Some ideas die because they are bad. And some ideas die because they have nowhere to be tried. To me, the greatest pity of Vietnamese entrepreneurship belongs to the second kind.
After many years working inside the startup ecosystem, I came to a realization that sounds almost backwards: Vietnamese founders do not lack ideas. What they lack is infrastructure — a place safe enough to try, kind enough to allow failure, and connected enough to help them stand up and keep going. An idea is a seed. But a seed dropped onto concrete pavement will never grow into a tree.
Why I speak of infrastructure — from lived experience
I do not speak of this as an observer. I live inside it. At Times Zones — the innovation-infrastructure company I joined as Founder and Vice Chairman — we chose to do precisely the part few people want to do: the foundations. Not a glamorous product for the headlines, but a member-connection platform, a virtual office system — the things that spare a newcomer from having to carry everything alone.
We believe that investing in startup infrastructure is investing in probability — not betting on any single startup, but on the odds of success for an entire generation of people who dare to act. A charging station does not choose which car will go far. It simply makes sure that every car has a place to recharge.
Trial and error needs a safe place
I work by PDCA — Plan, Do, Check, Action — and within it there is one principle I hold as my compass: accept trial and error. But accepting trial and error at the scale of one person is easy; at the scale of an entrepreneurial society, it takes something larger than willpower. It takes infrastructure.
I have seen projects stop not because their founders lacked ability, but because a single stumble took too much from them — their capital, their relationships, and their faith in themselves.
I have seen good ideas lie still in a drawer, simply because the person who conceived them did not know where to begin, whose door to knock on, or who would walk the first stretch of the road with them.
Infrastructure exists to answer exactly those questions. It turns trial and error from a gamble into a process: fail here, learn here, fix here — then move on. That is the spirit of PDCA, set at the scale of a community.
Decision 982 — when the State builds infrastructure too
In an earlier piece, I wrote about Decision 982/QD-TTg — the national program to bring Vietnamese digital technology enterprises to the world. Reading it again closely, I realized the part that moved me most is its infrastructure mindset: controlled testing mechanisms (sandboxes) for FinTech, AI, and IoT; the "three houses" model — the State, the Academy, the Enterprise; doors opening to capital and to intellectual property protection abroad. What is a sandbox, after all? A place where trial and error is safely permitted — at the scale of a nation.
For Times Zones, it felt like a natural meeting of paths. The State opens the road at the institutional level; those of us who build infrastructure pave it onward at the community level — workspaces, networks of connection, companions for the journey. Only when those two layers touch does the person who dares to try truly have ground to stand on. No one goes far alone — the sentence I have always believed in turns out to be true of policy as well.
So what do we do?
If you are nurturing an idea, let me share a few things I keep reminding myself:
- Do not try alone. Seek out places where infrastructure already exists — communities, incubators, coworking spaces. The cost of one failure shrinks greatly when someone walks beside you.
- Design the failure before you design the success. Think right before you act right — decide in advance: if this fails, what is the most I can lose, what will I learn, and where do I stop.
- Make use of what is being opened up. Sandboxes, the three-houses model, support programs — do not let policy stay on paper simply because you hesitated to look into it.
- If you have made it through the first stretch, become infrastructure for those who come after. An introduction, an hour of shared experience — sometimes that is the first "office" of someone just beginning.
A closing word
I believe this country does not lack people who dare to think. What we still owe one another are foundations firm enough for those who dare to think to become those who dare to try — and for those who dare to try to be allowed to fail with dignity. Building infrastructure is quiet work: when everything runs well, no one remembers it; but without it, nothing runs at all. I am grateful to have been given that quiet work.
Once the foundation is laid — the house will rise.
Nguyễn Ngọc Hải