Entrepreneur life
I made a quick trip to Hanoi for this event. We were scheduled from 9AM to 11AM, but the show didn’t end until noon. Nobody wanted to leave! Everybody was asking for more 😍.
Fate brought me here. I met VNDIRECT during their darkest hours, at the beginning of a terrible incident. After less than 10’ hearing me to lay out a recovery plan, the top leadership handed me the command of the incident. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for their trust and vowed to do everything I could to help.
After the incident was over, the leadership shared with me that choosing me was their riskiest bet, going against the advice of many people. Wow, I had no idea.
Some people insisted that we were the culprits. They didn't believe I was just coincidentally in Hanoi at the time of the incident.
Actually, I was wrapping up another incident with Pham Van Khanh when VNDIRECT leaders asked me to meet. At that time, I didn't think they would give us the project, but I thought if they did, I wanted the best North Vietnamese comrades by my side, so I invited Khanh to come along.
But first, I wanted to run back to the hotel to... change clothes. I was wearing my usual outfit of senior Silicon Valley engineers, and I knew from experience that it didn’t gain much trust in Vietnam looking like a hobo.
While on the way to VNDIRECT, I was so amused by my changing clothes that I took a selfie to save the moment. The time on the picture shows it was taken at 3:00 PM on March 26, 2024. Thirty minutes later, I called K and M to tell them to fly to Hanoi on the earliest flight, because we were given the project.
We plunged into work days and nights, forgetting to eat and sleep, yet in the middle of it, some people still insisted we were the perpetrators. They accused us: If we weren't the culprits, how could we know how to handle the arising problems so well? It seems they've never heard of the word "experience".
Fortunately, our team members were excellent and worked very hard. When the top leadership needed to decide who to trust, their engineers vouched for us.
In retrospect, I was so naive, busily throwing everything at our disposal to help, without paying attention to the "hostile forces" that were trying to "sabotage" the trust I didn’t fully earn yet.
Oh well, water always flows to the lowest point, being naive wasn’t so bad, as I trust my heart to lead us to where we need to be.