If you have been reading all the books you can find on the biographies of business persons, then you would have found that most of these examples are from the American culture, or of a privileged or too different background in order for us to apply the lessons learned.
Thats when i started to look to Asia for more relevance. Problem is, the language is not in English, and you are not going to find much information if you cant speak that native language. Most of the Asian examples are very limited. It’s either written by an American, which focuses on different values, or very lacking in contribution of the person documented. Asian business persons are also very conservative and do not openly share their life with others. Luckily my wife is Vietnamese, so i get a direction translation.
The information I share here will not be found anywhere else online. (unless you can read Vietnamese and know where to find it)
a quick google search would show you that Pham Nhat Vuong owns Vingroup, and everything Vin. I also note that his net worth is combined of the #2 and #3!!! There is also something about this guy that is different from all the top 10 on the list. he IS NOT from a privileged background. That means that we can also possibly build that kind of mind boggling wealth, if we can learn the secrets from Mr Pham. This wealth was built FROM ZERO. if there are relationships, he built them from scratch. he did not have knowledge of how to run a business, nor how to get to know the right people.
But what I really want to know is not how he built all these big companies. I want to know how he got started. How he failed, learnt, and what he went thru to earn his first pot of gold, before anyone has heard of him.
Firstly, Mr Pham is very good at studying. He was so good that he earnt a scholarship to study the economics of raw material extraction at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute. I think most people glamorise the rise of “dropouts”. My last research shows that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others were actually way ahead of their peers before they dropped out. If you can’t study, you are shit out of luck and better learn how to.
His first business was started with about $US30,000 borrowed from his friends and family. it FAILED. this is a lot more realistic. Why does every business success case study always start with success? I think we spend much more time with failure than we do with success. I guess he felt like shit and didn’t know what to do. Me too.
Everyone is born with some talents. I believe one of them comes from our background. The jobs of our parents determine very much of what we learn. His father served in the North Vietnamese air defence force and his mum ran a sidewalk tea stand. Most of our parent’s profiles would easily exceed this.
Here comes the magic. His first pot of gold is came from selling dried noodles to war torn areas in Ukraine. He sold it off to Nestle in 2003 and the rest is history. notice the specificity. Who else would be better to appreciate the palate of war torn people? and why would they like to eat noodles, and not better fare? That person would need to be able to fully appreciate the cost and pain of war, and how that affects his own reliability of food sources. This examples are not special. Most of the case, knowledge from parents are passed on to their children to give them their competitive advantage. good news is that you have at least 2 such sources, and they don’t have to be in a popular or profitable industry, as shown in this example. all jobs create their own industry specific knowledge and competencies.
If you know another story of someone else who has built it from ZERO, please let me know, i would love to study the case. i have a intuition that I’m going to find it in Africa.