march 2026
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once a month, i use this "writings" section to dump thoughts onto the internet. sometimes they’re opinions. sometimes stories. sometimes things i don’t fully understand yet but want to think through anyway.
but, further than opinions and thoughts, i also want to use this space to talk about my personal feelings, journeys, experiences, and life in a startup.
startup is a part of my life. i started my first business back in 12, and ever since then, i've always wanted to build and create different things that leave an impact on the people around me. so many people have supported me along the journey, but at the same time, some people have questioned my purpose and intent of becoming an entrepreneur, whether it would make me feel different, famous, or rich.
tbh, there's a tiny tiny part of my purpose revolving around the idea of being an entrepreneur is being different and rich - because, yes, for so many entrepreneurs and startups, their dream is to exit at a large amount of money or take the home run of going public. moreover, being an entrepreneur is already different, because the path is thousands of times more risky and unstable than having a corporate job, receiving stable paychecks, paying taxes, and enjoying life.
that's why whenever people are asking whether they should start a company, i always tell them to truly think about the tradeoff between having time and money stably, or going insane, working almost 24 hours a day, and living on ramen for years.
but, if it were just for the money or fame, then i wouldn't have started a venture in the first place. again, the path to success in a startup is so fuckin low - like extremely low. if you look up, there are tens of pages and sources talking about how building a startup from scratch has such a low success rate - like fewer than 10% or something. some startups may already have raised 7-8-figure funding but still end up being shot behind the barn. so, if it were for the money and fame, startups would be the stupidest way to look for them.
so, why?
well, again, it's in the blood. my first business was creating a notebook with covers made of scraped wood. i spent the first few months learning how to make a notebook, talking to friends to see what types of designs they would want to buy, watching youtube on wood sawing videos, finding wood products that still were usable and not too rotten, trying assembling the first ever prototype, failing multiple times, wasting some time and materials, dropping my grades in class, feeling asleep every morning going to school - all to make some first money of mine.
after 8 months, i made my first thousand dollars. yes, four figures. it might seem low to american currency, but in vietnamese, it was worth around tens of millions of vietnamese dong. as a 12yo kid, i had no idea what to do with that type of money. i enjoyed the money for the first few days, but then, i felt empty. i decided to drop the business and focus on school again.
money didn't bring me joy. it was the journey and process of traveling, trying, failing, getting back up, talking to people, learning from customers, collecting cash from customers, helping customers feel good about the product, refining the product, improving the product, launching, marketing, spreading the word, and a lot more that let me understand what it was like to build a startup.
well, that was tip of the iceberg. i also failed - like hard, painful fail.
my sophomore year, i started my first college business with a good friend of mine. we built a fashion marketplace for college students. it was a great business as we raised $5,000 in pre-seed and got to the school's pre-accelerator program. we also had paying customers.
but, it was the start. we gradually learned the hard truth that international students were not allowed to make any revenue from businesses in the usa. that being said, we ended up with two options. fight or flight.
fight - i wanted to give it a real shot: doing real business, making no revenue but still allowing the customers to interact and do business with us, and slowly figure out the legal game as we were running.
flight - we gave up.
after discussions and considerations, we ended up dropping the business, taking it behind the barn, and shooting it down. it was a painful failure as our friendship actually was damaged. shit truly happened.
my junior year, i launched a social media startup called ricefield. the idea was to have a reddit-like website specifically for college communities. we worked for a year, building the site through three iterations, launched across the campus, acquired hundreds of users, got into the school's premier pitch competition - only to end up dissolving because we couldn't agree on being on the same page or sharing the same vision.
failing is definitely painful, and, oftentimes, demotivating as well. there were points in the past where i thought of actually giving up. i felt so stressed, burnt out, and purposeless. i did not feel like chatting, talking, or sharing my stories with anyone but to keep it to myself and endure all the hardship alone.
whenever that happened, i asked myself: why did i choose this path the first place - and it all squared back to my very first business at 12. when i did things not for the sake of being successful or feeling rich, but because i truly enjoyed starting, creating, and doing things for the people around me.
on top of that, there are so many other things that need to be figured out while building a startup. tbh, i could sit down right here and write 100+ things that you need to be looking into.
so, the answer to the question of "should i start a startup?" isn't a simply yes or no, but it's whether you would try in the first place. there are good days, but there are also bad days. there are victories, but there are also failures, losses, and pains. but, if you wouldn't try in the first place, you would never understand what it feels like to go through those moments.
so, give it a shot. it's not the "if," it's about the "when."