There are dreams one thinks must be set aside. And there are dreams that get rekindled — thanks to people who arrive at just the right moment, bringing faith, and the resources for that faith to stand on. For me and the dream called Lĩnh Nam, those two people are Annie Nguyễn and my brother Hà Tuấn Khang.
Every person in business eventually has a stretch that, looking back, they only dare to call by a few plain words: the hard days. My Lĩnh Nam once walked through such a stretch. The dream of an ecosystem built by Vietnamese hands — from rest stops and technology to platforms that serve the community — was still there, but unfinished. The hardship of those days did not lie in the lack of a plan. It lay somewhere else, far more delicate: when the road runs longer than expected, the first thing to run dry is not money — it is the faith of the people around you. And for that very reason, the most precious thing anyone can bring you in such a stretch is not money either. It is faith. Money is merely the way that faith proves it is serious.
Annie came to Lĩnh Nam with exactly that. Sixteen years in entertainment media and international trade promotion gave her an eye I deeply admire: looking at a venture, she does not ask "how is this doing" — she asks "what does this deserve to become". At a time when many looked at Lĩnh Nam with wary eyes, she chose to look with the eyes of a believer. Then she did what only true believers do: she laid her own resources down beside that faith, taking up the helm at CD Restop — so the dream had something to lean on as it rose to its feet. I still think: one can hire a great many things, but no one can hire a person who shares the responsibility. That can only be given — and it must be given with both faith and action.
And Khang — I often call him my brother, because the word "partner" feels too distant. Khang belongs to a generation of young people I cherish for one quality: alert to the new without being infatuated by it; whatever he touches, he wants to understand down to the root — from technology and product to the way a brand must tell its own story. In a company's hard days, a young person has a hundred exits toward somewhere easier. Khang chose to stay — to stay in the fullest sense: contributing his mind, his labor, even the first savings he had put away, and contributing what I know is most costly to a young person — the finest years of a working life. There were evenings when we sat down together, not to talk profit and loss, but to turn over a single question: "how do we carry on, and do it right?" It was those evenings — not any business plan — that carried Lĩnh Nam through the hard stretch.
Thanks to the faith and resources of such people, the company got back on its feet. But what I am grateful for, even more than the "getting up," is how we came to agree on the road ahead: we were not lifting the company up to save a name, but so it could keep doing what it was born to do — creating more jobs for more of our people, opening more decent places to stand for those who have walked with us and those who will. To me, a business only truly comes back to life when it can feed its own people again. Revenue is the breath — but jobs for our people, that is the heartbeat.
We did not exchange grand words about the future. We agreed on a single term: the long haul. Walking together not through a project, not through a phase, but along a road — where each brings their own strength: Annie with her brand vision and the mettle of one who leads from the front, Khang with technology and the storytelling of a new generation, and I with an old faith in the Lĩnh Nam ecosystem that has never gone out. I still believe what I have always believed: no one goes far alone. And a dream rekindled by many hands is harder to put out than a dream with only one person tending the fire.
Half a lifetime of work has taught me one more thing: failure is not what a founder should fear most. What is most fearsome is walking through the hard days without knowing who believes in you. I have been fortunate — because in the hardest days, I knew exactly who did.
Thank you, Annie; thank you, Khang — for rekindling with me a dream still unfinished, and for choosing the long road. The rest, we will see through together — all the way.
Ho Chi Minh City, August 2026 — Nguyễn Ngọc Hải