Story of Beeketing - a Vietnamese-origin tech startup - part 1

(Photo taken by Quan- first one on the right, CEO of Beeketing- at his office in Hanoi, November 2018.)

When Vietnamese-origin founders strategize for the company, they will choose local-focused on day 1 and scale out to the global market on day 2 if there is a product-market fit.

I would like to define 2 different categories of Vietnam-based startups. The first category is Vietnamese-origin companies whose founders were born and raised in Vietnam. They found the company when they were in Vietnam, either still in the university or after graduation. The other category is Vietnam-based companies whose founders might or might not be Vietnamese. They could be "Viet Kieu" - successful Vietnamese grown up in developed countries and returned to Vietnam to do business - or foreigners but decided to put the majority of operations including product development done in Vietnam.

Beeketing belongs to the first category.

I met Quan Truong - CEO of Beeketing - in 2014 when he was part of a delegation from Founder Institute Vietnam visiting Singapore. I co-helped connect some friends and VCs in Singapore to the delegation during that trip. At that time, Beeketing was just founded and definitely not a name that was popular yet in the Vietnamese tech ecosystem.

With some Vietnamese-origin startups, they were a software outsourcing company

Vietnam has been long known as a software outsourcing hub. Prior to starting Beeketing, Quan found a software outsourcing company doing software development projects for customers overseas. This experience gave the founders some funding in order to bootstrap the company when they decided to pivot into product development in later stages. That also helped the founder select the best talents among the pool of employees. As you might know, it requires a completely different skillset, mindset and calibre of someone working on outsourcing projects versus a greenfield product development project.

I have some other examples but will cover them in another article.

With some Vietnamese-origin startups, the first source of funding is from grants or angel investors.

Vietnam has long been a favourite off-shore manufacturing hub for some global conglomerates from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Europe, US. The executives of those companies are typically native citizens and posted to Vietnam. After finishing their terms, some of them decided to stay back in Vietnam. The majority of them are wealthy individuals and they understand the local culture very well. Some of them even could speak Vietnamese fluently.

With Beeketing, their first angel investor was a Japanese executive. I do not have the insight information on who that executive is nor how much angel funding has been invested into the company.

Besides the source of funding from angel investors, some of the founders whom I have spoken with also shared with me that they also received decent funding from NGOs as non-returned grants to help the country align with UN's sustainability goals.

My personal impression about Quan is that he is a very fast-paced CEO. When I met Quan at a tech exhibition in Singapore, he asked me if I know any investor to help him with the fundraising. On the spot, Quan sat down on the floor, turned on his laptop and sent me his company pitch deck straight away.

This is the 7th atomic essay as part of my learning with the #Ship30For30 cohort