8x Vietnamese partners of many technology "giants" once… quit their companies to study abroad

Vo Minh Quan, business author with best-selling books on Amazon and Tiki platforms.

After graduating from the High School for the Gifted (Ho Chi Minh City National University), Mr. Vo Minh Quan studied the Advanced Program in Computer Science (in collaboration with Portland State University, USA) at the University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City.

Boldly leave the company

With outstanding achievements in both high school and university, the young man born in 1988 had for himself certain knowledge, skills and experience to confidently establish his own company in 2014. After a period of being busy with work and reaping certain successes, it seemed that Minh Quan's life would not have many big changes, but at the end of 2017, he suddenly had the idea of... studying abroad.

The destination he was aiming for at that time was the Irish Government scholarship called Irish Aid IDEAS Fellowship. Because this is one of the very difficult scholarships granted by Ireland's oldest university, Minh Quan himself did not put too much pressure on himself. However, with this relaxed mindset, the 8x guy won the prestigious scholarship after only 2 weeks of IELTS preparation and a few days of preparing his application.

Vo Minh Quan (gray vest, sitting in the second row) and graduate students in Ireland.

Few people know that, in his profile, Vo Minh Quan did not hesitate to state clearly that the reason he wanted to study abroad was because he was disoriented even though he was in the position of a business administrator. He frankly talked about the times when he thought he would have to close the company due to lack of knowledge, experience in managing human resources, cash flow and the biggest weaknesses of his "brainchild" such as dependence on a few key personnel, no opportunity to expand the market, increasingly falling into the situation of "hiring" for foreign companies...

For those reasons, Minh Quan temporarily put aside all plans for his business and traveled to a faraway, unfamiliar country to reshape himself and his work. After a period of "studying with a teacher" in Ireland, he graduated with a master's degree with excellent results and even topped the class of more than 100 outstanding students from all over the world , opening up opportunities to continue on the path of research or move to start a business abroad.

However, once again, Vo Minh Quan surprised many people when he decided to return to Vietnam with the title of International Student Ambassador of Ireland. Sharing about this choice, he said simply: “I want to live near my parents. In addition, I see that Vietnam is the place where I can continue to develop myself in the best way.”

Ambition to sell "Made in Vietnam" products to the world

Returning home at the end of 2018, the new master applied his new knowledge and skills to running the “brainchild” of which he was a co-founder. But God really knows how to test people. The Covid-19 pandemic struck when everything was going well. Many of the company’s partners were forced to delay project implementation or, worse, shut down completely.

Faced with the severe impacts of the pandemic, Vo Minh Quan and his colleagues' company resolutely refused to cut staff or reduce salaries, instead reducing costs and ineffective projects. However, one time, just before the Lunar New Year, the company did not have enough money to pay its employees. Minh Quan decided to "clean out" his personal account and borrow more money from various places to have about 200 million VND to keep his promise of "not paying late salaries".

Vo Minh Quan (far left) gives Tet gifts to colleagues at the company.

Currently, on the path to realizing the ambition of building an e-commerce ecosystem on a global scale, his company has a prestigious customer base with a series of world-class technology giants such as Google, Meta, Klaviyo, Amazon, Alibaba... Vo Minh Quan said that the goal of him and his colleagues is to sell some "Made in Vietnam" products to the United States and five continents.

Few people know that the CEO of the company just mentioned, Vo Minh Quan, and the owner of the podcast channel “Better Every Day” Quan Vo are just one person. This is a completely non-profit product aimed at the community that he launched during the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic. According to statistics from the Spotify platform, many topics of the channel such as “Give feedback without being offensive”, “Confidently say no”, “Life changes when we are less harsh”… were once among the top listeners in Vietnam.

In 2022, the owner of the channel "Better Every Day" continued to coordinate with a number of partners to organize the Emerald Run environmental fundraising race, donating more than 1,300 trees to plant at Bach Ma National Park (Thua Thien Hue).

Recently, Vo Minh Quan's first book on digital marketing was on the Top New Releases list as soon as it was released, then the Top 1 Best Seller title on the Amazon e-commerce platform, stored in the libraries of 12 leading universities in Ireland, the best-selling book title of Tiki...

The English version of the book topped Amazon's list of best-selling marketing books.

Following this success, Vo Minh Quan hopes to become an influential author and businessman who sells books abroad, contributing to exporting Vietnamese knowledge to friends around the world.

Nhandan.vn