What do startups in Vietnam need or lack? I asked this recently to a bunch of friends on the way back from new annual conference for the technology community. They immediately replied: Focus! Technical Skills! Exposure! Creativity! Courage! The event underlined something rather poignant in technology events in Hanoi and Saigon. There’s a disconnect. High-level speakers flew in from around the world to talk about what’s next in technology, but how relevant are 3D gesture interfaces to a country that is still dominated by feature phones?
One of my venture capitalist friends summed it up well: “From heaven to hell”, he said. “Speakers at all the local events in technology talk about things that are rarely ever relevant to actual problems in Vietnamese startups. It’s like angels talking to devils.” But what are the problems? Essentially, the question really is, how can the Vietnamese tech community, centered in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city, achieve a Silicon Valley-like cohesion that produces great individuals, companies, and products that significantly impact domestic and worldwide markets?
Over the last three months, I’ve uncovered five main areas of improvement commonly cited by local CEOs and executives in the tech industry: community building, handling of ideas, execution, technical skills, and business savvy. Let’s delve into the mechanics of each.
1. Community building
In 2009, community was something rather hard to find here. Facebook was still well under three million users (but now it’s the largest social network in Vietnam, with over eight million users) and events for tech enthusiasts were hard to come by or low in attendance. Barcamp Saigon was the biggest event on the map with a few hundred attendees. Homegrown web companies like VNG, VC Corp, and others were still on the rise. Online, there was no place to meet other like-minded folks except in fragmented forums across the web. That’s where Launch came in.
Launch, branded as the “Vietnam Internet Startup Community”, only had a few hundred members by the end of 2009. For Trung Huynh, one of the early co-founders of Launch, he felt that communication was vital.
People didn’t know each other, they didn’t know who was doing what, they didn’t have access to Silicon Valley wisdom about starting up, they barely had access to the latest trends in tech. So we first started Launch by translating content from leaders in the the tech scene like Paul Graham, and monthly events with successful Vietnamese CEO’s.
After six months of this, the community started to self-sustain. Launch members organized their own events and brought their own topics to the Facebook group. Today, there are 5,631 members and it’s the number one place to go for techies to go to talk about hot tech topics in Vietnam.
Today, more Facebook groups are popping up in more niche web-oriented areas: technical, founders, startup news, and so on. And yet, the community problem persists somehow. That’s because Launch only solved the logistical problem. The other side of communication is an attitude towards ideas.
2. How new ideas are handled
Like much of East Asia, Vietnamese kids are raised in a Confucian household. That means veering from the status quo is frowned upon and adhering to a hierarchy is the default. Also, being a developing country and burgeoning tech community, that means the environment is both very competitive and young. The status quo makes people cautious about new ideas, and competition makes people feel protective about their creations. This is reflected in the market.
When a startup goes to a big business to pitch, let’s say, from a B2B e-commerce service, companies are skeptical. B2B startups will often think here: “Why should our company take a chance on your no-name company that has not proven itself in the market?” The risk is high. Is it any wonder that there are so many consumer-oriented e-commerce and social media clones in the market? These are considered safer bets, consumers are more ready to take a chance than businesses. The risk is low.
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