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.”

It’s been really interesting to work on an entrepreneurial project within an existing firm.

In a lot of ways it’s great. From day one you already have a fax machine, an established brand, and a pay check. You get to skip all the mundane work of actually setting up a new business entity. You have whole departments at your disposal to do your bidding. It feels so good to just send something to the marketing department and tell them to make a press release for it and send it out.  And getting an actual paycheck in the first months of a new venture is an uncommon luxury for entrepreneurs. (although it’s at the expense of equity)

Entrepreneurship within a firm isn’t a new idea, but it’s often overlooked. Macintosh started as an entrepreneurial side project at Apple and ended up becoming their main product line. Post-it’s started as an independent project at 3M that employees worked on on their own time.

I feel like right now, with the economy being what it is and all, a lot of firms with too many idle employees could really benefit by putting some of them on entrepreneurial projects.  They could be developing new projects or divisions, doing consulting or training for partner firms, figuring out how to make or do something internally that the firm used to have to buy, etc.

In a lot of ways though I miss the wild-west style of doing a real standalone startup. I find that I do a lot better work at 2 in the morning than at 8 in the morning, and I don’t think wearing a suit makes my work particularly better either. And I’m also having to get used to the idea of working on a project, emailing it off to the boss, and never hearing of any feedback or results.

The funniest part of it, which I’m completely unaccustomed to, is the dilbertesque world of office politics, inefficiencies, and paradoxes.

Some departments just don’t get along with other departments. We have an IT department who’s primary task, as far as I can tell, is figuring out which websites employees are using to goof off, and blocking them. But they block sites in a very absurd way, they block all web addresses that contain certain strings of 3 letters. For a while we couldn’t use our google spreadsheets because they had blocked the letters “ads”. (spreadsheet)

Today one of us was goofing off, and he discovered that the letters “imo” were blocked when someone’s facebook profile wouldn’t load (someone with a long silly russian name that had “imo” in it).

Probably there is some sort of Vietnamese social networking site or chat client that has “imo” somewhere in the name, perhaps a site for sharing opinions, who knows. I don’t, because I can’t load the url.

I’ve made it a minor personal quest to go yell at the IT department whenever they block websites or disable some functionality on my computer. I got my google chat functionality back by showing them that the google powered search on a Vietnamese news website had been disabled by their shennanigans. Once one of my partners had to get management approval to use his USB thumb drive.

So I sat and sat, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any important business words that had “imo” in them. Eskimo? I needed a good reason to go mess with IT.

I tried to search online for words that contained imo, but of course my searches got blocked. So I enlisted my friends on google chat to help me out (previous victory paying off!). I found this site that lets you search for a piece of a word: http://www.onelook.com/?w=*imo*&scwo=1&sswo=1&scwo=0&sswo=0 and my girlfriend was nice enough to load it on her computer and email me the results.

Unfortunately none of these words could be reasonably related to any of my work online. I guess I might have been able to argue that I needed to search for “Vietnam antimonopoly law”, but that’s a stretch, and antimonopoly isn’t really a word.

although this part of the list does make a cool word pyramid:

135. limous
136. limousin
137. limousine
138. limousines
139. longanimous
140. magnanimous
141. magnanimously
142. magnanimousness

check that out.

Next I tried to search for Vietnamese business news that contains the letters imo by clicking through archives and doing a page search in my browser. I found this article http://www.vnbusinessnews.com/2009/01/vietnamese-kimonos-win-japanese-hearts.html which I guess must be about kimonos that are being manufactured in Vietnam and sold in Japan. Still, not very important.

So I don’t have a good reason to go yell at IT today. They win this round. Bastards.

I wonder if I were at a real startup if I would have actually been working on my work during that time instead of trying to thwart my rivals in the next room.

I can’t blame it on the suit because today was dress down friday, woo! office life!

I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been adjusting to working full time and finally finishing this business plan consulting project which has been eating up my free time.

So here’s an update:

After a lot of powerpointing we got our division approved. My two partners and I are now officially a strategic consulting team. We’re hiring four more people who will come in over the summer, and we have our work cut out for us.

We are stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Large Vietnamese firms and international firms operating in Vietnam already have have a bunch of consultants from the big law firms, funds, and international consulting agencies running around. Plus, most of their staff have a lot more experience than we do. Small and medium sized Vietnamese firms on the other hand often don’t really understand what consulting is and whatever it is they don’t have much interest in paying for it.

This leaves us with a very narrow band of potential clients: up-and-coming mid sized Vietnamese firms that are hip to the idea of consulting and aspire to be a bit more up to international standards, but don’t really have the resources to pay for fancy real consultants and are willing to give a chance to a couple of white kids in their early 20s.

This all begs the question of “what exactly do we do anyway?”, and we’re still in the process of answering that for ourselves. From our point of view it’s  basically anything we can get people to pay us for and actually do a good job on.

externally the answer is going to be something like:

“[Our division] works together with top management teams, boards, and investors to create the detailed analysis, long term strategies, and practical plans needed by firms to survive and to thrive in Vietnam. We provide external, objective advice offered from an independent perspective that successful firms rely on to help direct and validate their strategy.

Our international team brings the tools and best practices used by the world’s leading organizations to tackle the specific objectives of our clients. Then, by combining the resources of Thang Long Securities and Military Bank with our network of partners, we facilitate the implementation of these new plans, ensuring that they translate into real world results.”

What I wish we could just say is “Look, if your firm is having some sort of a problem that you’re not sure how to deal with, why not let us come in and take a crack at it? We’re relatively cheap, we’re smart, and we might have a different approach than you.”

Once we get good enough at making this argument we’ll have to deal with what happens when it actually works. It’s not that we’re useless, far from it, it’s just that most of our skills are very direct and analytical. We’re good at economics, which is to say that we’re good at running big sets of numbers through excel, pulling out some key ratios, running a a couple of regressions, and figuring out what causes what.

I’ve been doing the opposite kind of research lately. I’ve just been running around and meeting with everyone who will take the time to see me at funds, law firms, commercial organizations, and every company we have any sort of relationship with, and just having lunch with people and picking their brains about business in Vietnam.

What I’m figuring out about Vietnam is that solid, reliable data to analyze and to base your decisions on is very hard to come by. Because of this, and just because of the culture, a lot of decision making is very informal. Deals get made because of who knows who and on the whims of whoever owns the company

What I’m learning is that while in a place like Vietnam, because there aren’t as many qualified people, it’s more easy to jump right into doing something at a high level. The counterbalance to that is because there is so much informality it takes a really long time to actually figure out what’s going on and how to get things done.

All of the macroeconomic reports and estimates these days are guessing that Vietnam will snap out of its economic funk around the end of 2009, which should also be right about when we can expect to really get this consulting thing off the ground, and right about when I expect to really get a good sense of how to operate in this environment.

The end of 2009 is also about the very latest possible time that I plan to be leaving Vietnam.

Still, by that time I probably will have learned a lot about informal and intuitive information gathering and how to navigate through subtle social and political constructs to get stuff done as an outsider.

I figure that will be a valuable skill set when doing business back in the developed world where everyone else is just running the numbers.

Hopefully. Or maybe I’ll just get fat.

Woo!

Until then, here’s a sneak preview of Vietnam’s hottest new strategic consulting team:

So it worked.

I finally got a job.

I am the new co-director of a currently non-existent strategic consulting division at a major Vietnamese finance firm. I have a desk, my own phone extension, a new bank account with Military Bank, an extended work visa, and one week to finish a presentation of my initial financial and strategic analysis of 3 publicly traded Vietnamese companies and a plan for how to build this new department.

I got the position thanks to the help of two friends I have here (in addition to taking the time to send the company my resume, put on my suit, and come in to meet the boss). So I got it through networking, although not really the kind I was writing about. Rather it seems to have come about totally independently of most of this running around I’ve been doing. More so just the normal kind of networking where you naturally hang out with people similar to you.

It seems like luck. I happened to meet two American guys my age, with similar tastes, preferences, and tendency towards furious nerdy argument, that live about two blocks from me,  and were just put in charge of hiring some fresh meat for special projects at their finance firm. But I guess getting lucky sooner or later was the plan all along.

So now the three of us are building a plan to create a division that has to overcome a lot of challenges. First and foremost it would have to be able to offer genuine, insightful, useful, and practical advice to Vietnamese corporations. This means that we will have to have better insight into the markets, competitive dynamics, competencies, and potential for these firms than the people running them do. Then the real hard part is going to be convincing the firms to pay us to do it.

It would also have to be accepted within the complexities of interdepartmental firm politics; not taking business or power away from anyone else.

Our only tools are PowerPoint, Google, a Bloomberg terminal, our education, and our wits.

We present our analysis and our plan on Monday. If we succeed the new department we create will be our jobs. We’re bargaining to get our own office space upstairs and we might even bring in our own interns.

For me it’s really the perfect job. It will be my duty to spend all day thinking really hard about strategies I think businesses should peruse, and then to design and present them. It’s like making a cat the chief officer of finding sunny places to nap.

There’s a sad irony to all of this though. This should be triumphant success of my experiment in entrepreneurial travel which I’ve chronicled in this blog.  All this time I’ve been worrying about my suit, my business cards, my resume, and my contacts, running around, trying to find an opportunity like this. Finally I do, and after just two days of working (8 to 6 today) I feel as though everything is already changing.

I feel like my weekdays, amounting to five sevenths of my life, will simply disappear to another universe; a surreal looping indoor universe of wake, commute, work, food, sleep, repeat, occasionally interrupted by menial errands.

I worry that I won’t have the free time or extra energy to devote to my writing, my photography, or my health. I’m really scared that I might not be able to put in all the time I have been into keeping up my relationships with my family, my friends, and my girlfriend. Maybe those were all just the temporary luxuries of unemployment.

I feel like such a baby. Wah wah, I have a job. I can’t keep sleeping until noon, exploring temples all day, and playing on my laptop all night like I have been for months. Poor me. On the one hand I got exactly what I wanted. On the other I feel like I’ve fallen right into the life that I came out here to escape. (the third hand is holding a duck)

I guess it’s all relative. I’m incredibly lucky and thankful to have the opportunities that I’ve had, and it’s certainly not an appropriate time to complain about having a job, especially in finance. And maybe the simple sadness of growing older is seeing your life turn from an imagined spectrum of possibilities to one single path.

I could write more about it but I have to go to sleep. I’m tired and I have work in the morning.

Running a business is about more than just making money.

This is an especially important thing to remind yourself when you’re not making any money.

My friend Ian and I have been running a small independent art licensing and online poster retailing business out of our garage for the last 3 years (for more info follow the “projects” link on the right). Lately we’ve been working on the annual task of sending our artists their accrued royalties from the previous year.

Our agreement with the artists is that they make a royalty of 50% of the profit from the sales and licensing of their art. As the business isn’t exactly profitable yet, their royalties this year were rather meager. So along with the check we sent out a letter thoughtfully explaining the progress made and challenges faced by the business in the last year.

We were expecting some serious grumpiness in return.

Instead we got nothing but incredible support and understanding feedback from the artists.

“I just wanted to say thanks, and I really appreciate you sharing all that with us and keeping us informed. That said, I still believe in you guys, and will continue to pass on your URL to all my friends as I’ve already been doing all this time and telling them about your mission statement. “

“i love what you guys do, whether you’re making money or not. anything I can do to help? no charge, total volunteer work.”

“You guys are saints. It’s been a real pleasure working with you”

Many of them also offered to license new art to us and one even offered to give up their royalty payment so that we could keep it to support the business.

This has really renewed our enthusiasm for the project.

What’s exciting about this business is that if we ever actually get licensing contracts with major publishers we can run the business from anywhere in the world with just a laptop and an internet connection, so long as we still have our accountant and someone to check our p.o. box for us back at home.

That was the dream all along; to have a fully digital business. We would scout out independent artists, in person and online, maintain a portfolio of high quality print ready scans and renders of their art, we would then market that portfolio to publishers, while periodically collecting the royalties from sales, and in turn sending our artists their share. Of course a key part of the plan was also that the business would make money.

What happened in reality is that publishers weren’t initially interested in licensing our art from us. So we went down a long and hard road of creating and retailing the products ourselves to prove their market viability. This involved a lot of really unpleasant work for Ian and I; dealing with printing, inventory, storage, shipping, credit card processing, sales tax, returns, website maintenance, marketing, vending, etc. The small scale we were operating at kept us always just below break-even. The whole experience was rather draining.

Now we’re preparing to make our last marketing push to the publishers. We will send them physical samples of the posters we’ve been selling along with some of our sales data to show that people actually buy the things.

I honestly don’t have very high hopes. Risk and innovation are rare in this industry, and the economic situation has further compounded the publishers’ conservative nature.

In retrospect if I could do it all over again I would have included in the team someone who actually knew something about art, and someone who had some experience in the industry.

Still, it would be a shame to have come this far and not give it one last shot. The incredible support from our artists is really the inspiration we needed to get back on track.

Wish us luck.

I recently used up the last of my batch of 100 business cards.

People here love trading business cards, especially at these conferences. I’ve been handing the things to everyone I meet. (I could say that I’ve been handing them out like hotcakes, but when’s the last time someone handed you a hot cake?)

So far I’ve gotten three work opportunities.

For those of you keeping score at home that’s a hit rate of 3%.

-

The one I’m most excited about is a possible position at a French architecture firm as a “green building project manager”.

For all the businessy events I’ve gone to lately I actually ended up with this just by chatting with one of the regulars at Derry’s, the bar nearest to where I’m staying, after popping in for a late meal on a Sunday night.

He’s working as an architect here in Hanoi so we started talking about the green building conference I had recently been to. I also mentioned that I briefly studied in an architecture program at Cal Poly and have kept up on news relating to green and modular building ever since.

When I told him that I was looking for work here in Hanoi he said there might have an opening for me at his firm. My job would be to research different methods of green building and put together presentations for clients on why they should bother.

Right now I’m holding my breath waiting for the boss to come back from vacation to have a real interview.

-

Another recipient of one of the three lucky cards was a partner in a new hotel management company. I arranged to meet with him and the company’s founder. They asked me about my experience with marketing and I told them about my various marketing classes and my marketing experience in my previous businesses and jobs. They said they might want to hire me, starting at $1000 a month full time, to do various marketing projects for them.

To test me out they gave me a bunch of convoluted fact sheets, brochures, and other copy about their hotels that needed to be translated from nonsense English into regular English. They also accepted my offer to make a quick simple website for them, as they don’t have one yet. All free of charge.

So I spent a few long nights re-engineering passages like this:

“Tan Da Resort is created by the peaceful atmospheres & harmony, that you find similarities between Human & Nature. The green air outside is created from bamboo & natures breath, while setting is simple furniture but modelled with the combination of wood & Vietnamese bamboo to refresh your life and get away from the work pressure.”

I also put together this simple website entirely out of content I pulled from a PowerPoint stack they forwarded me.

They responded by saying they were very dissatisfied with the website and without thanking me for the copy editing. They can keep their stupid $1000 a month job. I don’t want to do marketing anyway.

-

The third opportunity came as a follow-up from the bike trip photography I did. One of the participants I spoke with works in a local NGO that specializes in health communications. I had told him about my experience with business plans. It turns out his organization is in the process of finishing a business plan to present to their primary donor for their next round of funding. They didn’t have any experience with business plans and needed some help.

I finally got to put on my new suit and meet with them to discuss their progress. They decided to pay me a consulting fee to help get the plan presentation ready. This is actually something I am very qualified to do. We studied business plans extensively in my Technology Management Program at UCSB and I co-authored the business plan for my previous company, Nitride Solutions, through countless versions and revisions and presented it to investors.

-

This project is a huge milestone for me. For starters I am thrilled that someone is taking the title of “Business Development Consulting” displayed on my business card seriously (especially considering that I sort of just made it up on the spot).

More importantly though is that I am getting paid for work that I literally did on my laptop while sitting on the beach watching the sunset. I’m charging $25 an hour consulting fee x 10 hours of work, so while this doesn’t get me much closer to financial sustainability, it does somewhat justify my fantasy about earning money by applying my business skills abroad.

In a previous post I talked about my quest to get a proper suit. I decided to take the time and get a suit custom tailored.

Unfortunately the tailor I wanted was unavailable, so I thought I would get another cheaper suit made of a lighter material to hold me over and to wear on hot days.

Then silliness struck; once I had just been fitted for interim suit my first choice tailor became available after all. So I ended up getting two suits made simultaneously for me by two different tailors.

I didn’t tell them about each other.

Nguyen was the first tailor. He and his wife run a small tailor shop that I found listed on an expat info website I use (the New Hanoian). I had it made out of a lightweight grey cotton acrylic kind of fabric that I chose from the fabrics he had in the store. I also emailed him some photos of the style of suit I prefer.

Linh was the tailor that came highly recommended to me.  She has a side company that makes cleverly branded, high end, natural, handmade soaps in small batches for export to fancy hotels in the US and Europe.

Linh first met me to talk about what kind of suit I wanted: two button, single vented, and slim fitting, with narrow notched lapels and the jacket cut high. Two days later we went together to the fabric market to pick out the fabric for the suit. I chose a black wool and cotton blend, and a blue paisley for the lining.

Here’s how they turned out:

The black suit on the left came out really well. It feels heavy and warm, and is the right combination of soft and firm. It fits well and it’s cut how I wanted. Combined fabric and tailoring cost $250.

The Grey suit on right came out ok. It fits fine, though the jacket is a bit longer than I wanted, and the fabric feels a bit stiff and thin. It also feels a but frumpy, almost like wearing a suit that’s a prop in a play. It is still tailor made, so it’s serviceable. It only cost $85.

What I didn’t realize is that this whole business confrence scene that I’ve been hanging around doesn’t really exist near the holidays. Now I have to wait for the first good opportunity to try them out. Also I need a tie.

I saw a post on the NewHanoian the other day looking for models for a shoot of new tours by a tourism company. In exchange for modeling you get a free tour. It sounded cool so I called the guy in charge and told him I’d like to participate.

He was doing a bunch of different tours, unfortunately I could only make it to one heading out to a traditional pottery village outside of Hanoi.

The van had to wait for me to catch up from investment outlook lecture thing I had attended that morning. There were three of us “models” and three people from the tourism company. The other two models were a really nice guy from San Diego who was studying in Vietnam and a girl I was actually already friends with who’s working here as a German teacher.

We all went into a little pottery workshop they knew and they carefully positioned me in front of a ovoid lump of clay on a makeshift pottery wheel. I proceeded to mangle the lump into something like an  misshapen oversized ashtray while they took some pictures. I think it became apparent pretty early on that I wasn’t a very good model for this task. They figured out instead to take the San Diego guy and put him in front of an already made vase and just have him pretend like he was putting the finishing touches on it. Later we went back to Hanoi to eat some street food back and take photos of that.

I had my camera with me and figured I could help out by taking a few pictures. I got a couple of decent ones. I also had a flash with me which I lent to the photographer as the pottery studio was somewhat dark. Later in the evening we used my camera for the street food shots as it had a low light advantage. Normally I wouldn’t butt in when a professional photographer is working but they were just using their head sales guy as an interim photographer and he appreciated the help.

The next day I ran into the head tour company guy at a coffee shop near my place. We talked for a while and I told him to give me a call if he ever wants a photographer. He gave me a call the next day and said he needed a photographer for a shoot involving a couple going to the flower market and buying flowers, and then sitting by the lake together with the flowers. So we called up the german girl again, and found a new guy from Colorado to join us, and went off early Monday morning to the lake and the flower market.

The tour company guy had written out these very detailed descriptions and diagrams of the exact shots he wanted. He basically wanted a lovely couple, romantically buying daisies from a bike vendor and then sitting by the lake on a bench holding the daisies with the girl resting her head on the guys shoulder. Plus a lot of holding hands and gazing lovingly into each others eyes. It was all for a honeymooner tour of some sort.

The shoot didn’t go so well. The models were awkward in general and extremely uncomfortable acting like a couple. The age gap is pretty obvious. I know as a photographer a big part of my job is supposed to be making people feel good in front of the camera but I can only do so much (and I’ve never been good at it anyway).

Also these imagined scenes weren’t working out in reality. We weren’t on the right side of the lake to get a bench with a silhouette of a tree next to it and a view of the pagoda. The foreground was very dark and it was tough to get it exposed and still be able to see the pagoda. Once we got to the flower market they weren’t selling daisies. Then the only bike vendor we could find had a huge bucket of big green plants strapped permanently to her bike making it really hard to compose the scene.

On top of all that I forgot to bring my portrait lens to Vietnam so I had to shoot everything in wide angel which really wasn’t appropriate for the lake shots. Ideally I would have had a telephoto lens so I could compress the distance between the subjects and the pagoda, and some sort of a wireless flash and bouncer to correct for the lighting.

I’m not even getting paid for this. The hope was that if I do a good job that he can hire me for bigger projects and recommend me to friends in the industry. I would say I did an ok job.

The dream is that eventually I could get paid well to go on tours as a photographer. I think I still need some more experience and certainly some more equipment before I reach that level. This is a start at least.

Lately I’ve been networking full time, going out to these business conferences and other social events, meeting people that I think might help lead me to an interesting job or other promising opportunities.

It’s been a learning experience. At first I was talking to a lot of people at these business conferences who really weren’t my peers in any way.  They were all older than me, and usually worked very high up in big organizations, banks, trade groups, government ministries, embassy’s and NGOs. I had some interesting, if a bit awkward, conversations with these folks during these events. But they would never respond if I wrote them an email trying to follow up.

Recently I’ve been going to different sorts of social gatherings, and a lot more charity fundraisers and events. Charity events are a big deal here because so many people work in NGOs, and it’s very important to expats to stay involved. I’ve been recognizing and getting to better know people I’ve already met, instead of always starting fresh. Most importantly still is that I’m really starting to meet some more people closer to my age, background, and situation. This week I’ve met some other recent graduates getting into economics and finance, a few younger professionals that are also looking for projects to work on or their next job, and some guys from San Fransisco working doing environmental research.

The first lesson I’ve learned is that business conferences and lectures aren’t very hospitable to social outsiders.

Most of the time is spent listening to a presenter. Before and after the event people tend to greet and say goodbye to those they already know, although it’s not too hard to sneak in an introduction and a handshake here and there. The real trick is in which table you sit at to eat. The instinct is to try and sit with people who look important. What happens though is that they engage mostly in conversation amongst themselves about issues that really are none of your business. It’s a lot better to sit with people who look like they’re also somewhat new or out of place simply because they’re a lot easier to talk to.

The second lesson I’ve learned is that if you can find it’s be a lot better to network within your own peer group.

It’s more fun. You have a lot more in common so there’s more to talk about and more opportunity to make friends. That commonality also makes them a lot more likely to identify with your job search and not mind helping you out. Of course the down side is that unlike hanging out with executives they can’t actually give you a job.  Still, they can ask their employers if they’re hiring and recommend you or if they get an offer to do something they can pass it on to you.

The third lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t just talk to someone about business for five minutes, trade cards, email them to follow up, and expect a response.

You really have to hang around in the same circles and meet people a few times before they really can be bothered to deal with you. Worse, if you did email them and they didn’t respond it makes it awkward next time you meet.

This last one is more of an observation than a lesson: a good personality trait for networking is a genuine annoyance at having to eat by yourself. I push myself to meet a lot of people largely because I really just hate sitting alone and silently starting at my food for 20 minutes every night.

Not much direct progress yet though. I sent my resume to a really interesting wine importing company / restaurant group. If they find a place for me in their orginization I’m hoping that I can tap some of my friends back home who have wine industry connections as a resource. I’ve also met a few guys that are interesting in exporting furniture, and some other guys that also have experience in that market. It’s not really the kind of exciting cutting edge industry I would prefer. Still, a lot of people say it’s a good opportunity here and it could lead to interesting things. It’s also a good time for that sort of project, some WTO rules benifiting vietnamese exports are about to kick in and vietnam is about to finish it’s first deep water international shipping port.

I continue to meet a lot of teachers that say they could get me a great job teaching, and I’m still keeping that as my backup plan. Though I did design a few flyers for tutoring advanced business english. I have no idea what the market for that looks like.

Another piece of advice I keep getting is that I should really have my own apartment and motorbike. I don’t think I’ll take those steps until I have found some good work here though. I want to be able to easily pick up and move if I hear about something promising to do elsewhere.

Earlier this week I attended something called SME week. The name is a bit misleading, I trekked all the way across the city on Monday to the national convention center only to find a bunch of people setting up booths. It was actually a single tuesday of talks regarding the development of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam.

I sat through 11 hours of lectures and presentations from various state officials, bank executives, and foreign research teams regarding what Vietnam needs to do to improve the business environment for SMEs. The gist of the talks is that small businesses have been largely ignored so far in economic development efforts despite accounting for a large percentage of total businesses, employment, and GDP. What they really need is better access to capital, a more organized relationship with supporting and complementary industries, and a streamlined universal online registration process to replace the absurdly complex and inconsistent bureaucracy they have to deal with now.

One particularly Vietnamese moment was one when one speaker made the an analogy between business and family. He explained that in Vietnam the government is like the parents, big businesses are the older brothers, and small businesses are the younger siblings. The younger siblings are naive and vunreble, but the parents are busy and somewhat out of touch, so they need to ask to the older brothers to take care of their younger siblings and help them out. In a culture where family roles are very important this was a fantastic analogy, and one that would probably just bewilder people in the US.

It was interesting to hear how officially, through various decrees and memorandums, the Vietnamese government is creating a business utopia. Then, speaking privately to others at the conference to learn how all this big talk is very slow to trickle it’s way down through the bureaucracy. For example, there are these new websites that describe all the steps necessary to go through the various permitting and registration of creating a new venture. Apparently though, once you show up at the government office everything is completely different. There are also laws that dictate the maximum prices of various registration and services like notarization, but in reality these laws are ignored and prices tend to be invented on the spot with a heavy premium charged for timeliness.

Still, it’s progress that the government at least knows exactly what it should be doing. Eventually,  the older generation which still regards business as an evil that needs constant government control will retire. In it’s place will be a younger generation of leaders that has whipped been up into a pro-business frenzy. When that happens all of these referendums, memorandums, and decrees will probably just snap right into place.

Some of the highlights for me were:

Having a pair of super high tech wireless headphones that broadcasted real time English translations of what everybody was saying. I really didn’t want to give them back at the end, but I guess they wouldn’t exactly have worked outside of the conference.

The organizers, in an attempt to magnify the sense of busy business, decided to have two other confrences in the building simultaneously. One of which was a water technology conference in which my friend with the arsenic filtration company was running a booth. So I got to skip out and hang out with him for a while. The other was a security equipment conference in which every booth was covered in video survaliance cameras and complex locks, walking through it was very weird.

Free food was provided. The first such session of which was a modest free cup of tea and some watermelon. Because it was still early in the morning all the confrence attendees, including many students from local universities, were still there. The result was total and complete anarchy as people trampled and pushed each other to get their free tea and watermelon. By the end of the 20 min break the floor was covered in spilled tea and crushed watermelon. Another very Vietnamese experience. I learned my lesson and snuck out a few min early to get first crack at the lunch. The funny thing about the lunch was how the few westerners in attendce made a point to really enjoy the Vietnamese food, while the Vietnamese loaded up on plates of ham and white bread. Go figure.

By the time the time the buffet dinner was put out almost nobody was still around, so I really got to indulge:

Last but not least, the powerpoint slide from hell: