I’m coming back to California after working in Vietnam as a business consultant for the last eight months, and I thought I would use the transition as an opportunity to keep in touch, and share what I’ve learned.

This is the consolidated story of my experience. Why I went to Vietnam, what I did there, and why I’m coming back. In it I talk about how to find work and opportunity abroad, and what business is really like in an emerging market. I share some unexpected lessons that I’ve learned about traveling and about myself. If you’re ever tempted to run away and start a new life, some of this might be really helpful, or it might change your mind.

It would really mean a lot to me if you’d read it (when you have some time, it’s super long) and get back to me with your thoughts and feedback.

- Dangerous Ideas -

Often, while studying it, I worried that economics might be boring. Actually, it turns out that economic ideas can be extremely dangerous. The idea that an investor can increase returns by moving around the risk almost destroyed the world economy. Now financial models are being called weapons of mass destruction. Not bad.

For me the most dangerous idea I ever learned studying economics was the concept of “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost is the realization that the true cost of something is not its price, but rather the value of what you could have had instead. An investment was only a good investment to the extent that it made more money than the next best thing. To spend a day shopping for a $30 pair of shoes costs you not only your money, but also a day that could have been spent swimming, or reading, or whatever. And for me that’s a big whatever.

I was very lucky to be born into the time, place, and situation that I was. I have never been called on to provide for my family, or defend my country, or really do anything for anyone but myself. A California style childhood of loving family and nurturing teachers has assured me that my opportunities in life are limitless and my only responsibility to the world is my own happiness. I can do anything I want with my life. Sounds good right? Except for the opportunity cost.

It turns out every hour I spend cleaning my toenails is an hour that I’m not climbing mountains, making friends, or founding companies. With infinite opportunity, every choice I make is suddenly infinitely expensive. Stupid economics.

Wait, wait, relax. That’s ok. My only goal is to be happy. A trivial luxury compared to most people’s lot in life. Frosting on the cake. Simple, right?

I wish. As if studying economics wasn’t bad enough, I had to completely cripple my ability to function in life by also studying some philosophy (not a lot, just barely enough to be annoying).

It turns out, that at some point back in Greece all these damn philosophers got together and decided that happiness is a rather silly concept, a temporary state, like being sleepy or gassy. So they came up with a much more robust version of happiness called eudaimonia.

When Doctor Kevorkian kills some someone who’s in pain, it’s called euthanasia, which roughly means “a good death”. Eudaimonia, alternatively, means a good life. And what did Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle decide a good life was? According to my philosophy 101 class, it’s human flourishing, virtue, living up to your full potential, fulfilling your opportunity in the world. Crap.

So I can’t just be childishly happy, that’s stupid. I have huge opportunity and I have to fulfill it. I have to be Jack Kerouac. I have to be Bill Gates. I have to be Siddhartha.

So, naturally, I moved to Vietnam to become a business consultant.

- Wait.. What? Why Vietnam? Why Business Consulting? -

Last June I graduated from UCSB with my degree in Business/Economics and Technology Entrepreneurship. It was finally time for the “real world”, whatever that is. I think it might have something to do with paying my own rent.

At the time I was working on two business projects, an art licensing and poster retailing company called PostersforHumans.com, and a clean tech materials startup called Nitride Solutions. Neither project was going anywhere in a hurry. Nitride Solutions was having trouble convincing Venture Capitalists to invest. My role in the company was shrinking and my attention was elsewhere. Poster retailing was barely breaking even, and publishers weren’t on board with our vision of promoting independent artists. Neither of these ventures was going to be paying any rent any time soon. So, by my definition, neither of them counted as the real world.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to stay in Santa Barbara. After graduating I saw many of my friends transform into zombie shadows of their former selves. I call them “Happy Hour People”, because I now only see them at some stupid bar during happy hour. Friends whose formerly rich and interesting lives as students are now reduced to sitting in their entry level accounting jobs, staring at excel and slowly counting down the minutes until 5pm Friday evening when they can finally go meet with the other happy hour zombies to drink mildly discounted beer and complain about work. They called this the real world, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a great thing going in Santa Barbara, but I  needed a fresh start. Rather than cling the scraps of my college life I wanted to face adulthood head on. I had enough money saved up to do something cool. Everyone agreed that I should carpe my diem while I had the chance.

I have had some opportunities to travel before, summers backpacking around Europe and the usual tourist clichés. I no longer believe in the value of seeing the world from a train window, letting your guide book lead you from hostel to temple to cafe to museum, taking pictures of yourself standing in front of old stuff. I wanted a real experience. I wanted to go to one place and really get involved with something, really let it sink in. And I didn’t feel like graduating from college deserved a vacation, I wanted something that I could put on my resume.

So I packed my suitcase, printed some business cards that said “David Pricco – Business Development Consultant” on them, and bought a one way ticket to Hanoi, Vietnam.

I chose Hanoi because I had briefly studied abroad there four years ago and had really liked it. It was a cheap, tropical city with a good balance of traditional and modern elements. Despite the economic apocalypse, Vietnam still had strong positive GDP growth projections, and the beginnings of Startup and Venture Capital scene. Plus I figured if I didn’t find anything there I would move on to Singapore, Malaysia, Bangkok, or wherever. I didn’t have any contacts or any Vietnamese language skills, but I ended up staying in Hanoi and building a whole new life there.

I chose to be a consultant because I knew that I didn’t want to start a full entrepreneurial venture. I had already been down that road and I knew how much of a commitment starting a new business was. Doing it in Vietnam probably would have tied me to the place for a few years at least. Actually, the main reason I became a consultant is that you can’t write “unemployed” on your business card. My real goal was just to find a job, and handing someone a business card is a better introduction than handing them a resume. Besides, I figured if someone actually hired me as a consultant in the mean time, it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

- What I learned about networking and finding work abroad -

The funny thing is that back in school I would always get mad when someone told me they wanted to be a consultant after graduation. I insisted that consulting itself, is not a job. It’s an employment relationship. It just means you’re around temporarily, that you’re billing by the hour, and that you don’t get any health insurance. I always demanded to know what people were actually going to do, and no one ever really had an answer. Now it was my turn to not have an answer either.

I moved into a cheap hotel and bought a map of the city. I found a tailor and had a suit made. I bookmarked all the websites for the various business groups in town and started going to business events and conferences to network.

After a while I figured out that sitting next to high powered global executives at business conferences, chatting, trading business cards, and sending follow-up emails is not a particularly effective method of getting a job. No one really gives a damn about you, and usually the important people in a company aren’t involved in hiring for entry level positions. Big companies have HR departments and systems in place for finding new employees, they don’t just hire random folks because they sat next to the CEO at some conference. I was just a business groupie (lamest vacation ever).

Eventually I found that the key to networking with more senior executive director types was to meet them in a non-business context, like a cultural or charity event. My first consulting contract came as a result of a charity event that I had volunteered to be the photographer for. It was a bike race. I motorbiked out in front of the cyclists, squatted on the ground, and got shots of them rushing past markets and cows and temples. It was a lot of fun. At the after-party I gorged myself on free snacks and idly chatted with whoever was within 5 feet of the food table. Somehow I ended up talking about my experience with business plans, and pretty soon I had a consulting gig helping write the business plan for a health communications NGO that was applying for its next round of funding. I wasn’t even wearing my suit.

I worked on that for two months, and did a really good job, I think. At the end I didn’t know how much to bill for. I went online and found a bunch of calculators that let you add up all of your living expenses, and your equivalent annual salary to figure out your billable rate. If I tweaked all the numbers in my favor I barely hit $25 an hour. So I asked for that salary to see if I could get away with it. I charged $950 total, and they went for it. I was now officially a professional business consultant.

I learned that it was actually much more effective to network within your own peer group. People my age or other recent arrivals were a lot more willing to talk, had more time for followups, and were much more sympathetic to the challenge of getting a foot in the door. Finally, I ended up getting a full time job as a “Strategic Consultant” at a major Vietnamese financial firm. I got the job through two buddies my own age with similar interests and disposition. I had met them through the normal process of making friends, rather than by actively “networking”. They happened to live right next to me, and happened to have a position open at their company.

My new job was to work on various projects in the company, help get brokerage services up to international best practices, help with research and English language marketing, and to work with my friends to create the companies new strategic consulting division: Management Solutions. (pro-tip: businesses with “solutions” in their name don’t know what the hell they’re doing)

The idea behind the consulting division was helping the many Vietnamese companies were born during the huge business boom in 2006 and 2007. During this time foreign investment poured into Vietnam, and businesses were able to prosper doing almost anything, often without much of a plan. Now business was tough, companies needed good research, planning, and outside expertise. We spent the next few months convincing our board to approve the new division, writing our copy, making our logo, creating marketing material, researching common business problems in Vietnam, and building a network of other consulting allies that we could call in to collaborate on projects. We even got a budget to hire another four people and pretty soon I was on the other side of the table, reading resumes and conducting interviews with people way more experienced than me.

We were interviewing Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, and IIT grads, people with experience in Merrill Lynch and the World Bank. It almost didn’t seem fair. Doing the interviews was enlightening. I quickly realized that I had screwed up a couple of my own earlier opportunities by not being able to properly answer the simple interview question: “What can you do for me?”

I read a lot of business news and business books, so I like talking about business. A few times early on, some poor business guy would take enough pity on my attempt at networking to meet for coffee. When this happened I would start ranting and raving about my insights into their industry, clever things similar companies have done, and the sorts of problems I supposed they were facing. Eventually they would stop me, knowing that my grand purpose in all this noise and fury was to get a job, and give me a chance to pitch myself by asking me what I could do for them if they hired me. I never really have an answer ready, I usually just explained that I had a lot of business skills and was happy to do whatever. I figured they should know what to do with me. But of course I wasn’t applying to a defined job in a traditional way. What I should have said is that I could do some research into the best practices of their competitors, help them improve their website, do some online marketing, do some analysis of cost and sales data and help them figure out how their different business segments are doing. I should have spent some time thinking about this stuff before meeting them. Next time I’ll know better.

Once you master these soft networking and interview skills It’s amazing the kind of work/trouble you can get yourself into.

- What I learned about doing business in Vietnam -

Soon after getting this new job I moved into a new house with my friends Kris, Joe, and Jon. Combined, we were the only foreigners in our company. We were all early twenty-something American recent college grads with a strong interest in business and a similar short term strategy for getting the most out of life. While I was busy building this consulting division one powerpoint stack at a time, Kris and Joe were building databases of stock prices and running regressions to pull out trends, writing reports and giving talks about the economy, getting interviewed on TV about investment strategy, and advising on bond issuances. Jon was upstairs advising our fund management company, sitting in on investor meetings, brainstorming ideas for new funds, and other stuff that 22 and 23 year olds would not get to do at home. We all got motorbikes. We had a big fancy house down a crazy ancient alleyway near our work. We had food delivered every night and hired two maids to come three times a week. Little old ladies sold fruit in front of our gate in the mornings, and crazy loud frogs kept us up all night. I was making $1000 a month. My rent was $150 a month, my motorbike was $50 a month, and eating out for every meal was costing about $8 a day. Life was absurd.

Some of that excitement was canceled out by how ungodly boring Vietnamese businesses are. I’m used to California where every business is some high tech organic web2.0 paradigm shift startup disrupting a new industry with a breakthrough product and a quirky name. In Vietnam, on the other hand, there are two ways of naming a business. Half the businesses here are some combination of place, product, number, and “Joint Stock Company”. Duc Thanh Wood Processing Joint Stock Company, and Construction and Investment J.S.C. no 492 are two of our clients. The other half are Vina+product, including Vinamilk and Vinaphone. These businesses all make normal stuff in normal ways, and sell it domestically. Most industries have one or two leading companies that compete more by buddying up with customers than by worrying about improving products and methods.

In school I had learned a lot about the sorts of companies that Venture Capitalists invest in. I figured where there are Venture Capitalists there would also be interesting startups. While there are two Venture Capital funds in Vietnam, offshoots of IDG and DFJ, their portfolio companies are all just localized versions of established US web2.0 models. Vietnamese websites are able to quickly build their user base, but don’t have the supporting local advertising or online retail industries to properly monetize. As far as I know, between these two fund’s combined 40+ Vietnamese portfolio companies there is only one company, Vinagame, which has been profitable. I think it will still be a while before we more innovative startups coming out of places like Vietnam.

As we got the new consulting division off the ground we were forced to confront certain… realities. We were three inexperienced white kids armed with only our undergraduate degrees, excel, powerpoint, and a bloomberg terminal. We were operating in an environment in which business decisions are usually based on the whims of the boss, deals are made according to who was friends with who, and everything happens very, very slowly. We’ve pitched our services to a few companies, and they showed some interest, but none of it has led to anything yet.

Despite all the conferences and books and reports about how Vietnam is poised to be the next “Asian tiger” economy like Taiwan or South Korea, doing business here is a disaster, a slow motion train wreck, and no one’s really interested in fixing it. The Vietnamese stock market is a good illustration of this. Part of our work is writing research reports on publicly traded Vietnamese companies. Our firm makes its money from brokerage. Since all brokers do pretty much the same thing, we try to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering better research. So we run discounted cash flow models, do industry analysis and projections, interview management, and make these big fat beautiful reports of everything there is to know about this or that Vietnamese company. We recently flew down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and pitched these reports to a dozen different investment funds. But it was all just a big waste of time.

Why? The Vietnamese stock market moves up and down in one giant blob, completely independent of the actual performance of its companies. We found one publicly traded company that runs a cable car up to a pagoda on some holy mountain in the south.This company is completely detached from the rest of the Vietnamese economy. Every year thousands of people come to pay their respects at the temple during lunar new year, and they certainly don’t base their decision on their expectations of future GDP growth. Yet this company has a beta of 1, which means its stock price fluctuates in perfect lock-step with the rest of the stock market. It’s stock price goes up and down right along with the cell phone providers and construction consortiums. Another company, a cotton producer, is such a disaster that they have a negative profit margin, and 100 times more debt than money to pay it. They can’t even get their shareholders to meet to liquidate the company. Yet, on a good market day recently their stock price hit its daily trading ceiling.

In the US you could make a fortune if you spotted these sort of inconsistencies, because you could rely on the prices to eventually correct themselves. But here a savvy investor has no advantage. The market soars when an upbeat article in the economist causes some huge fund manager in New York to slightly increase their portfolio’s exposure to emerging markets. The market tanks when the Vietnamese investors suddenly get excited about gold and pull all their money out of equities. Yet all these fund managers are sitting in their fancy offices in Ho Chi Minh City, going through the motions of raising capital, allocating investment, and collecting their fees. It’s a joke. All the ideas we learned about in school require some consensus to work. You can’t be the only one in the room with your way of thinking. If you tried to drive down the street in Hanoi using the same traffic rules as at home, you’d never move a mile.

This isn’t to say anything bad about Vietnamese people. They’re incredibly flexible and have amazing abilities to work together and improvise. This business stuff is just all very new here. With developing infrastructure, education, and legal systems, business in Vietnam will truly thrive one day. But for now, it’s foolish to bring over a bunch of standard Western business models and systems and pretend they work in such a different environment.

And this explanation implies that we even had those models to offer. Recently at a conference we made friends with two guys from Deloitte (a big famous international accounting firm) that were also setting up a similar consulting division in Hanoi. They invited us over to their office, patiently gave us all sorts of helpful advice about consulting, showed us their database of research, case studies, templates, the full materials from thousands of completed consulting contracts, and their worldwide network of experts and underlings to do their bidding. They had decades of experience doing business in tough markets. Their business cards said consultant, just like ours, but we were definitely operating on completely different levels. We were essentially the “Vietnam” of business consultants, a lot of big ideas, but not much experience or planning to back them up.

After six months of this I reached a point where I realized none of it was going anywhere any time soon. I could either finish my projects and neatly wrap up my time now, just as the new hires were arriving. Or, I could dig in, get back to networking and pitching, and really dedicate myself to this for the long term. I chose the former. Screw it. I’m going home.

- What I learned about traveling and living abroad -

When I arrived in Hanoi I was still somewhat under the impression that the key to being a good traveler was to blend in with the locals, live off a few dollars a day, walk the streets and explore the alleys hunting for street food. That, I figured, is what set us true travelers apart from the loud, awful, fat, sunburned tourists waiting in line for their overpriced buffet. I was a travel snob.

After a month or two of hanging out in weird food markets and visiting temples and pagodas I realized that not only am I not Vietnamese, I’m not a little old lady, or a monk either. And if I were Vietnamese I wouldn’t be hanging out in stinky alleys eating gross street food. Living that way is just a silly indulgent fantasy, pretending to be poor and ethnic with none of the hardship. Instead I learned to embrace the life of the expatriate. I found all the local cafes and restaurants that expats go to, not because they’re ethnically authentic quaint little secrets, but because they’re good, and because it’s nice to hang out with other expats. I found a nice swimming pool and a cool arty movie theater. I learned to go out without a backpack, or a water bottle, or a notebook, or any other silly tourist/traveler junk.

I made a pretty decent life for myself out here. It’s really no big deal living in a foreign city. You can easily learn enough of any language to order food or direct a taxi, and most any big city will have enough English speakers to build a good social life. I’m lucky that these two guys in Hanoi, Tom and Elliott, made a really good expat info website called the New Hanoian. Everyone gets the idea to make one of these websites once in a while. They spring up all the time, and usually wither away in a few months after failing to solve the chicken and egg style problem of building both content and users early on. The New Hanoian worked because Tom and Elliott were on the ground everyday, getting people to use the site, and helping to add all all the info for restaurants and bars themselves. They personally programmed the hell out of it too. They managed to build in maps, different languages, and a Q&A section. Now, after a few years of development, you can rely on the site for information about almost everything you need in Hanoi. Expat businesses live or die according to their rating on the New Hanoian, and because of that accountability, are probably a lot better than they would otherwise be.

At first I was frustrated that all expats seemingly ever wanted to do was go out to restaurants and bars. I don’t really like bars, and I got sick of hanging out in restaurants. But after a while I began to discover little pockets of culture, small groups of people that have gotten together to pursue mutual hobbies in their free time. My housemate Jon is a rock climber. He found a subculture of French rock climbers that all hang out on a little rock wall set up in the rooftop laundry room of this one guy’s place. Some of my other friends here set up a DJ collective, they play dubstep and arrange big events at the two or three decent clubs in town. One of my buddies even organizes weekly ultimate frisbee games.

If I had to classify myself socially, I would have to say that I’m a hippie/nerd. Eventually I found a local stash of funky hippie brethren. They live in crazy old houses, make yummy salads out of organic mint, sit on the floor, hang out, drink tea, play drums, talk about crystals, and rarely feel the need to go to bars or restaurants. I even managed to put together my own little band of fellow nerds to play StarCraft and watch Star Trek with after work. Sometimes the new friends I’ve made remind me so much of this or that friend back home that I’m sad they’ll probably never meet. New cities are very lonely at first, but if you work at it, you can either find or make your scene.

The flip side of becoming this integrated is that as time passes, being in a foreign place becomes less and less magical. The novelty wears off. It all becomes ordinary. Your quirky part of town just becomes the normal background of your commute.

A few times, when I met with long term businessy expats, I would get asked how long I planned to stay, and half jokingly pressured to settle down and find a Vietnamese girlfriend. The real expats saw right through me. They knew I wasn’t one of them, I was just a half-pat. I was just like all the other twenty-somethings that float through Hanoi to teach English or intern at some NGO and “find themselves” for a year. They knew it wasn’t really worth their time to buddy up with me too much, because sooner or later I would miss home and fly back.

They were right.

- What I learned about  life -

Coming out here was an attempt at optimizing my time, my effort, and my savings. I was trying to optimize the next step of my life according to what I thought was important.

Studying economics primarily involved learning how to take complex real world situations, reduce them to equations and graphs, and then use calculus to find the highest point, the optimum. After years of that it’s impossible not to try and apply the same framework to your own life, even if subconsciously, to imagine some ideal ratio of fun/sleep/love/money/health/travel/food/work and to constantly update your plan for getting there.

I’m finally starting to realize that you can’t optimize life like this. It’s too abstract, or maybe in some ways not abstract enough. Furiously thinking about it renders the whole point moot anyway as you’re not even mentally there to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Instead of living in the moment, you’re too busy optimizing the next thing, or at least I find that I usually am.

During school we had these standard definitions of “doing well”, like going to a good university and getting good grades. We knew when it was time to try harder, and when we could relax. We don’t have that any more, and making important life decisions is a lot harder.

It’s a cliche but I’m really trying to “live in the moment” and not always worry so much about what to do.

- What I learned about myself -

When deciding to come to Vietnam I was afraid to leave the safety and comfort of California, but I was more afraid to stay and miss out on an opportunity to travel and challenge myself. I figured this was the optimal choice. I put a high premium on leading an interesting life, and I thought I was pretty damn interesting for coming out here. I felt special and exciting. But recently I’ve realized I’m actually really just a typical American, and that thinking I’m so damn special is a big part of that.

Here in Hanoi I’ve got about a dozen American friends and acquaintances my age, and about a dozen other European or Australian friends and acquaintances my age. If you ask the Euros or Aussies what they’re doing here and why, they’ll mostly sort of shrug their shoulders and explain that they’re just doing their thing. They’ve got a good English teaching job, and life is easy and nice. Most of them stay in Hanoi for a couple of years.

Americans, on the other hand, what a bunch of silly people we are. Every one of my American friends either works for an NGO, doing traffic safety or health communications or protecting the environment, or they’re working in finance or economic research, investing money and crunching numbers. We’re all either trying to save the world or take it over. We’re all writers and we’re all photographers too. We all have some big story about what we’re doing with our lives and why we’re in Hanoi, and we have hundreds of quasi-artsy photos to prove to our friends on facebook how much fun it is. Few of us last even a year out here before we move on to our next big opportunity to be even more special and exciting. We are completely absurd.

More than just an American, I’ve also realized how much of a Californian I am. My other American friends here can’t understand why I prefer to spend my vacations just hanging out in one place instead of furiously motorbiking across the country, and why I’m willing to spend more money than I need to on fancy lunches and daily fruit smoothies. The three other Californians I’ve met in my time out here clicked as friends right away. I miss California and I can’t wait to go home.

And just as I was originally afraid to leave the comfort of home to try my luck in Vietnam eight months ago, I’m now afraid to leave the comfort of Hanoi for yet another uncertain future. I’m afraid of missing out on everything that will continue here without me. Everyone who leaves Hanoi for a wedding or something returns with reports of economic desolation in the wasteland of the outside world. Back at home, where all this started, going to Vietnam was my plan B. Now in Vietnam going back home has been my plan B. After this I’m out of plan Bs, and maybe it’s for the best, as having a plan B is dangerous.

I’ve worked on three major business projects in the last year: Nitride Solutions, PostersforHumans.com, and now the consulting division. I’ve bailed out on all of them. Each time I’ve gone with my plan B, and I’m not sure if those were the right choices. They were easy enough to justify at the time. All three projects had slowed down when the demand we were expecting never materialized. But that’s only half the story. All three times I got lazy, and stopped trying. I approached each project with a burst of energy and enthusiasm, but soon my effort was waning and I was looking over my shoulder for something else to do.  It’s only my first year out of college and still very easy for me to say “it’s just not for me”, and no one really expects me to build a financially successful business anyway. Still, I feel like next time I really need to see things through instead of running away.

I rely hugely on my friends. Growing up, my mom and I were our entire family in this country, and for some long awkward teenage years I was horrifically unpopular at school. Since then I’ve always made a massive effort to be social and maintain relationships. Besides companionship and fun, I’ve relied on these relationships to find work, housing, and opportunity. Here in Vietnam I got my job and my house through my friends, and when I get back home I plan to crash at a friend’s place back in Santa Barbara and hopefully get some part-time work with a friend doing computer repair.

But as a young person what you can get through cronyism is limited. Friends can help you find opportunities, but you need to fulfill them for yourself. Being social is a lot more fun than actually working, and the illusion that it’s just as useful is a dangerous one. I need to learn how to work hard, stick with a project, and achieve things for myself.

- moving on -

As a whole, my experience in Vietnam was fantastic. I found the interesting work opportunities I was looking for, went on fun adventures, learned a lot, and made some amazing new friends. The eight months ended up costing me about $5000 net, including a week on a tropical island with a girlfriend for new year, another week motorbiking around thailand with a buddy over Vietnamese new year, having two suits tailored, and a lot of expenses that were foolish and avoidable in retrospect (including a chinese knockoff iphone). I think it would have taken me another eight months of work to break even on the trip.

Moving on now is bittersweet, going home yet leaving so much behind. It includes the recognition that I have spent not only my money here, but also my time. I have grown older out here. The great sadness of growing older is seeing your opportunities disappear as you choose one path at the expense of others. You can change your mind, and you can change your plan, but you can’t stop time. One way or another you’ll end up doing something, that something will be “the real world”, and it will probably involve doing some hard work.

But don’t despair! I’ve discovered an up-side!

Sharing this story is part of an effort to shift my narcissism from photography to writing. I used to take photos of everything I did. I wanted to prove to myself and to the rest of the world that I had been there and done that. That I wasn’t still sitting alone at home like the awkward kid I was in middle school. Recently, I looked through some old photos of myself from early college and I was so embarrassed. What an asshole I was, making some stupid face at some stupid girl at some stupid party. I can’t believe the things that I thought were important to photograph. My intentions were so shallow and obvious. At the time I thought I would treasure these memories, but now I hardly identify with the person I see in the photos.

Maybe years from now, I’ll re-read this, and I won’t lament the tragedy of all my lost possibilities and unfulfilled opportunities, and I won’t congratulate myself on my business insights either, because I’ll no longer think any of that is important. I’ll simply say to myself “well, at least I’m not that guy anymore.”

People are often confused or offended when I use the word hippie.

Some people either think the term is derogatory, or they think that hippies were something that only existed in the 60s, and that you can’t be a hippie today any more than you can be a flapper. These people haven’t spent enough time on the west coast lately.

Most of my friends in California are, as you can see, obviously hippies and I genuinely consider myself to be a hippie as well. I’ve even got some hippie buddies here in Hanoi, they do drum circles in Lenin park on Sundays.

I really can’t think of any other term to use to describe the ongoing social/cultural movement that I’ve been living in for most of my life. I don’t even like to call it a movement because it’s really not going anywhere, it’s just how a lot of people think and live. It’s more of a lifestyle philosophy.

The parts of hippie culture that resonate most with me are: the focus on a happy and healthy lifestyle, living within your means and enjoying what you have, eating well, being social, relaxing and taking it easy, being experimental and open to new ideas and cultures, being politically progressive and believing in peace and the environment, traveling, helping people, enjoying food, music, and art, but not necessarily by the same rules as the critics and experts. In short, living well.

On a Friday night, when my more mainstream friends are standing in line to see some stupid $9 movie, my hippie friends are having bonfires and potlucks, playing music and dancing, jumping in the surf at the beach or finding hot springs (or at least sneaking in to the movie through the back door).

And while a lot of people seem to have a natural tendency to forming fixed and closed off social groups,  most of the hippies I know are a lot more open minded and quick to make new friends and invite them along for the fun.

I guess if someone held a knife to my throat and demanded that I describe hippies without saying the word “hippie” I would say progressive, alternative, bohemians.

There are also some parts of hippie culture that drive me completely nuts: embarrassing and counterproductive protests, blind allegiance to all things alternative, chard. But what especially gets me is the prevalence of, and often militant belief in, poorly thought through political, metaphysical, and scientific theories. (How can someone concurrently believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and an afterlife!?)

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So what does this have to do with business? Well, they say the key to marketing is to find your niche. And many companies have targeted the hippie niche, as many hippies have a lot of money.

People often think that hippies having a lot of money is hypocritical, and to some extent it is, but it also makes perfect sense: It’s a lot easier to reject the traditional goals of career success and material wealth when you’ve grown up around a lot of wealth and you realize that big houses and fancy cars don’t really add much to the day to day quality of your life.

It also really helps if your parents pay for you to go to college. College today is hardly a full time endeavor, and my hippie ways were slowly built up over years of idle afternoons and long summer vacations. It’s hard to listen to someone explain the wonders of kombucha when you have to be at work in 15min.

In theory, hippies are supposed to reject consumerism. But some companies have created brands that really work for hippies. Two examples (out of many) are Moleskine and Nalgene.

Moleskine makes notebooks. Unlike other manufacturers they don’t sell their notebooks in the school supply isle of supermarkets and office stuff stores. They sell their product in book stores and airports, and they claim on the packaging that their notebooks are the same type as some used by Hemingway and Picasso.

Nalgene makes water bottles, another deceptively simple product. Their water bottles are very strong and were originally popular with climbers that supposedly have a problem with dropping and breaking their water bottles while climbing.

These companies have a lot of similarities. They make very high quality products. They use very subtle branding, but are definitely distinct enough to get you noticed by other fans of the brand. Most importantly though these products imply a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle where you travel around the world sketching and writing, and you spend so much of your time dangling from cliffs that dropping and shattering your water bottle is a serious concern. Normal notebooks or water bottles obviously wouldn’t stand a chance.

People love these brands. Fans have uploaded 3,169 photos of their Nalgenes and 74,755 photos of their Moleskines to flikr. There are even 49 photos that have both Moleskines and Nalgenes tagged in them, including a couple of people that decided to draw pictures of their Nalgenes in their Moleskines. (idiots)

Other hippie brands include: Dr. Bronner’s soap, Braggs Amino Acid condiment, Rainbow Sandals, and of course, Apple.

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For each of these successful brands there are a million little companies trying to catch the next wave. Many are founded by hippies that have followed their dreams and opened their own business creating something that was important to them, but a lot of them also tend to be total scams. The scams often take advantage of the hippie enthusiasm for silly pseudo-science.

So about a year ago I was hanging out with some of my hippie friends up in Homer, Alaska and I noticed a very silly bottle of water:

Since then I’ve made it a point to check out the bottled water whenever I pop into a local health food store or co-op.

“Real Water” vs. “Earth Water”…  That’s a tough choice. I guess someone figured out that hippies are especially finicky about their water.

I soon realized that the crazy bottled water market was turning into a serious arms race:

Here are some quotes from my favorites

“H20 Vortex, Activated Water: spin cycle process with ULTRA OXYGEN”

“Borba skin balance water firming contains a revolutionary cultivated bio-vitamin complex along with a scientifically designed blend of nutrients intended to promote the skin’s natural support system, helping to nourish and tone the skin. Borba skin balance water is formulated to work with your body’s chemistry to promote healthy skin. This on-the-go, skin care-infused beverage combines simplicity and nutrition with the goodness of water. It’s water with benefits”

“HiOsilver Oxygen Water: Spring Water TurbOcharged with PURE OXYGEN (TM), 6 times the oxygen (50 ppm) of ordinary water, Glass bottle retains oxygen, Made with spring water, pH 8.4, naturally alkaline, For fresh breath, No sodium”

“New studies at a leading American and European Medical University have found that there is a water that not only fully hydrates, but may also be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. That water is Penta. – Penta water is first cleaned using a state of the art purification system that removes all impurities. No other bottled water is as pure! The water then goes through the patented penta process that spins the water at high speed and pressure for 10 hours. This unique process energizes the water to be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. And, unlike many antioxidant supplements and beverages that use synthetic additives, Penta has no additives so it is fully absorbed by your body maximizing its antioxidant effects.”

“e-water: A revolution in refreshment! Full Spectrum Electrolytes with fulvic acid.Stimulates metabolism, Increases absorption of key electrolytes, scavenges heavy metals/free radicals, increases enzymatic activity”

“AQUAVYBE’S pure, smooth taste comes from a unique formula that combines natural, bio-energetic minerals from Original Himalayan Crystal Salt (TM), with quantum science, creating super-hydrating, energizing water, with naturally occurring electrolytes.”

“E2 – Electron Energized (TM) water is the most advanced water available today. Through a proprietary process, E2 water is stably enhanced in two very important ways. First it is alkalized and second it is negatively ionized. Most bottled water is acidic which according to many nutritionists is unhealthy. E2 water helps the body become more alkalized  for improved health. Second, Nearly all water is positively ionized because the water molecules have been stripped of valuable electrons. This causes the water molecules to share electrons and clump together. These clumped molecules are not easily absorbed on a cellular level. With E2, the water molecules are negatively ionized. These negatively ionized water molecules contain free electrons and unclump so that they can be absorbed quickly on a cellular level. As an added benefit, the free electrons act as an anti-oxidant to neutralize free radicals. So to truly hydrate on a cellular level, use E2 – Electron Energized (TM) water. You will taste and feel the difference! Oxidation Reduction Potential (OPR) of -50 Guaranteed!”

One water bottle brand is the clear winner of the bullshit war.

AquaHydrate: The Ultimate Hydrating Fluid! Aquahydrate is the purest, health promoting water available anywhere. Some waters are purified, some are alkaline, some have organic trace minerals, some are micro-structured, and some have proper electrolyte balance – AQUAHYDRATE has it all!”

This is like when a little kid, after being asked what he would wish for if a genie appeared, thinks to say “I wish for infinite wishes.”.

I wish for infinite water awesomeness!

Genius.

In defense of my hippie side and hippie friends, I’ve never actually seen anyone buy any of this silly water. Well, except for the Egyptian geometry one. But come on, Egyptian geometry? That’s a pretty cool thing to put in your water.

update: yes I know that people are now boycotting Nalgene in favor of Klean Kanteen on the basis that Nalgenes use toxic plastics and make restraints for animal testing. This is just the next step in a long line of trendy water holders. I remember the bygone eras of Bota Bags and Camelbaks. Like I said, hippies are finicky about their water.

I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing here in Hanoi 10 years ago. The internet is really what’s made it possible for me. I’ve learned about these business conferences I’ve been going to from local Vietnam business news and organization websites, like the website for the US chamber of commerce in Hanoi. There are also Hanoi groups on both Facebook.com and CouchSurfing.com. I’ve met up with people from both sites, expats and local Vietnamese, and made some friends.

Most helpful though has been a site called the New Hanoian (http://newhanoian.com). This is a local expat information site. People go on this site and exchange reviews and advice about how to do and where to get almost everything.

The site has a fantastic built in google map feature with all the local streets manually added in, so that when you look up any business or event it shows you the location. This sounds normal enough, but in Hanoi this is a big deal as streets are tiny and winding and the names change every two  blocks.  Because of how useful the site is, and how helpful and nice its’ community is, it has become very popular for planning and promoting events. It’s great for me because the people and organizations that plan the events have profiles on the site it’s very easy to get in contact with the afterward. Plus the site has internal groups that plan their own events. There’s a photographers BBQ coming up that I’m pretty excited about.

I tried to start a website like this back in my freshman year of college. It was supposed to have reviews of local music venues, listings of local music events, and a message board for people to talk and plan things out together. I imagined that this site would foster a really interesting online community that would spill over into real life and actually facilitate the independent music scene in Santa Barbara.

It was a very short lived project. I never really got around to reviewing all the venues. When I tried to get my friends to talk to each other on the message board I ran into a chicken and egg problem. With a blank message board people didn’t know what to post. There weren’t any conversations going on to show what the message board was for. Also, there was no real incentive to go back and check up on your post and read responses on such a sparsely trafficked website.Worse still was that I wasn’t even part of the music scene in Santa Barbara, neither were my friends. I just wanted to make a website and feel important.

In the end the real thing that killed the site was simply that people just didn’t need it. There wasn’t much of a live music scene in town. Most people just went to dance clubs, bars and house parties. What small music scene there was got by just fine promoting on myspace, facebook, and putting up fliers at coffee shops.

After a month I shut the thing down. I felt pretty silly about it for a while. In retrospect it was a great learning experience. Since then I’ve literally had over a dozen friends and acquaintances ask me for guidance and advice on very similar projects. They includes a local surfing site, a local bar/club site, a local coupon site, a local employer review site, a site to help people find particular items of clothing out of magazines, a myspace for babies, and a computer game like interface that you use to go about your daily life by listing your various goals and accomplishments.

My spiel usually goes like this: It’s a cute idea but you should give it up because a quick Google search will show you that there’s already 5 websites trying to do exactly what you’re doing. If that doesn’t phase them I go on to explain that the first big problem is creating a site that has enough actually content and usefulness from day 1 to attract the initial group of users.  Furthermore, those first users are really going to set the whole tone of the site for the rest of it’s existence so they need to be carefully nurtured.

Plus it’s really very difficult to get users. The era of “surfing the web” are over. Most people now have about 6 websites or so that they check every day, and asking them to add another one to their routine is really asking a lot. Especially when you take into consideration that you’re now competing not just with websites similar to your own, but also with all other the millions of helpful and entertaining sites that the user could spend their internet browsing time on. You actually need to relentlessly promote your site to keep it in peoples mind.

A bunch of sites have sprung up trying to the ‘craigslist’ of my university, or of the UC system, or of colleges in general. The only one that’s stuck at my school is called ULoop. They spent the last two years consistently putting flyers everywhere, taking out ads in the school paper and on facebook, plus promoting and sponsoring other peoples events and organizing a few of their own. Even after all that the site is basically just a few people asking each other for chemistry textbooks or a room for rent, and it has no real revenue model as far as I can tell.

So even if your site does take off it’s really hard to get it to actually make any money to justify all the time you have to pour into it. Most people think that they’re fine with that and are happy to do it as a hobby, but it really starts to feel like a job after a while. It’s hard to justify an unpaid job that consists mostly of sitting in front of your computer for hours every dealing with annoyed and confused users or website errors.

Of course all of these warnings also assume that the person has the competence to design, build, maintain, and most importantly scale the website in the first place.

All of this advice had to do with different reasons why these sites fail. What I hadn’t really thought about is why some succeed. I guess I had always assumed that they just sort of were in the right place at the right time and got lucky.

Thinking about the New Hanoian though I realize that the key is that people have to genuinely need your site. The New Hanoian works because if you’re living in Vietnam, and you’re not from Vietnam, doing most day to day stuff is very difficult. People really need this information just to get through their week. If you think about it all other successful web2.0 social community websites give the users something they really need.

I’ve had a few chances to meet the and talk to the guys running the New Hanoian and they’re genuienly very nice. More importantly though is they are very active in the community here, they know everyone and they really know about all the businesses and orginizations that use the site.

Anyone planning on starting a community web2.0 social networking whatever website should really study the New Hanoian.

Bonus business idea: having a group of writers paid to act as message board posters in the early days of a new online community. Call it Social Seed or something. Contract based on # of users and # of posts per day. Some users also in charge of monitoring post quality.

Small run manufacturing would be a fun project to do while traveling through Southeast Asia. It’s very easy in a place like this to bring a design for a product to a manufacturer like a factory, tailor, or woodworker and have an initial run of under 100 produced. I’m not talking about making your own solar powered laptop or anything requiring serious engineering. Let’s say you had an idea for a dress or a backpack. You could come over here with some plans/diagrams/schematics, find the local district of people who make similar stuff, and have a few made. After a bit of back and forth, and maybe spending a few hundred dollars, you would probably end up with something pretty similar to what you imagined. Then if you had any sort of connections with retailers or distributors you could send them a few samples to see if they wanted to place an order. You could even invent your own brand for the project.

In reality the life cycle of new retail products is a lot more complex and involves going to a lot of trade shows. Perhaps though, if you could target the right niche, you could bypass all of that.

For example California is filled with hemp stores selling stuff made of hemp. I bet if you designed a sweet little messenger style laptop bag, maybe with a cool lock on the top, had it made out of hemp, and put a panda bear or something on the side of it you’d be in business. Or what if you made people elaborate custom Halloween costumes. All you would need is their measurements and pictures of what they wanted to look like. I would want an old western style suit like the one Daniel Day Lewis wore in There Will be Blood. Also, because you’re actually on the ground here you can ensure that your stuff isn’t being made in sweatshops.

The temptation for me personally is to go through all of my pictures from burning man and other hippie festivals to look for really cool custom clothing that people made and try to get some similar stuff whipped up. Of course this is a huge ethical conflict; these people very thoughtfully chose to express themselves by wearing stuff that wasn’t pumped out of a factory in Asia. It’s seems wrong to steal their ideas and do something in the exact opposite spirit as what they intended. But cool hippie clothes made of colorful Vietnamese silk sold on San Francisco would easily make somebody a lot of money.

The ethical middle ground would probably be to approach people, tell them about your idea, and ask them to make a few designs for you. Or you could just use the uncreative cop-out of giving 10% of the money you make to a charity for blind buddhist orphans.

Another interesting project would be to bring western things to new markets. I went bowling the other day here in Hanoi. I thought I was in for a wild experience, bowling in Vietnam, crazy. I was wrong. It was a perfectly normal American style bowling alley, complete with those stupid animations when you make a strike or a gutter ball. It was half full of a few groups of Vietnamese kids, a couple of older guys that you could tell hung out there a lot, and a few Europeans. All the bowling equipment was American, they charged about $2 a game, they severed beer and soft drinks, and they even had a little arcade with videogames and air hockey on the side.

What struck me about this is how funny it is that some American bowling equipment company one day randomly getting a sale from Vietnam. My guess is that a Vietnamese entrepreneur traveled somewhere, saw a bowling alley, and figured he would build one back in Hanoi. And why not? They have ipods in the stores here for way more than they would be in the US. Someone is probably just ordering them retail and reselling them at a markup. It makes you wonder about all the other things that there might be a market for here. I’m tempted to tell my friend Bryan to come here and setup a paintball park. Somehow though I can imagine that being politically awkward.