I’m coming back to California after working in Vietnam as a business consultant for the last year, 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.”

Day to day,Life — preeko @ Sunday, April 12, 2009

Every day I wake up at around 7:15am, get dressed, bike to work, and spend the first hour of my day reading the news.

I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and about a billion other miscellaneous business, economics, and entrepreneurship related publications, news aggregators, and blogs. I also have a growing list of English language Vietnam business news sources which I slowly work through over the course of the day. So probably about two hours of average total news reading daily.

I feel like studying the news is an important part of what I do. It allows me to know what’s going on domestically and internationally, to tie it all together in my mind, and to sound smart when I speak to clients or partners. I recently had a phone meeting with a brokerage VP from Morgan Stanley and he seemed a bit annoyed that I didn’t really know anything about the Morgan Stanley + Citigroup merger. Mostly though I feel that I have a pretty good overview of what’s getting discussed in the press these days.

Reading so much news is definitely distorting my perspective, but I can’t tell how.

I figure that I might have developed a hugely exaggerated view of the craziness of the current global economic and political situation, as I am constantly being bombarded by a magnified version of the worlds day to day freakouts. Or, I might have the exact opposite distortion; I might not really understand or appreciate the massive scale and importance of the changes occurring in the world right now because I am lost in the foam and froth of daily details.

Right now journalists are all grasping at understanding the potential direction, aftermath, solutions and ramifications of this current global financial-economic crisis/recession/apocalypse.

Despite really dedicating a huge amount of time and thought to figuring it all out for myself, I don’t have much of a clear idea of what’s actually going right now on or what exactly any of it means for the future.

Whatever happens though, everyone is going to claim that they saw it coming. Looking back on it, everybody says that they saw the tech/dot-com bubble coming, that it was obvious. I think at the time there were legitimate reasons to believe that tech really was the new economy, and the websites that staked their claim now would have huge ongoing advantage. Now people are starting to come out of the woodwork and claim that they saw this entire current mess coming. I doubt it. If you go back and read people’s economic predictions from a few years ago, most will probably have some argument about oil prices. Remember oil prices? Ha.

I don’t normally re-write about things that I’ve read elsewhere online, I feel that bloggers already waste far too much effort on that kind of churn. But I’m going to deviate from my rule this one time, as a kind of thought experiment.

I am going to attempt at sort out some of the major themes that I’m seeing in the news these days, and try to make some predictions about what they might mean for the future. If I’m actually right about anything, I too can look back and say “I saw it coming.” But what I expect is to look back in embarrassment and maybe some added appreciation of how unpredictable things are.

Davids interpretation of the news, and vague predictions of the future, April 2009:

There seems to be a major re-evaluation of the basic nature financial investment and risk going on. Stock prices have collapsed. Banks and huge companies are failing and getting rescued by the government. No one is investing. There was only one US IPO so far this year, and venture capital investment is down 71%. There is a global consensus that Wall Street finally went too far, fueling huge debates about new regulation and executive pay restriction.

The common wisdom used to be that the key to getting rich/financial independence/retirement in America was saving up your money and putting it in the stock market. Some stocks would do well, some would do less well, some years would be especially good, some would be not so good, but on average you could expect your money to grow about 10% annually as it had historically until about the year 2000. Even better was to buy a house, you could live in it, there were various tax benefits, and it was less abstract. This system of building wealth was implicitly promised to us by modern financial society.

This promise has been broken, and this system has failed those who relied on it. While there was always the recognition that investing involves risk, assets prices weren”t supposed to collapse like this.

I don’t believe that this happened because of any grand conspiracy or some epic level of greed in the financial industry. Everyone was playing the game according to what they thought the rules were. We all just overestimated how much asset prices were based on their underlying value, and underestimated how much they are based on peoples demand for things to invest in.

Of course we saw this in the 2001 tech bubble, and in various other historical examples of asset bubbles, all the way back to the often cited stupid Dutch tulip craze of 1600-whatever. But we don’t usually see the entire financial sector go pop. And this time the pop took the entire world economy down with it. Whoops.

We also failed to realize the extent to which our financial institutions were taking big, leveraged, bets on these assets. And how intertwined these positions were with everything else. Whoops.

So now we’re in this period of spiraling doom as the slowing down of some things fuel further slow downs in other things. Great.

Eventually though, barring further catastrophe, we’ll probably snap out of it.

That’s the big thing that everyone is trying to predict right now, how long this recession will last. Some say a long long time, some says it’s already wrapping up. I don’t think you can predict it. There are certainly still big problems to overcome: unemployment, unused capacity, toxic assets, and what have you. On the other hand there is still a world full of people that would like nothing more than to go back to making and buying stuff as usual.

Lately we’ve seen just how much economic activity relies on confidence, not just consumer confidence but also investor confidence and business confidence. People feel uncertain. How they’ll feel in six months or a year depends on the news, and the news by definition depends on random and unpredictable events. How long the gloom will last is anyone’s guess. Some percentage of predictions will be right regardless.

Whenever the economy really starts to recover, I expect that investors will want back in as they slowly regain their risk tolerance. I predict that we’ll probably see is a rush of people and cleverness back into Wall Street. New types of investment vehicles will get dreamed up, probably by new firms we haven’t heard of yet. They will have to work their way around the new regulations and figure out some clever ways to ensure investors that there is some tangible underlying value to their assets. There’s going to be a lot of money to be made by making people feel safe.

Another big theme I’m seeing dispersed through the news lately is a serious challenging of the standard beliefs of how monetary and fiscal policy are enough to stabilize the economy.

When studying economics I learned about how careful tweaking of government spending and interest rates supposedly help keep everything running smoothly.

During the last years, we’ve been hitting the monetary gas pedal as hard as we can by maintaining super low interest rates. Now we’re also injecting an incomprehensibly large fiscal stimulus to shock the economy back in to motion. This seems like the best thing to do.

Economic activity is facilitated by money, and it can be limited if there’s not enough money, or if the money is not moving fast enough. Economic also activity feeds on itself, so it can be boosted by an stimulus of cash or spending by the government. The reason we need this massive stimulus to increase the money supply so much right now is that the velocity of money is so low, everything is moving in slow motion. This should get things moving again.

Some time in the long run, I could see this hugely expanded monetary base, combined with the mounting pressures of the national debt, and growing grumpyness from countries about holding all their reserves in dollars, leading us into a situation of serious inflation.

Once the economy picks up, and the velocity of money along with it, we are going to have way too much active money flying around way too fast. If foreign governments eventually start dumping our debt it’s going to further increase the supply of dollars looking for something to do.

The other edge of that sword is that it would become a lot harder for us to continue to pay for our debt. We won’t be as able to just roll it over by selling these endless dollar bonds to countries building their reserves, as we’ve been doing. So allowing some inflation, making it cheaper for us to pay back our debt, might start to look really tempting. And that could easily get spin of control.

I can’t really say I expect this to happen. It seems like the current fed and Obama administrations will be smart enough to properly control if things get overheated, and long sighted enough not to undermine the nations long-term creditworthiness.

But then again, as we’re seeing now, sometimes the economic systems we rely on have a funny way of all failing at the same time. Something weird could happen and we might not have a choice.

My more likely prediction is that we’ll just have to get used to watching the economy very closely from now on, and controlling for new kinds of potential problems as they start to emerge – even at the expense of economic growth – instead of just trusting that the market will automatically work everything out.

It seems like this Chinese and Russian talk about moving away from the dollar as a reserve currency might be nothing more than a bunch of jumping up and down and arm waving for attention. Just a political chance to say “haha, your economy broke.” There just really isn’t any other reasonable alternative way for them to hold their reserves. They need dollars to clear international transactions, other currencies have at least as many problems, and the talk about using IMF SDRs doesn’t make any sense as they are not a currency, just a claim on other currencies. SDRs don’t do anything that you can’t do for yourself in forex markets. There is also some discussion of creating a new non-dollar international reserve currency, and I don’t think that makes much sense either. You’d still have to convert it to something to use it.

What this does show is an official grumpiness from other countries about the dominance of the dollar, and opens the window for people to imagine a non-America-dominated global financial system. But for now the structure of our global financial systems and institutions is pretty sticky and ingrained, and it really isn’t the time to be messing with them. Eventually though, these things will change. That’s always an easy bet to make.

Ok, that’s the world and the future as best as I can figure it out based on the news I’ve been reading.

I don’t think anyone else has any real idea exactly what the hell is going on either, and I have yet to read any thoughtful or convincing predictions about what to expect from it.

Of course, 5 or 10 years from now, once whatever the hell is going now has all played itself out, everybody is going to say that whatever came next was completely obvious to them all along. And I alone will be able to look back at this and prove that I never even had a clue.

Entrepreneurial Travel,Theory — preeko @ Sunday, March 22, 2009

It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them.

A couple of times during my informal networking style job hunt I had meetings with people who were in a position to potentially hire me.

I got these meetings by putting myself out there, networking with as many businessy people as I could, making a big deal of my interest in business, telling everyone that I was looking for a project or opportunity to get involved with, and then following up by emailing them my resume. So when someone took enough interest/pity to meet with me, it was completely removed from the normal hiring process in which you are interviewing for a clearly defined position.

I would go and chat about their business, and share my various insights on the industry, talk about related articles I had read, and talk about other businesses I knew about in Hanoi. Then I would talk about myself a bit, tell them about my background and what I was looking for in Hanoi. Eventually, a point would always come in the meeting where they would take a break from the bullshit and flat out ask me “So, if we hire you, what are you going to do for us?”

I never knew what exactly to say to this. I usually explained that I had a variety of business skills, particularly relating to my experience in startups and my economics education, and that I was excited about any opportunities to use them. This never seemed to satisfy the question, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I figured that it’s their business and they should know what to do with new employees.

But they didn’t need any new employees, they were just nice and open minded enough to spend some time listening to some kid talk about himself, and I should have had an answer ready for them.

While they might have appreciated that I had an interesting mix of abstract skills, they were trying to imagine hiring me to run around their office doing something useful, something concrete, not just sitting around basking in the aura of my own potential.

I realized that one of the big reasons the boss at my new job was excited to hire me was not my experience with startups or my education in finance, but that I thought to say that I could also work on revamping the company’s English language website.

I’m not a web designer, and I don’t aspire to be one. I feel like writing copy and working on websites is a necessary part of any small business or new project. I don’t really think my web design skills amount to much more than your average nerdy teenager. I made the websites for my last two businesses, the advanced materials company and the art licensing company, and they came out ok. But I can always tell when a company has a site that was just thrown together by an employee instead of hiring a real marketing and design firm. There’s more to a site than just a name on the top and some sections with info.

Still, I don’t think any of that mattered to my new boss. What mattered is that he saw the clear chain of events; I hire this kid, and BOOM – better website, oh and he’ll also run around and do all sorts of smart stuff for the consulting division.

In the future, when looking for ‘informal’ positions, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for people to hire me. Before I meet with a company I will think of a few potential projects that I could work on for them right away. And as a complimentary long term strategy, I’ll build more skills that are instantly applicable, not just the theoretical stuff.

My girlfriend is currently taking a grant writing class and I think that’s a great example of the perfect sort of skill for this type of situation. She doesn’t want to be a grant writer any more than I want to be a web designer. But if I ran a non-profit or NGO, and I met someone who said they had experience in grant writing, and could come in and get right to work on a grant that might bring in some new funding, I would be a lot more excited to hire them for whatever the full time position that they actually wanted was.

What I want to do is leverage all the abstract skills that I just spent 5 years of college learning. I want to direct the macro level strategy of meaningful long term projects and ventures. But if making the occasional website is my foot-in-door opportunity to do that, then I’ll do it.

So here is the expanded version of my original point: It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them, to think of practical projects you can start on right away, even if they aren’t the part of the job that you’re most excited about doing. So you better build up some useful skills, otherwise, good luck convincing someone to hire you just to do the abstract stuff.

Entrepreneurial Travel,experiences — preeko @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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:

 

 

 

Uncategorized — preeko @ Friday, February 13, 2009

Vietnam completely shuts down for the week of lunar New Year (we usually call it Chinese new year, the Vietnamese call it “Tet”). Everyone gets the week off to go visit their families. All shops close, all commerce stops, the streets are empty. So a friend and I went on a quick trip over to Thailand.

At some point we visited a small city called Chanthaburi in Eastern Thailand near the Cambodian Border. The city is famous for gem trading. The streets are lined with gem shops and are normally filled people haggling and looking through magnifying glasses, except during lunar New Year. Here again, most stuff was closed. Which suited me fine, I was just happy to be away from the noise and chaos of Hanoi.

So what was everybody in Chanthaburi doing instead of trading gems? They were at the local festival, sticking gold stickers on monk statues and watching matches of my new favorite obscure Thai sport: Sepak Takraw.

The game is basically volleyball, except you can only use your feet, and half the time you’re doing crazy back flips.

So far the story all makes sense right?

Well, except for one thing. All their jerseys have big AIG logos on the front.

AIG, or the American International Group, is a huge American corporate insurance company that also deals in financial services, telecommunications, ports, and aircraft leasing. They’ve been in the news a lot in the last few years over a big fraud scandal in 2005, and as one of the major financial bailouts last summer.

It’s not uncommon to see international brands in developing countries. Coca Cola and Pepsi have managed to get their logo absolutely everywhere. It seems like they must do this by subsidizing or fully sponsoring the manufacture of signs for restaurants and shops, and including free signs and placards with their deliveries. This would be pretty easy for them as Coca Cola and Pepsi have vast networks local bottling and distributing companies that they work with.

And it makes sense that Coca Cola and Pepsi want to build an international brand, especially in emerging markets.

But did a bunch of local Sepak Takraw players in an obscure Thai city end up with AIG logos on their custom team jerseys? I can only imagine two possible explanations:

One explanation is that AIG actually had such a large scale and long term global strategy that they thought it was important to really really get their brand out there into every corner of the earth. I doubt anybody at this local Thai lunar New Year festival had any business purchasing insurance or renting jumbo jets from giant American corporations.

The other explanation is that maybe AIG has been sponsoring major sports teams internationally, as many big global corporations do, and that the local business that prints up the jerseys for the Sepak Takraw teams figured they wouldn’t look legit unless they had some corporate logo action going on – in which case AIG is getting free advertising.

I wish I had thought to ask them about it. Either way it’s pretty silly.

Followup1: Googling “Sepak Takraw AIG” came up with a bunch of references to AIG: the Asian Indoor Games, which is the big annual tournament for Sepak Takraw. I guess that this suggests a variation on the second theory: the AIG logo was borrowed because their stupid three letter acronym (TLA) has a separate special meaning in this context. Ha!

Followup2: Upon re-reading my post I realize it sounds somewhat condescending and ethnocentric: “These naïve villagers couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of this American brand, how quaint, har har har!”. I should explain that the copying and misuse of brands is everywhere here and you can’t help but wonder about the stories behind it sometimes. Yesterday I got a ride from someone who’s motorbike seat said Dolce and Gabana all over it. Thailand is a major business center and I’m sure lots of people know what AIG is, but there’s still something a little off about the AIG brand showing up on sepak takraw jerseys.

Entrepreneurial Travel,Theory — preeko @ Sunday, January 4, 2009

I’ve always been a snob

When I was younger I proudly displayed my Stanley Kubrick box set and insisted that I watched “films”, not “movies”. I made an effort to seek out local underground artists in my quest to become a connoisseur of “Hip Hop” while snubbing my peers for listening to “Rap”. In college I loved to take my friends to a particular restaurant in Santa Barbara that I was convinced made “traditional” Japanese food, and forbid them from ordering sushi. In short, I practice a level of snobbery that borders on just simply being a jerk.

In this same infantile spirit, I have during my trips abroad developed a conceptual distinction between “tourists” and “travelers”.

Oh how I loathe tourists! Loud fat sunburned families pouring out of air conditioned busses, with their fanny packs and money belts, clutching their video cameras, frantically waving their guidebooks and yelling at people in English about their free buffet.

Travelers are a different species entirely. To be a traveler is to calmly walk the earth, lightly packed, living off of a few dollars a day, blending in, easily befriending locals, playing with children, petting puppies, and finding remote hilltops to watch the sunset.

This distinction is of course completely absurd.

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I learned an important lesson a few years ago on a trip to Venezuela. A friend and I took an overnight bus to a town called Mérida up in the Andes Mountains, and spent about a week just sort of walking around. Our experience of the place was limited to sidewalks, bars, cafes, restaurants, and small parks. Our interaction with other people rarely went beyond ordering our food. Still, we were proud of ourselves for being “travelers”.

Eventually we got bored and our willpower wavered. We gave in and signed up for a white water rafting tour. It was tons of fun and we finally had people to talk to besides each other. Ironically it was also a more “authentic” experience. We got to stay at their camp way outside of the city, they had a local cook that made fantastic home style Venezuelan food, and the staff was able to clear up a lot of questions that had been confusing us about Venezuela.

For example everywhere we went we saw “Si” and “No” spray painted on trees, walls, rocks, mailboxes, everything. We couldn’t figure out for the life of us why some trees would be yes and others would be no. They explained to us that this was how political activism worked in Venezuela and there had recently been another Chavez election. The “Si”s and “No”s were saying yes or no to re-electing Chavez, the local equivalent of lawn signs and bumper stickers. It would have been a thorn in my mind to leave Venezuela without knowing why, and the people in the tourism company could tell us a lot more about the place than we would ever learn by just walking around.

 

Being back in Vietnam I’m again faced with the challenge of not being a tourist, except with a twist. I’ve discovered a new level, above traveler, in the hierarchy. Now the struggle is to be respected as an expat. An expat, short for expatriate, simply means someone that has left their home country and moved somewhere else. A human export.

In Hanoi the term is used to refer to the community of English teachers, business folk, NGO workers, volunteers, and other whities. There is a distinct expat scene and the expats make great effort to distinguish themselves from the tourists. You will never see an expat walking around in short cargo pants, tiger beer shirt, and diagonal strapped backpack, taking a picture of a street vendor. They make a point of dressing up when they go out, constantly checking their cell phones, and always being “a regular” at the places they eat, drink, and shop. This is my peer group now here in Vietnam.

Unlike the other expats though I’m not yet working full time, and by their standards I’ve only very recently arrived. I’m not ready to resign myself to the life of work, errands, and happy hour that I came to Vietnam to escape. I still want to go adventuring.

The challenge is how to adventure without being a tourist.

My solution when I start to get sick of the city has been to get one my regular motorbike drivers to take me on a…. uh… tour outside Hanoi. I have a map of the Hanoi area that has pagodas and temples marked on it, so what I’ve been doing is just pointing at a pagoda or temple and heading off for the day. I have no particular interest in Vietnamese religious sites but I figure that they tend to be situated either in the old parts of their towns or in interesting natural areas. Besides, I can’t easily communicate any other destinations.

So I’ve gone on four trips in this manner so far. Three around Hanoi and one on Phu Quoc, an island in the south of Vietnam off of the coast of Cambodia that I visited for the holidays. These are some of the photos from around Hanoi with my motorbike guy Da:

 

 

 

As you can see I mostly visited a bunch of temples. I was hoping to see more countryside and little old towns. The area around Hanoi is pretty bleak. largely it’s just industrial with tons of new freeway construction. The towns were primarily just simple homes and rickety little businesses built in the same concrete block style as everything else. Also all the fields were destroyed in a recent wave of massive flooding.

An unexpected bonus was that the temples are often built on craggy rocks that have natural caves that you can explore. They build little shrines inside the caves and light incense which makes for a surreal atmosphere.

 

In Phu Quoc my experience was a bit different.

The island is a big tourist destination, mostly for Germans and Russians. So I never really got the feeling that I was “off the beaten path”. The upside was that being on an island, or perhaps just because of the whims of my motorbike guy, we saw a much greater variation of stuff than I had around Hanoi. The drive itself was also much more scenic.

 

Again we went to a temple on a hilltop (this one was covered in swastikas which is always feels a bit weird to me). We also had lunch on a beach with very fine white sand which was almost like baking soda, saw a weird park with an alligator pond, visited a little fishing village, and had some overpriced beers at a creepy karaoke bar.

Then something really cool happened.

There is a “Holy Grail” in the version of reality that exists in the minds of tourists, and I found it. It is being invited to a local home for a traditional dinner. For whatever reason it is considered to be the most “authentic” experience one can have.

There are tour companies that offer this as part of their trips, but it’s just not the same to have dinner in a house that gets paid to host a van load of tourists every other day of the week. My motorbike guy liked me enough though to invite me to join him for some dinner and meet his wife and kids.

He lived in a ramshackle little dwelling. It consisted of three rooms and a tiny outside area nestled in with a bunch of other similar buildings. It had one dinky little power cord strung in from the street that powered a fluorescent tube in the entry/living room.

We had picked up two kilos of scallops from a street vendor and grilled them on top of a coal fire in a bucket. On each one we plopped a spoonful of sauce made out of oil, green onions, garlic, salt, and then we heaped on some ground up peanuts.

 

 

Having had some time to reflect on it I think the key to good tourism, traveling, whatever, is to mix it up. Tour companies are often run by local expats with a real love of the place. They are an easy way to see the sites and make some friends. Going off on your own can be lonely and confusing, but you’re a lot more likely to have a unique experience. Plus you get to feel like a “traveler”.

 

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1 Comment »

1. The second version of the business plan is much easier to read. I’m sold.I’ll see if I can check this book out to help with that pesky senior thesis. Thanks for the idea!
   Comment by Nina — February 10, 2009 @ Tuesday, February 10, 2009

 

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3 Comments »

1. Hey David, glad to know about your business plan consultation and best wishes for your architecture company opportunity. How these opportunities came to you also seems very interesting to me – in a bar and through a bike trip! Well, chance does favor the prepared mind.
   Comment by Ashish — January 2, 2009 @ Friday, January 2, 2009
2. Compared to the vendors that you interviewed, you are making hella pho fella! So congratulations, way to bring home the giant tortillas.
   Comment by tover — January 5, 2009 @ Monday, January 5, 2009
3. Man, that H&K site and their response are an absolutely hilarious combination. The amount of effort you put into it was likely completely lost on them. But also, as per your title on the card, it’s not advisable to give anything away for free.
   Comment by phat aaron — January 20, 2009 @ Tuesday, January 20, 2009

 

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3 Comments »

1. Cool beans, David. Neat article. It was nice to get to know some of the people you’re encountering- and you did a good job of surveying. Keep up the good work.
   Comment by Aaron Belsh — December 16, 2008 @ Tuesday, December 16, 2008
2. David, I really enjoyed your article. I came here from the New Hanoian Photography site to look at your pics. Your pics are pedestrian, but your writing and perspective was interesting–great article worthy of a polish and wider publishing.The only place I might “disagree” with your analysis is about the “health code”. Basically, this system works better than a health code, my neighbors have explained to me, because health inspectors can and are bribed — EVERYWHERE — not just in Vietnam. Here, what you call “social liability” was explained to me very clearly. If you give your neighbors food poisoning, they “bring you fruit in the hospital”–which is a polite way of saying that they beat the shit out of you.Good meeting you at the barbie this weekend. Keep up the writing. That’s where your talent lies.
   Comment by Nick-in-Nam — December 19, 2008 @ Friday, December 19, 2008
3. Very interesting blog, I found it fascinating that the paintings gallery in your survey made the highest money and their business model seems distantly similar to your poster business idea! How is that coming along?
   Comment by Ashish — January 1, 2009 @ Thursday, January 1, 2009

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1 Comment »

1. Haha! Awesome dude. You looking smashing. So, David’s first instincts were right. You got the better suit from your first choice tailor. Also, your writing has gotten much better. Whatever you are doing, keep it up. I can see the transition into better writing by jut scrolling up in your blog.
   Comment by coxface — December 28, 2008 @ Sunday, December 28, 2008

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