Le Hong Minh of VNG: Rising above Global Giants as Vietnam’s Homegrown Startup

TRANSCRIPT

Dimi:

Today on the show, we have Le Hong Minh, founder and CEO of VNG. VNG is one of the largest internet companies in Vietnam. Founded in 2004, VNG began as a gaming company. Today, its digital services span across several verticals including social media, which is Zalo; digital content, which is Zing MP3; financial services, which is ZaloPay; cloud services, which is VNG Cloud.

Hans:

Minh got his bachelor’s degree in finance from Monash University. Before starting VNG, he has been doing investment banking for many years, and honored as one of the 10 most influential people on the internet in Vietnam for the last decades. Welcome to the show Minh.

Minh:

Thank you for having me.

Dimi:

Great to have you on the show, Minh. We heard you are a hardcore gamer before you became an entrepreneur and VNG started 17 years ago in 2004 from an internet café. Tell us how you have decided to become an entrepreneur.

Minh:

I finished my bachelor’s degree in Australia in 2001. I have many friends in Australia or in other countries, but I was among the very few people that got an opportunity to go abroad and decided to go back to Vietnam immediately after graduation. The reason for that is I think that I kind of having an inkling that I can start a business someday. After graduation I went back to Vietnam and worked for initially price in the corporate finance department and later join as one of the early employees of one of the very first investment banks in Vietnam. It’s hard to know how you certify hardcore gamer, but I basically play games seriously. And then I went to work site again back in 2002. So, you can call it a hardcore gamer. Immediately after going back to Vietnam, I started an internet cafe with a few gaming fans as a place to hang out and play games. And then as a result, I witnessed the rising of online PC game when it just started in Asia, and then obviously in Vietnam back in 2003. Before that time, we kind of only play LAN PC games, like Warcraft, StarCraft, or CounterStrike. We just played within the user, within the same internet cafe. And then the first online game became a hit that everyone was playing, a game developed by Korea. It became extremely popular in Vietnam. Everybody was in the internet cafe was playing that game. And we saw the opportunity, both as a gamer and someone who witnessed the formation of the whole industry. I talked to my friend and said that “this is the opportunity, let’s do it”. That’s how we started.

Hans:

I remember back in 2004, South Korean was very good in gaming. Then in China, Shengda and Neteast bet big on gaming as well, and internet cafes were all arrays in North Asia. How did you decide what would be your first game? It’s amazing that the first thing you pick immediately becomes a huge ship.

Minh:

Basically, I think that all the entrepreneurial story is a combination of right time, right place, and tremendous luck.

I went to Korea in 2004 and knocked on the door of a few Korean companies and set that out. Korea is like the birthplace of the whole online game industry. I asked if I could license your game for Vietnam, including the most popular online game outside of China at that time. They all said no. I went back from Korea with zero gaming. And then I read some more research and found that China only spot the whole online game revolution. All the top games in China actually originated from Korea, with exception of a few local games. Within the top 20 games, there are three Chinese developers. So, I wrote the email to all the Chinese developers and said that, hey, I’m from Vietnam, and I’m looking for games to publish. Only one replied, which is Kingsoft.

I don’t remember exactly the two other companies, but basically Kingsoft replied a month later. After their reply, I came to China and signed a deal with them without even playing the games in the first place. I just know that this is about a martial arts game, which is a very popular content IP. I grew up reading all of the martial art novels from a famous national writer, Jin Yong. So, I just having an inkling.

I was a big Jin Yong fan. I just know that this game is all about martial arts. I said, okay, I would love to play it. I didn’t really read Chinese at that time. Somehow you can say that the whole story is pure luck. I just stumble upon that game, upon the Kingsoft partnership. That game became the most popular game in Vietnam in the last 17 years. It’s quite amazing.

Hans:

What did you think of Lei Jun when you first met him? I think you met him first. I only met him in 2007. And he became an older brother to me for a few years. What was your first impression of Lei Jun when you first met him?

Minh:

Obviously, he’s very intense. He worked very hard. Kingsoft is a traditional PC software company that they only went into gaming for two or three years. They just launched a few offline PC games at that time. The game that we licensed was their first game. And they just launched in China for less than a year. And they met us when we came knocking on the door. I think that apart from the intensity and working hard, one of the things Lei Jun did really well was that he is willing to take risks and kind of like expanding his scope. He said to me that I didn’t know you, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam. But the fact that you came and wished to take the game to build the game industry outside China. He said, okay, go ahead. He didn’t really do any due diligence on us.

The initial licensing fee is 160,000 US dollars. Industry-standard was for you to pay 50% upfront and then the other 50% upon you launching the game. 50% of $160,000 was $80,000. At that time, I only have 60,000 US dollar capital. One of the lessons I learned being an investment banker was you figure out your capital later. You figure out how you pay for that a year later. So, I have no problem signing, but I don’t have enough money to pay the 50%. So, I didn’t negotiate on the price of the game. So, when his business development team presented a term, I said, okay, I gotta pay $160,000, but can I pay 1/3 instead of 50%? They agreed. I paid nearly 50,000 US dollars. I got 10,000 US dollar left. That’s piece of history.

Hans:

So what happens afterwards? you only have $10,000, how do you start a company with that?

Minh:

I tried to figure out how to raise my money and recruit people and so on. But we didn’t know how to do that, unlike in publishing. No one in Vietnam has ever done it before. So the next thing I did was I talked to the business team in Kingsoft. I went there to sign a deal. I said, okay, I would like to visit your studio in Zhuhai. So for the rest $10,000, I used nearly all of them to just bring all the employees of the company at that time, which is around 10 guys, to China for 10 days. The purpose of the whole trip was to learn how to do the business. We have zero understanding of how to do business. We visited the market, we went and asked them how you do marketing? How you do the technical operation? How you do customer service? How you do payment, and everything? So after the trip, we came back and said now we kind of having an idea how to do it.

Hans:

You have run out of money already? How do you raise money?

Minh:

It’s okay. We have a game and we have a team. That’s another long and interesting story. IDG, one of the early venture funds that went to Vietnam at that time, was in China about five years before that. They did pretty well in China, the chairman Patrick McGovern was very passionate about Vietnam. He just set up a team in Vietnam in the beginning of 2004. I met with the IDG team in Vietnam, that’s another long story. We ended up raising our first money from them for 350,000 US dollars.

Dimi:

Amazing story. All the dots were connected for you. Now, VNG has evolved into one of the biggest internet companies in Vietnam. The game publishing and development is just one part of the business. Can you walk us through what does VNG look like today? What is the key milestone that got what you are today?

Minh:

I think that 17 years was a long time. We were extremely lucky because we picked the right game. And in the first two months after we launched the game, we were profitable, which is very rare among the startups and also extremely rare among the startups in developing market. Actually, you’re looking at the Southeast Asia scene 17 years ago, it was very difficult for a startup to really scale, because you didn’t have the necessary resource, like people and understanding of the ecosystem. It’s very difficult for monetization. You don’t have capital, you don’t have money, and you don’t have people. Many internet companies were online gaming companies because online gaming was very profitable. If you have a hit game, you have money. We were making profit in the second year. During the fall, we found a company, we launched the game in June 25. And by August 25, we were profitable. The game grew very fast.

So, we basically hit our three-year target in the first three months after launching the game. We are busy scaling the business to meet up with the demand of the gaming business. In 2007, we basically asked ourselves, what we would like to do next, either we’re going to expand business outside of Vietnam, or we’re going to expand our business inside Vietnam. And I think that we choose the later route to break. So I built up teams to do social networks. We launched a social network in 2008 to compete with Facebook. For a brief one year we are the most popular social network on PC. We launched in late 2008, and then we became very popular in 2010. In 2011. Facebook took over, they kind of conquer the whole world. At that time, in 2007, we already believe that the internet can become very popular. And we are a local company, and we kind of just built up the internet, internet products, and service. So we choose a pretty cool mission, which is Make the Internet Change Vietnamese life. So that’s our mission. We have a very interesting target; we call it 1441. I think that is kind of like a communist ideology.

The reason for 1441 is basically we think, okay, we want to make the internet change the Vietnamese life. We need to have a lot of users, because you cannot change Vietnamese life without a lot of users. So 14 stands for 2014, and 41 stands for 41 million users. That’s the name of the target 1441. The first moment in a company that we said that we’re gonna just do modern game, and we’re gonna build up other business, we want to have a lot of users and become an internet player in Vietnam. So, we launched social network, we launched the music website, we launched a news website, and a number of things. Our social network failed the competition with Facebook. And then we decided to shut the social network down in a way.

But at that time, I think that mobile is going to be the future. When we shut the social network, we said, we have the whole social network team and put them into mobile messaging, kind of like business on mobile, and that’s how we launched Zalo.

Now Zalo was the most popular mobile messaging app in Vietnam. In the technology world, and in the startup world. In VC, you guys have seen this story played out. I think that we were very lucky because we were in all the moment of seeing how technology have changed in the past 20 years. In a way, not a lot of people experienced that kind of thing. I was born after the war in 1977. Our generation was the first generation that touched the computers in Vietnam. I touched a computer when for the first time when I was 14. This is something quite magical, because you’ve never really seen anything like this before.

We were the first seeing PC internet growing from a few 100,000 users to 10 million users in Vietnam, and seeing the inflection point mobile. We were there all the way. We were very lucky because we’d be able to ride all the way. We built a PC online business. Basically, when we launched a lot of our products after a few years, our music website become the number one music website in Vietnam, and today the number one music streaming app in Vietnam as well. We keep the brand from the beginning. The name of the app is Zing MP3. And mp3 only makes sense for people who know about PC. The mobile native would never understand what mp3 stands for.

Hans:

I remember hearing about you in 2010, literally 10 years ago. IDG invested in this company and said it would become the Tencent of Vietnam. In Silicon Valley, we don’t see a lot of companies that can do many things well at the same time. The second you do something new, you need to get a new group of people, you need new properties. So it’s very difficult for a big company to keep on stirring up new subsidiaries, each one can be a category leader, not easy at all, even the best, such as Google and Facebook. They cannot turn on multiple products.

However, in Asia, whether it’s in South Korea, in Japan, or in China and Vietnam, we do see companies that can come up with multiple things. How were you able to do it when there were not many intrapreneurs at that time? How do you build a team that can actually learn to execute so well, time after time?

Minh:

I think there’s two things, a strategic question. From a strategic perspective, US eventually gonna have a global market in mind. So basically, you have a large market, a lot of talented people. So then the strategic choice is going to be focusing on a few things that you can do very well in a global scale and become number one on the global market. If you look at all the technology companies in the US, when they become a leader in the US, it is very likely that they’re going to become the leader in the rest of the world. The context set them out. I think in Asia, it is different. Even in a large country like China, a large market like China or Korea. Vietnam is in the same context, but we are much smaller. It’s very hard for a company to initially start out in this market to have a global view. We didn’t really have the understanding of the global market as well as the capability and the talent and resource to really have that.

Now it is different. So the natural expansion is, you really focus on your local market and you know that  you are gonna just try to win on multiple kind of verticals compared to bring one vertical and expand that out very aggressively. Obviously, there’s a few exceptions to that, for example, Tencent. Over the last 10 years, they become the number one gaming company in China and the number one gaming company globally. They expanded very well on vertical.

I think another factor is that all company like us, we set up even and we built different products and business. From a strategic perspective, we know that it’s not easy to really build a world-class, but we not necessarily have to compete with a world-class company every time. We’re going to just focus on our local market.

For example, when we launched Zalo, the mobile messaging app, the team was really focusing on making sure that we won on local features and local performance, compared to the biggest competitor out there, like Kakao and Facebook Messenger. So, I think that the reason that we won is that Zalo is the best mobile messaging for Vietnamese. Globally, we believe that no one build a product for Vietnamese market as good as the team that we have here. And I think that’s that first strategy, kind of like a viewpoint.

Hans:

A lot of people in the US think that the reason that Facebook Messenger cannot do well in China is because the Chinese government blocked it. In Vietnam, did Vietnam government blocked Facebook messenger from entering Vietnam?

Minh:

No, Facebook got a lot of users in Vietnam. I think that the reason that Facebook Messenger become popular in Vietnam is because of Facebook. Initially, it is coupled with Facebook, and later they decouple it and forced us to use it. So it become very popular in Vietnam.

Hans:

So how’s it possible for a company where the government did not block a bigger US player, never protect local players and some of the better product?

Minh:

I think it is just the focus. If people send an image, it is much faster on Zalo, with a much higher quality compared to Facebook Messenger. We don’t need to optimize for the whole global market, we’ve optimized for 400 million users in Vietnam. We have other features that really target for Vietnam, a user that people really like. But I think overall, it’s not just feature, the overall performance of the mobile messenger is much better than Facebook Messenger. It’s faster and more reliable. Over and over time, people are going to use it more.

Dimi:

Just a follow-up question on that. Now that you are at a certain scale and size and you have very strong talent in your team. How do you balance corporate development and acquisition versus doing things yourself?

Minh:

We didn’t really do a lot of M&A. Two reasons, I think number one is that you in a smaller market it is harder to have a good company to acquire, we do have one or two acquisitions in the last 15 years, but more or less, I think it’s hard to buy a good company. And if there’s a really good company, normally they would like to just do it themselves and grow along the way until they agree to sell. In the US, in a bigger market, you have a lot of good but smaller scale company. The better way for them to scale is to sell to a big company. But I think the M&A in Vietnam generally is less. Secondly, I think our DNA prefers to build something ourselves, company cultures and DNA. Many of the things that we do, we just prefer to start from scratch and learn and how to do it. Even if we do partnership or acquisition later. At least we need to understand what the stuff that we do is, both in business and in product.

Hans:

How do you develop talent? Especially when you were in the in the late 2000s, versus the kind of talent that you see in Vietnam today.

Minh:

Obviously, in the early days, it is much harder to have people. The second question, how did we do it. I think that it takes a longer time for our product or company to be successful in Vietnam, we need time to really acquire the experience and the ability. Even today, we are the largest company, it’s always a challenge to hire talents. I think that in early days, obviously, because of the lack of people, the lack of ecosystem, and the lack of funding, not a lot of people really know how to do this stuff. We kind of grow everything internally by ourselves. We just have people who are passionate about games or who are passionate about technology, or internet in general. We just kind of work on products and work on building the business, piece by piece. When look from a quality and from the standard perspective, we are really bad. It didn’t really matter, because everybody was equally bad at that time. I think that from a tactical perspective, one of the key things we are actually different is mentality. One of the key things we believe for success is patience and perseverance.

You can go through multiple failures. It is important that you look at all the failure as a building block, a stepping stone. I think that all throughout our history, we probably built over 100 different products. And today, maybe five products really survive as a major scale one, and for many of them, we did not even remember their names. In Silicon Valley, you can have people who fail in startups and giant companies. Here, we said that, hey, we fail in a company and we continue in the company. That’s the whole evolution of our people.

Dimi:

In your 17-year journey, there must have been points along the way where there was a temptation to sell when the big guys came in, and they said, hey, do you want to sell VNG? We can come and buy you. How do you resist that temptation?

Minh:

Sometimes it’s not easy to resist. Obviously, I’ve done this for 17 years. It’s always not easy. I think that there’s a good saying that if you really do something seriously, then there is a rule of one third. 1/3 of the time you’re going to feel good. 1/3 of the time you’re going to feel OK. 1/3 of the time you feel really bad. And that’s the time you know that you are moving. If you feel bad all the time, you’re not able to sustain it. But if you feel good all the time, you’re not really pushing yourself. So it’s 1/3 feeling good. 1/3 feeling OK, and 1/3 you even don’t want to think about it, you just don’t want to touch this thing. During those 1/3 times, if someone put a good offer in front of you. You would think, why I have to do this? I have to suspend the bullshit or difficult phase.

The whole story is, at the end of the day, the entrepreneur and the founder only have to think of what we need to do, what we would like to do. For me, it was kind of interesting. Our previous mission is to make internet change Vietnamese life. We started the company when there’s less than 1 million internet users in Vietnam. 17 years later, now I think that Vietnam has almost 70 million internet users. It’s a tremendous change. I think that Vietnam is one of the few countries in the world where the level of internet and technology adoption is higher than the level of economic development, because we have a young country, we have people who are really open to new things. And actually, the government also do a few great policies in terms of promoting the development internet.

We have 100 million population, about 70% penetration. We didn’t make internet change Vietnamese life a mission two years ago. But we kind of like thinking hard about, okay, what makes me go to work every day? Even after 17 years, why I still go to work every single day?

I keep asking myself that question. And then I said to myself, if I just focus on what makes me feel good, there are two things that make me feel good. Number one is, obviously, you see the impact of your products on people’s life. I’m not an IT guy, I’m not a programmer, but when you build a product and you see people use it, you always have that pride, you always have that kind of feeling like, hey, people are using my product. We have so many of that stories here in Vietnam. When we see people using our product, and we become an important part. I think all the technology, all the internet people, they are the first reason that make us want to go to work.

And I think the second reason for me is, I’m really proud to say that our people, a lot of the people we work with become really good leaders and really good people. So, there are two reasons for me to go to work every day, one is for the product, one is for the people. I said to the team, okay, I was the founder and CEO, so it is my privileges to write the mission statement of the company and I write the two reasons for me to go to work. And hopefully that will be the two reasons for you guys to go to work. Our mission now becomes new technology and grow people, very simple. That’s what motivated me and make me put up with the 1/3 time that I didn’t really feel good.

Hans:

When you look at Grab expanding into Vietnam with lifestyle services, rides sharing, food delivery, and payment, which Shopee and Garena expanding not just in Southeast Asia, but now into Latin. How do you think about you? There are several ecommerce companies in Vietnam, did you ever attempt to invest or buy? Or start ecommerce business or lifestyle service business in Vietnam? That’s the first question. And the second question is, what do you think about expanding beyond Vietnam at some point in the future?

Minh:

That is also a very interesting question. And I got a few stories to share. We did build our own e-commerce business about 10 years ago. And after a year, we quickly figured out that it was not our DNA. Obviously, there’s a lot of debate, if you’re looking at generally the tech, the gaming and then the internet application company, they are high-margin business. Because basically, you have a fixed cost of people, your marginal cost is still. As long as you build a good product, you can, in theory, scale very big with a limited fixed cost. You’ve got a high margin, gaming is the same, internet application is the same.

But for e-commerce business, it is a different business, you have a much smaller margin, you need to really structure and organize the business very differently. So in the beginning, e-commerce guy sitting in the same office. We have a good office because we want to take care of our people. None of the e-commerce companies have this kind of fancy offices being really successful. You need to really be crappy. There’s no stories. It’s hard to really have that DNA and culture within a company. That’s number one.

I think number two is, we are very conservative, we always use the profit from a gaming business to invest in new business. We do it in a kind of gradual way because it’s a learning process. So we just do it randomly and one step at a time. When we set an e-commerce business, we could not do the same way since this is a low margin business, very operational and commerce heavy, and you need to spend money like crazy. We didn’t really know how to do this. After one year and a half, we said, okay, we need to get out. So we quickly shut down and sold our e-commerce business. At a time, we really believe in the e-commerce wave. So we invest in local champion, which is Tiki, the local champion in e-commerce in Vietnam.

We do not have a DNA, but someone in Vietnam will be successful. Hopefully, by supporting them we kind of getting on the right way of e-commerce business in Vietnam. The problem is they need to compete with the regional big guy, right now is Shopee and Lazada. And I think that with e-commerce, selling is very important. Because you really need to be able to raise money, you need to invest heavily or invest enough in the fundamentals in the platform, not just spending on the user acquisition or promotion, but also spending on the platform side, technology side, and product side. I think that is the challenge that Tiki is trying to solve today. And I think that among all the e-commerce business in Vietnam, Tiki is still the best in terms of the local operation.

The second question you asked about expanding. Four years ago, I have a trip to see Shopee and Grab and talked with Anthony. And then going back, I said that if we really want to become a regional company, we need to move to Singapore. If we stay in Vietnam, it’s very hard to become a regional company, not in the center of the region. I really admire Anthony in a way because I remember he said to me that he started a company in Malaysia but two years later moved the entire headquarter to Singapore. The reason that Singapore is the center is because it’s not providing a big local market. So, everybody who puts business in Singapore have to think in a global vision.

And in a way, a lot of Chinese companies are facing the same question, they have a big local market, and it’s always very competitive, they have to fight very hard to survive there. At the same time, if they want to move out, how they’re going to that? It’s very challenging. Look at ByteDance, they are kind of like the first China company that has a global successful product. That’s not easy at all. So that’s what we think about regional. Two years ago, we already said to the team, even we are a local company in Vietnam focusing on Vietnamese market, we need to have global ambition. So we start out with our older business with our gaming business, and today gaming business is global. We kind of like okay, let’s just go with game in the region, building game, a global market. We are doing that right now. We have a very good traction. I think today, about 20% of our revenues coming out of gaming revenue comes from outside Vietnam. And I think that’s fantastic.

Dimi:

Minh, today your business is so multifaced. You have so many things, you have Zing MP3, you have ZaloPay. How do you balance your time? How do you spend your time upon your current initiatives and thinking about the future of the company?

Minh:

I think as a CEO, you need to learn new skills, basically be able to shape yourself and to do new things. I was the only one in company that didn’t get a promotion after 17 years. At the same time, I feel that I have to do many new things. I didn’t get promotion, but I got to do new stuff, which is good. I think that I did a lot of the right functional work myself, we just launched the mobile version of the PC game that we launched 16 years ago on mobile a month ago. I was kind of having a celebration party with the team. We still have all the original product managers starting for me 16 years ago. We take a picture with six product managers throughout the year of that game to have different versions. I was the product manager. I was the marketing guy. I moved to different things, now with the game business, I just make sure that I’m on the strategy side and on the people side. I think different business, I spend time differently. At the beginning of the non-game life, I worked closely with the team to understand and then also support them from a strategic issue. In the past few years, I immerse myself with a payment business and do everything, even managing a tech team for a year.

I think that both the fun part and the challenging part of being a CEO is that you need to really learn and understand the business.  You make sure that the strategy is right, and you’re able to really communicate that strategy to all the relevant people in the business. You make sure how you build your team, make sure that the people in the team is motivated. You need to make sure that it is the right people, to some extent the culture part of the business as well. I am spending time anywhere in the world now, you have to make sure that the government is looking at you with a favorable eye. That’s also some part of the job as well. I still want to understand the product side, understand the direction of the product in different parts that we do. I’m also involved a little bit with how we think about the new innovation, the new thing that we invest in for the next five years, or even the next 10 years.

So that’s generally how I spend my time. But I think the most important thing is we need to have a learning spirit. Everything with technology is very interesting, you got to learn new things every day.

Hans:

A lot of great founders think very similarly, having a lot of passion, focusing on what customers want, learning very quickly, also failing quickly. They don’t worry about it, just keep on improving and evolving. They are not afraid to be ambitious, or to try new things, that’s the best way to expand. They’re not restricted by the MBA textbook, and have no limitations on what to do what not to do. They are not afraid to break convention, or to do multiple things. You just need five or six thing that you do well and do really well. It’s a very different ballgame altogether. It’s fascinating hearing the similarity in your answers with other great founders, even you have different cultures, different location, different states, and different economic development, the similarity in approach is striking these differences.

Minh:

I think it may also come from a cultural aspect. Silicon Valley and the other Western places have different cultures. There are certain ways of doing things, certain ways of thinking about things. And then this part of world has different ways of doing things. I often set to answer some interview that I don’t think there’s a magic formula. Everybody is just trying to figure out the thing, the formula or the methodology that suits them. I mean, obviously there is certain generality, for example, being passionate about things, working hard, being open to learning and so on. But the specifics of what you do is very different, which depends on context. Even in the family within the same context, you can achieve success in different ways. And I think that is the beauty of life.

Dimi:

Thank you for your time. And we will enter into some quickfire questions. Just a few words from you on every question. First of all, what is your favorite game now?

Minh:

I’m playing a lot. My original PC game on the mobile. It is number one in my server right now, so I’m pretty good at it. And then beyond those games that we do, I am always a big RTS fan. Empire, StarCraft, those are my favorite games.

Dimi:

Second question, if you could live your life in any game as a character, which game would it be? And what character would you be?

Minh:

I would like be in a Jin Yong novel. Being a martial artist. That’s always great.

Dimi:

And the last one, what is the habit that has changed your life?

Minh:

Running for sure. Maybe I’ll talk a little bit. A few years ago, I wrote an essay, and I talked about the three decisions that changed my life. If you think about life, there’s a lot of randomness. Things happen to you, and you take the thing that happened to you and continue to go. There’s a lot of chance, a lot of luck in some cases, but there’s still a thing that you believe is a decision. Getting married is not one of them. Because actually I think about getting marriage is not really a decision that you deliberately make. Especially when a lot of emotion involved and you know, the probability of making good decision is not high. Look at the divorce rate of 50%. That’s what I could tell.

Among the three decisions, founding the company is one of them, obviously. Then the second one is running. When I was 36 years old, I talked to a good friend of mine, and we decided to run our first half marathon. That was eight years ago, we have training for the first half marathon in half a year. Then we went to one of the very early races in Vietnam. At that time, even running in Vietnam is non-existent. Not a lot of people running in Vietnam. In our first race that someone organized, maybe there’s about 100 people and 80% of them would be foreigners living in Vietnam. Only about 20 Vietnamese took the race. So that was eight years ago. After that, I become very passionate about running and endurance sports. So, I do mountain trail running, I do iron man. The whole thing is very similar to some of the tech people story, we were nerds in high school and were never sport guys. And then two years later, we got our revenge. That obviously has a huge impact on my life, both physically and mentally, and then in a way spiritually as well. I think that the thing that I am proud of it as much as founding a company is that I really influenced a lot of people around me to take sports. All my best friend now become endurance athlete, either in running in doing iron man. In VNG we have the best corporate wellness program so far in Vietnam. We have 3,000 people; we sponsor iron man in Vietnam. Eight years ago, when we I started my first run, there were only 20 Vietnamese running in my first race. Today, I think that in Vietnam, we have maybe 100 races a year. I think that in Vietnam now we have maybe 300,000 regular runners. We actually have a few things to do in that space. One of the great things that we have is we start out a virtual running thing we call UpRace, and it is basically virtual running plus gamification plus charity. We started out three years ago with only the internal people in VNG. This year. I think that the goal of the team is to have about 200,000 people participate in that event. The goal for the team is 1 million. So they’re gonna have a long way to go.

Hans:

So over time you get to start a Peloton of Vietnam or Keep of Vietnam, that type of business?

Minh:

Maybe. Actually, one of the emails that I sent out to the team, to the entire company late last year is my reflection on the whole COVID year. There are a number of reflections, but one key point I think is now everybody understands the importance of health, both the public health and our private personal health. You’ve seen what happened in the world. And I think that sort of reflection for me is VNG is going to get into healthcare in a few years. And I think that we would like to do it differently. I think that we want to do it in a way that promotes a healthy list of people. Look at the healthcare industry today, it’s not really healthcare, it is sick care. When you are sick, you go to the hospital, or you go to see a doctor. That is the general understanding of health by many people. If you have a few good habits, if you really live a good healthy lifestyle, you can improve your health tremendously. It’s not an easy thing to bring it to scale or bring it to many people. We are busy with a number of things today. But maybe we will start out something in a few years because that is our passion as well.