ABOUT
I was born in Hanoi and have worked in Ho Chi Minh City for close to twenty years, alongside customers, investors and partners across Vietnam and Southeast Asia. In the startup community I am usually known as Rua. If one word described my work, it would be building: building processes, building companies and building teams.
Outside work I read widely, listen to many kinds of music, travel to learn rather than to rest, spend time with my children and study history and military strategy in depth. History offers the richest body of cases on strategy, human behaviour and how power is exercised. Many of my investment and operating decisions are tested against those precedents before they are tested against management theory.
Three principles govern how I work:
Every problem is considered in relation to the whole system, and to what else is affected when one link changes.
Persist with a stated objective until it produces results.
Employee, manager, founder, investor, board member. All of it on one axis: building and scaling digital consumer businesses in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
Co-founded and spent nine formative years building a digital media and performance marketing company, while the Vietnamese market was still in its early stage. Moore Corp was later acquired by IREP Japan (2014).
Co-founded a performance marketing and affiliate platform for Southeast Asia, now with teams in five markets. The central lesson: cross-border expansion is a people and systems problem before it is a product problem.
Investor and advisor from the early stage. A men's D2C apparel brand now backed by Vertex Ventures, GSR Ventures, Do Ventures and other institutional investors. A defining case for my thesis on Vietnamese D2C.
Head of Corporate Development at Vietnam's leading mobile game publisher. Responsible for M&A, investment, support and venture building for game studios.
Investment Director and Co-General Partner. The step from investing my own capital to managing third-party capital with partners, under the full discipline of a fund. More than 100 deals reviewed.
An investment in a coffee brand built on one principle: perfect the product for yourself, grow within a loyal customer base, then consider scale.
Founded a financial education product for children, starting from a need at home. Now used by teachers in the classroom.
Together with a deep network across the Vietnamese startup community and among KOLs, KOCs and influencers. For many founders, this matters more than capital.
01
I still build companies myself, not only invest in other people's. Co-founder of Ecomobi, founder of Ruva.vn, responsible for venture building game studios at Funtap, and a board member at companies I have invested in. Building keeps my investment view anchored in operations: real costs, real people and the real speed at which a company can move.
02
I invest as an angel at the earliest stage, when the idea is clear and the team has just formed, with personal capital or alongside other suitable angels. I do not spread capital thinly: I pick few, join from the start and support the company until it has traction. The value beyond capital lies in distribution channels, partners, key hires and preparation for the first institutional round.
03
At VIC Partners, as Investment Director and Co-General Partner, I manage other investors' capital under the discipline of a fund: due diligence, an investment committee and accountability to limited partners. The fund invests from seed to Series A in companies that have traction and need capital to scale. The question I focus on in diligence: where growth comes from, and how much of it the company generated itself.
vic.partners →04
For operating companies I serve as an advisor or board member, focused on strategy, fundraising, M&A and governance, as I do at Coolmate, Ecomobi and selected portfolio companies. Most Vietnamese founders lack neither capability nor effort. What they need is someone who has travelled the same road and will name the real risks. I am systematising that experience into a playbook.
I take a supporting position, beside or behind the founder, depending on the stage of the company.