10 years at VietnamWorks: the full story of Vietnam’s top online recruitment site

Last April, Vietnamworks, Vietnam’s top recruitment site, was acquired by En-Japan for a rumored $22 million. That made it one of the top acquisitions last year. It showed that indeed, Vietnamese companies can exit. But how exactly did this headhunting and online recruitment site rise to the top?

Vietnamworks was started twelve years ago by Jonah Levey. Just before coming to Vietnam, Jonah was managing director at a successful head hunting business in New York. But it was just after 9/11 and Levey had just broken up with his girlfriend. He went to Vietnam for vacation and was struck by the opportunity and culture he encountered. Vietnam was still developing, and it was a wide open field for innovation. Recruitment was clearly a problem: good talent was scarce and the number of new businesses rose steadily. Six months later, Levey launched the website. He was an expert in recruitment and was intent on bringing that expertise to Vietnam.

The early days: 2002

But for Levey and his cofounder, Sean MacDonald, it wasn’t easy. The team found a great investor in Chris Freund, who was profoundly supportive. Freund is also a key investor in MobileWorld, which just IPO’ed in Vietnam at a valuation of over $250 million.

Back then, we ran out of money several times. One year in, and we were already very tired. We were using used computers. We had little traction. Customers didn’t believe the internet would work. And we couldn’t generate enough revenue to survive. So we wanted to call it quits. We were really tired.

Levey says both he and MacDonald wanted to go back to New York and get real jobs. They were solemn and upset. But they didn’t tell Freund that they wanted to quit yet.

“We set up the dinner. Sean was vomiting and sick. And we sat there and told Chris all the reasons why we wanted to quit. And he was very understanding. We started talking about the trends and he pointed out that we were actually growing. We had six weeks worth of money left”, says Levey.

Back then, Levey was most worried about the cost of closing. In fact, that might cost more than running the business. But Freund reassured him that he could cover the closing, in case that happened, and said: “You can keep going. It’s not time yet.”

After that dinner, Sean left. He couldn’t afford to live with no salary. But we turned a corner, we squeezed our costs and we were able to break even on a cash flow basis. We just needed a little bit of emotional encouragement. And it was just so physically hard on us. But that dinner was the turning point. It’s a vivid moment for the VietnamWorks story.

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