture.

Binh Tran

25:19Vietnam came into the picture after the exit.

Quang Do

25:24How did that come about? Did you reflect more on Vietnam and what's next? Or how did it come into the picture?

Binh Tran

25:32We were trying to build one of the pillar companies of the internet. When it was at its peak, there were headlines. Tech headlines. They would name Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Klout.

25:51It was such an ambitious global mission. For me, after exiting, it would be hard to find something that I would be as ambitious and deeply engaged with. When I met Eddie, my co-founder, and he started telling me about what he was doing, providing some of the demographic numbers and what he thought was gonna happen with Vietnam, I leaned in. I started doing my own research and interviewing, and decided, "Hey, let's give it a shot," right? Not very often do you get to be at the very beginning of helping build an entire ecosystem, right? And so that's a big impact, and it was very interesting to me.

Quang Do

26:54Tell us that story with Eddie. How did everything begin from 0?

Binh Tran

26:59Very gradually. I think for me, first of all, being an investor: I was an angel investor before, but never had to go and raise a fund, deploy it, and be a fiduciary to others. Didn't know if I would enjoy it. Didn't know if it was even possible. Could you raise a fund for Vietnam? There's no exits, there's no tech here. Sure, there's GDP growth, but there's no evidence, right? Not in the classic sense of evidence, like what I'm used to. So a lot more questions than answers, and any time you start something, it's often just an experiment, right? It's an experiment to see if it works, and until it does, you've gotta believe in it, right? The energy that you need as a founder has to come from within. And so finding that energy is a journey. You start with a lot more questions, and then finally you say, "Okay, I believe this is where the future for Vietnam is headed, and I wanna be part of that." And you need incredible belief for that, otherwise you're not gonna last, right? You run out of money before you run out of energy, and that's what we look for in all founders. Where is that energy coming from? Is it endless? So the first fund was raised, and we started deploying capital in 2015. That was under the 500 Startups Vietnam brand. We have since renamed that fund to AVV Fund 1. We launched a second fund, the largest seed-stage VC fund in Vietnam, and we've been at it for 10 years.

Quang Do

29:03Tell us about the 10 years.

Binh Tran

29:08So first, I think our first mistake was thinking that we could raise from Vietnamese.

29:18Both Vietnamese in Vietnam and Vietnamese outside Vietnam. The mistake there is, first, if you're investing in real estate here, the market might provide anywhere from 10, 20 to 30% IRRs, and it's more liquid than a VC asset.

29:37So finding people who understood the asset could be that illiquid was very hard, right? If you had real estate assets performing at what you were pitching, you're not gonna invest. Plus, getting the money out to a US fund would be challenging. Well, first, I didn't know enough rich Vietnamese back in the day. Investing in a fund is, first of all, really risky. To invest in a fund, you're likely gonna invest in multiple funds, and you're likely to put less than 10% of your portfolio into VC, right? That's the typical allocation. Finding the families who had that type of ultra-high-net-worth profile: a lot of them weren't in my network. Who knows, maybe if I had had the right network, I could've raised more from Vietnamese. It's different now. I think there's more appetite and there's more folks, especially the corporates here. They wanna invest and understand what's happening beyond the state of the art here. Back then, how did you solve it?

Quang Do

30:59Who was your LP base?

Binh Tran

31:04I think fund one was a lot of corporates. We had families from the US, families from Taiwan, Singapore. We had money from Hong Kong. We had a lot of Korean corporates.

31:18So the likes of GS Shop, Naver, Gmarket. A lot of the Koreans were setting up manufacturing here, and they wanted to understand what was happening on the services side, on the software side. Fund 2 is a little bit more diverse. We have 45% of our capital from the US, 45% from Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and 10% from Europe. And that's a big spread, from institutional fund of funds to development finance banks to family offices and corporates. Corporates across China, Taiwan. So it's a good spread.

32:03Good diverse mix.

Quang Do

32:06Tell us what investing and startups in Vietnam were like compared to Silicon Valley. And I think it's still an ongoing journey. It's ever-evolving in Vietnam, and each year is different. But in those 10-plus years since you came to Vietnam, what surprised you? What did you learn along the way, and what was challenging?

Binh Tran

32:33Okay, those 3 are very big questions. Our first investment was ELSA. ELSA was this Stanford StartX company. I'd met Vu in San Francisco, and we were in the seed round. We've invested in companies like Trusting Social. They started in Vietnam providing credit scores based on a lot of secondary data. So it's not primary lending data, but secondary data. We've invested in over 100 companies now.

33:09We have 3 unicorns, 13 exits, so there's a lot of stories baked in there. There's a lot of learnings, a lot of mistakes baked in there. But think of where Vietnam was back then. Some of the companies like Vinhay, right? They're quite sizable now. In the first round, they were raising $35,000.

Quang Do

33:36$35,000 only?

Binh Tran

33:38And so a very different time to invest. Rounds were quite small. Checks were quite small. Back then we were writing anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000, $250,000 checks. Now we're writing initial checks of $500K to $2 million, and then follow-ons as high as $4 million. So the ecosystem has changed. It's evolved. I think there's been some corrections in the ecosystem. Part of that's the zero interest rate period. Globally, venture capital peaked in 2021, and then there's some of that correction coming back. But any tech ecosystem that evolves goes through these waves, cycles, right? And every cycle builds on the last. And so, for example, the US first cycle in the post-PC period: you had the internet. You had to lay down fiber optic cables. You had to go and build and sell web servers. You had to go and do all this stuff that was very CapEx heavy. Not everyone was on the internet. Not everyone had a smartphone. There wasn't cloud computing, so these things were very hard to do. It's infrastructure. It was changing behaviors. It was just the foundational things. And the expectation going into the first wave was that this was gonna transform everything.

35:21Guess what? Bubble popped, right? It took 10 years for the US to recover. And when it recovered, it was based on all that value that was created in the prior wave: all that behavior, all that infrastructure, being able to pay online, buy online, all these things. And then smartphones. All these technologies compound on each other, and then you have a new cycle that created a lot more healthy companies, a lot more scale in returns. So Vietnam and the Southeast Asia region went through a very similar cycle. There are 650 million people across the region, everyone going from low income to middle income, all these businesses that need to be digitized. What a fabulous place to be. It attracted a lot of capital. A little too much. Prices were overpaid, and people were thinking this was gonna be the next China. Those expectations got popped, and we're in between the cycles right now, where the pricing is really low And the expectations are very low, right? But the technology adoption, the value creation, and the inefficiencies you see in the market: it's inevitable. It's inevitable that this value creation's coming. And if I'm deploying capital at a time when the pricing is the opposite of what it was in 2021, what a great time to deploy. And when the tools are basically free, and it's free to be able to build something, what an amazing time to build. A very similar case would be India. India: "Oh, this is the next China. You have a billion people. You've got so much to do." A lot of money came in, and it bottomed out around 2013, '14, '15. Returns weren't there, and people pulled back. "India's not gonna make it." And then they introduced universal payment systems. They introduced a stock market with lower expectations for startups. It all built on the foundation that the first wave laid, and now India's in a very exciting place, with great returns for investors.

37:53So seeing these cycles, it's clear to me: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, we're in between those 2 cycles. Great time to invest, terrible time to fundraise. So is it getting better now versus before when you started?

Quang Do

38:14I feel you have more conviction now, because we had conversations along the way. It feels like you're more enthusiastic than ever. You mentioned also before there were no exits in Vietnam or even Southeast Asia by and large. How exciting is it now to be investing venture in Vietnam? Well, first, it's a healthier reset.

Binh Tran

38:40The founders, it's harder for them to fundraise. What that means is that the people who are actually out there building and fundraising, it's because they have to.

38:51It's because they want to. It's not because the capital's easy. And so that removes a lot of the noise in the ecosystem. Number 2, I think pricing has been the opposite of what it was in 2021, right? 2021 was a peak, and so pricing in this trough between 2 cycles should be really good, and we're seeing that on the ground. Now, those 2 combined: In 2015, there was more of this wonder of like, oh, man, where is this gonna go? And a lot of just naive excitement, right? Now it's tempered with, "Okay, it's not just sky's the limit." No, you're not gonna IPO on the NASDAQ. The majority of this stuff is gonna be M&A exits, right? If you're gonna go and win the Vietnam market, likely a $200, $300 million exit. And if you get to large scale, you're looking at maybe a US listing around $2 to 3 billion. You're not gonna anchor on what you're seeing in the Valley now. And so the temperament has definitely changed. It is based on a lot more evidence, right? It's a sobering check and a healthy thing for the ecosystem. But again, I am still very bullish in terms of where this is headed, whereas before there was maybe naive optimism. Here I have really tempered and confident optimism.

Quang Do

40:35So we talked about investing. Let's switch a bit to the building, entrepreneurial side. What are some of the things you've observed and learnt about Vietnamese founders, whether here or globally? What is unique about them, and what gives them perhaps an edge in building?

Binh Tran

40:56In various different areas. The pitch for Fund 1 was software engineering: global excellence at a very low cost, right?

41:11Obviously, AI crushes that a bit. The opportunities we're seeing in Vietnam fall into a few different buckets. So number one, mobile gaming. So Vietnam is number one in the world in producing and developing the most downloaded games. More than anyone else.

Quang Do

41:32More than China?

Binh Tran

41:33More than China.

Quang Do

41:34Crazy, right?

Binh Tran

41:35The games themselves don't make a lot of money.

41:39It's a hyper-casual audience base, so the companies themselves make money from ads.

41:47And so these games aren't really meant to be really engaging. They're quick hits. But these companies make a lot of money. They make tens of millions of dollars a month, right? And they have never raised capital. So a lot of these companies, how they did it was just really master performance marketing. Google Ads. I know it from the Google side. Ads, right? So if you could spend a dollar and know that within a few days or a week you'll get the dollar back, plus a cent, right? You would go at it all day. What's happened over the last few years is that, first, Apple got rid of the ID for advertisers, IDFA. There's been more and more of a movement away from cookies, of where the attribution of who clicked what gets a lot less deterministic. And so that business model is becoming less and less predictable and reliable. And so a lot of these developers are now moving from hyper-casual to more casual monetization. And what does that mean? That's games like Candy Crush, puzzle games where you might have to pay a bit for additional turns, or you get a subscription, or there's something else that can monetize. So currently the gaming industry here has proven that they can distribute games. They need to show that they can monetize well. A lot of people think that they can, and so a lot of global investors are looking at deploying and have deployed capital in that area. Vietnamese game developers, game studios: there's a recent acquisition for $100 million, and most of their revenue comes from developed countries. They develop the game here, they sell it, and they get the revenue from developed countries. And so we see that as a continuing trend. Hopefully matching the trajectory that a country like Turkey did. Turkey had a $3 billion acquisition by Zynga. And so we see that as an exciting global opportunity. Another area is basically developer tools. There's a lot of engineers here, and a lot of new types of purchasing. So when you know the problem that your customer experiences really well, then you can sell as well as anybody else, right? And so if you're a developer, you're gonna be able to sell, hopefully, a developer tool, right? Perhaps it's a new problem, and so there's not an established budget. There's not an incumbent that has dominated the space. And so you have a fair shot at being able to be a large, sizable company if you execute well enough and fast enough. And so that's where we see some interesting products being launched that's getting traction. These are founders here who know the problem, know what the customers are going through, and they're targeting a sector where the buyer is the user. There's no established budget just yet, and there's no large incumbent. And so that levels the playing field quite a bit. The third one is... There's actually 4. The third one is still things around, I would say, Web3. So we're not investing so much in that space anymore, but this is still an important part of emerging markets where not everyone here is banked, right? Not everyone here has the ability to take a loan or lend. So Web3 is a financial inclusion solution. It's a place where people can actually borrow and lend for the first time. In America and developed markets, Web3 is optimization of the portfolio, generating yields and all these different things. For a lot of folks here, it's like, "The first time I can actually trust the money, the first time I can actually borrow, and actually lend someone some money and make some points on top of it." And so it's a very different need, right? And Vietnam is so far ahead technically with Web3, and this need applies to all emerging markets. Web3 for emerging markets is very different from developed markets, and we think Vietnam is leading that charge. The 4th bucket is more around AI. So I believe AI value is created locally, right? There's this push towards transforming organizations, adding agents, and transforming the organization. That is not done except very willfully: going to the customer, earning their trust, getting all that non-public information on how they make decisions. Not just their databases and everything, but how managers and people make decisions there. A lot of it's in people's heads. And capturing it in a way that agents can actually produce the same type of output or value that a human can. And so that opportunity is sizable, and it's very local.

48:04But if you think about Vietnam to the world, Vietnam dominating in an area, it's those top 3, and then perhaps EVs as well, 2-wheelers, where Vietnam is an outperformer.

48:20I've asked you about the edge of Vietnamese.

Quang Do

48:25On the flip side, where do you think there's still room for improvement, or where do Vietnamese builders need to get to build more global businesses?

Binh Tran

48:38The biggest thing is networks. The founders here aren't gonna have the networks that are needed for capital, for customers, for a lot of different things. I would say know-how in terms of what that customer goes through: being able to contextualize, "Hey, this customer has these types of experiences, and I can build something very relatable to them." The same idea as a developer developing developer tools. Like you're developing a global solution. Do you know what this customer goes through? I don't know. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. And finally, scale. Like, building an organization from hundreds of people to thousands of people, an organization that's high-performing, not rank and file, right? An organization where people have a lot more autonomy, people have a lot more ownership. They're clearly aligned on the vision, and they take pride in having a piece of the company. That type of organization at scale is still quite missing here. From a regulatory standpoint, there's still challenges around an ESOP. So there's still a lot of gaps. And those gaps are not filled in.

Quang Do

50:17How do we get there?

Binh Tran

50:19Overseas Vietnamese? It's not just Overseas Vietnamese, but I think Vietnam has structurally set itself up to learn and grow in a way that's by design. So Vietnam entered the WTO in 2007 and has steadily removed foreign ownership limits across all these sectors. What does that mean? That means a Singapore company or a Delaware company can own 100% of a local entity. That's basically Vietnam saying, "Hey, we're not like China. We don't have a billion people. We don't have the resources of China, and so if we wanna continue on that steep growth trajectory, we have to implement non-protectionist policies to allow the world to work with Vietnam, and to allow folks like Overseas Vietnamese to come out here and establish businesses easily, and to be able to exit those businesses easily." And so by design, a lot of this has been set up so that Vietnam as a country can grow quicker. Sure, the local companies might face more stiff competition, right? In the long term, a lot of this knowledge transfer will put Vietnam on a much steeper trajectory: the knowledge transfer, the learnings and everything else. Not all sectors have this. Obviously, sectors such as banking, public education, anything that has to do with national security, and real estate are heavily regulated.

52:17But many other industries do. Let's say you wanted to start an EV company and go head-to-head with VinFast. What country in Southeast Asia besides Singapore would you feel like you've got a good chance at it, right? So there are companies going head-to-head, sure. VinFast has a much better set of capital and connections and everything else, but there won't be a gatekeeper out there to bend the rules so that you don't win, right? Because there's this equitable access across a lot of these sectors.

Quang Do

52:55That's refreshing to hear. I think a lot of people don't assume that from the outside.

Binh Tran

53:00You have to choose your sectors carefully, right?

53:03Real estate is a common place where people don't understand it. It's an asset that people feel like, "Oh, I wanna invest in that," but then again, it's heavily regulated.

Quang Do

53:15We have a few questions from our OV members. One is, "In the first seconds or the first minutes of a pitch, what makes you want to hear more?"

Binh Tran

53:26Well, there are stylistic things, but we're often a founder's first investor.

53:33So for me, I focus on the substance rather than the delivery. And so for me, it's broad buckets. I can't get super specific. They have to be smart, obviously.

53:47They have to be energetic, like they truly believe in this and they wanna hustle and they're aggressive about it. But at the same time, this humility, because what they're entering is a journey full of learnings, full of making mistakes. You gotta have this learning mindset, right? And so those 3 go a long way. If you're not smart, forget it, right?

54:12Even if you're not the smartest, I think if you've covered the bases enough, if you've been so thoughtful in all the different areas where this could go wrong, you've done the work, it'll show, right? And CEOs sometimes aren't the smartest people in the room. They are often the most energetic, and they have the most conviction and self-belief. They know how to tell a story, and they can rally people around them, and so that's not always the smartest person in the room. So I think what we focus on is being the first investor. The company often doesn't have anything, so it's 99% the founding team.

Quang Do

54:57Another question from Vicky. Vicky, we touched on this, but Vietnam is known for strong engineers and lean teams. What has to happen for Vietnamese startups to build global companies from here?

Binh Tran

55:09So launching a global company from here, you have to demonstrate that you understand the customer really well. If you're selling to a market where that sales cycle is through networks, for example, cybersecurity. Oh, you wanna sell cybersecurity? Well, the market in Southeast Asia is too small. You're gonna have to be in the US. Well, in the cybersecurity industry, it's not the best product that wins. It's the best product sold through that network that wins, right? All the chief information security officers know each other, at public companies, right? And they all talk to each other. It's a network, and that sale is top-down, it's not bottom-up. No engineer is gonna say, "Hey, I value this cybersecurity solution. It's the best." There are strategic, political, all sorts of different decision frameworks that someone has to go through. And then often it's just trust. Do I know you? So, having that network's essential for that sector, for that industry, right? For that sales process, that go-to-market. So if a team here doesn't have someone who has that, it's really hard for us to underwrite. But to go global, I think there's better and better chances to be able to go and get a very diverse team. No founder's perfect. Every founder has gaps, but if they are aware of those gaps and convince somebody of their vision to come on board and be a co-founder, those are strong skill sets that we look for.

57:02So if you can build it here, your engineering and your AI agentic engineering, and you've got a founder who knows the industry and the customers really well and the go-to-market, that's a winning combination.

Quang Do

57:19So network is the unlock. Would you say then Vietnamese founders would need to move to the market where they sell, the US? Eventually.

Binh Tran

57:30By having a team out there. We had a company here that started in Ho Chi Minh City. The last round was oversubscribed. We were the on-the-ground investors providing that type of support. An LA-based VC firm led the last round, and they just received a term sheet for a $25 million round. They're establishing a US base, a San Francisco base. So humble beginnings, but then now you gotta be next to where the customers are. If your market is the problem you're focused on is for customers here, then likely you're gonna find similar customers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand. And so using Vietnam as a launchpad or test bed and going across the region makes more sense. But even then, these are new markets. Their consumers and customers are gonna be acquired in very different ways. And they need to feel like, "Hey, this isn't a Vietnamese company pitching me." A Filipino needs to feel, "Hey, this is a Filipino company. They understand me," right? "They get me, and they prioritize me." "They love me."

59:00That's how you win the customer. So founders who understand that and maybe have a deep respect for that, I think have it. The mindset needs to be there, and then the execution to be able to say, "Hey, I'm gonna find someone in the Philippines who I can convince that we're gonna be the champion here," and getting that going.

Quang Do

59:23Many of the founders you back are Overseas Vietnamese. So are you, so am I. Switching gears a bit to this more personal topic of Overseas Vietnamese: do you today feel more American or Vietnamese?

Binh Tran

59:39Today?

Quang Do

59:42Or totally hybrid?

Binh Tran

59:48In the US, I was not fully American. In Vietnam, I'm Viet Kieu. And so it's like not fitting in one place. So now I'm a bridge. I take the best of both worlds, and I don't need to be fully Vietnamese. I don't need to be this idea of only Vietnamese American. I can live between these 2 identities. Being a bridge is what I identify with. Hopefully at this age, you don't have to deal with identity issues as much.

Quang Do

1:00:24I think in much of the OV network, we all have shared experiences of living in between, and identity is an important thing that people go through. And I think part of that is finding the positives despite experiencing some of these negative things, and grounding your identity in that. You moved to Vietnam, I moved to Vietnam, and I know a lot of members and Overseas Vietnamese families who want to move to Vietnam as well. The biggest struggle is usually what to do once here, and many are already set in their careers overseas. Coming here, you basically have the choice between working for someone or building your own thing. Working for someone is often not so easy. It's hard for Overseas Vietnamese to fit into Vietnamese companies culturally. Also, the pay is often not as expected. Many take up remote jobs or freelance. But then the alternative is building something here, right? Which is in itself very hard, right? Building a business is already hard, but building a business in Vietnam is uniquely hard in that sense. Any advice for Overseas Vietnamese who want to move to Vietnam and even build something here?

Binh Tran

1:01:56Vietnam makes it very hard to start a business. The process itself, the liability, all these different things. It takes an hour to spin up an LLC in the US. But once you get over that, building here is actually easier. It's cheaper. Failure is cheaper. If you think about it, what makes Vietnam really interesting is that a lot of folks here can start a fashion line, they can start a small restaurant, a cafe. They can start anything their mind thinks of. And the risk tolerance is just really high here, putting aside the regulatory licensing and stuff like that. So I do think that of the folks thinking about coming here, the ones that should come here are the ones that are coming to Vietnam, not running from something else, right?

Quang Do

1:03:12That's fair.

Binh Tran

1:03:13They're coming to Vietnam, there's a goal in mind, there's something, and there's a lot of support. Because it's so hard, there's a lot of vendors who can help you with that formation and servicing. And you're bringing with you a mindset from outside of Vietnam, right? But coming here, you're perhaps tapping into Vietnamese who are hungry to learn, who are very determined to build a better life. And so I think you can establish businesses that can serve outside Vietnam, and just have that operational base here. So think about business models where Vietnam can potentially create large outcomes. One of them is manufacturing and supply chain, right? As the world's shifting between different tariffs and where to manufacture things, Vietnam's been a beneficiary of some of this. And some of those relationships between buyer and seller are new, and there's a lot of needs around new relationships and everything else. So there's a lot of problems that are very large and global in scale that one can focus on. But I would say for Overseas Vietnamese: rationalize, research and think about what to do here before coming. Otherwise, coming here, you can get a little distracted and spin your wheels a bit, right? Come here with a mission.

Quang Do

1:05:04Which would you recommend in general for an Overseas Vietnamese: to come to Vietnam to build here, versus Silicon Valley or another more established ecosystem? So it depends on the sector.

Binh Tran

1:05:16Depends on the industry. Depends on a lot of different things, right? I have a company in the portfolio called TechCoop, and a tech leader in the Valley reached out and said, "Hey, do you have any companies? I wanna go back to Vietnam and establish my roots here. I wanna get more connected to my identity." And so I introduced them, and now he's their CTO. The company is raising a $100 million round. Their revenue is well north of $500 million a year. They've served 350,000 farmers and counting, and they're likely Vietnam's next unicorn. We were their first investor, and he is thriving because he gets to be in this industry and this company that's having a massive impact on the largest industry in Vietnam.

1:06:11He's getting to build AI solutions and have an impact on the organization as well. And so there's opportunities like that as well. You don't have to have just a founder mindset. You get to say, "No, Here's what I'm looking for. Here's how I can add value." Reach out to the companies themselves, or reach out to the investors in those companies. There's other VC firms here and then PE firms. I think a lot of folks would be happy to say, "Oh, we've got someone who's seasoned to come in and help build this company." Beyond startups, investing, innovation and tech, more macro Vietnam: what makes you excited to be here in the next years? The Vietnam story's very hot right now. Last year, the celebration of 80 years of independence, incredible energy in the streets, right? People were camping out for weeks to experience this energy with each other. So that story of being this underdog that now has complete independence and has this gritty story is really cool. It's a cool story. And so the fashion brands that are coming out here embody that. It's not manufactured. This is Vietnam's fashion, and it's being sought after. And so the Vietnam story is becoming very popular, so that's very exciting to see. Obviously, food is always globally prized, and it's getting more and more awareness. I see these videos of people trying all sorts of Vietnamese food, and it's awesome to see.

Quang Do

1:08:10And for you personally, what is remaining for your career? What is something you aim for within Vietnam, or even for you personally?

Binh Tran

1:08:21So the main goal here is that Vietnam needs to prove that money can come out. Money can come in now, but we need to show that Vietnam can produce money out, that it's a valuable place to invest, and that investors are getting a return because Vietnam is doing a lot of things right and getting on the global stage. And so the next 10 years is about helping find the founders who believe in that, who have what it takes to build a globally leading company, right? To create a very large outcome for investors so that more investors come, and more ambitious Vietnamese founders find capital, and the cycle continues. So next chapter is about actually proving it, right? Proving it on a global stage.

Quang Do

1:09:21A final message to a younger Binh, an imaginary Binh who is now 25 in California, maybe with an engineering background, dabbles in AI, has a few questions about, not identity, but Vietnam, this hot story. It's 2026. What would you tell that person? What would you tell a younger Binh or another Overseas Vietnamese now being in the US?

Binh Tran

1:09:49Hard to say. I think there's a lot of learnings from two and a half decades, right? That make you who you are: the mistakes, the pain, the suffering, even the right mistakes. All these different things, it's hard to wanna take away, right? Sure, do I wish I invested in a certain company? Sure. Do I wish I took a position in this public company? Do I wish I had kids earlier or whatever, right? All these things, but they are the decisions that have led me to where I am, and I am happy where I am. I'm happy where I'm sitting. I can spend time with my 2 daughters. In San Francisco I was optimizing my calendar: 15-minute meetings. That's crazy, right? Here, I'm optimizing my day, right? I'm optimizing, "Hey, I gotta carve out some time, be a little more impactful, spend less time on administrative busywork, leverage agents," all this stuff. I'm enjoying where I am in my life.

Quang Do

1:11:14And a final message for any Overseas Vietnamese who want to come to Vietnam.

1:11:20Very general, but try to condense it into a message.

Binh Tran

1:11:25Well, with Vietnam, there's never a point in time where you could say Vietnam is just this type of country, right? And it's constantly evolving. I would say it's a country now that is continuing to grow. The outward look for a lot of people here is constantly changing, and the opportunities are constantly dynamic. There's still a lot to do. There's still a lot of interesting problems to solve, and I think coming here with the mindset where it's not permanent is probably the right mindset because, again, these journeys are very personal and your view is very subjective. So if you have the risk tolerance, and many of you don't have children, don't have an aging grandparent that you have to take care of, that risk tolerance is probably peaking where you are in your life. Take advantage of it. Take advantage of that risk tolerance and try something new, and that new could be moving to Vietnam.

Quang Do

1:12:56Thank you so much, Binh.