Week 10 - Diane Tran

Andrew Rowen's book called, Startup Vietnam: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Socialist Republic talk about how to start successful entrepreneurship in Vietnam. In the last 20 years, Hanoi's leadership is trying to make Vietnam a "startup nation" to help the country grow over the next few years. From this book, I learned that Vietnam is second to China of how much growth and development this country has had.  Even though Vietnam does not have a huge market, they still have about 1,500 startups. Rowen also describes how people outside of Vietnam have this idea that Vietnam is just a location where wars were fought. However, he goes into detail how Vietnam is undergoing massive change. The urban changes in Vietnam are visible. He talks about what has not changed and what stayed the same. He also depicts how to work in Vietnam, one must understand the people, culture, environment to successfully create a start up there. He also talks about how Vietnam is known for its political stability but this also somewhat not as true. There are other things that are going on that is operating in Vietnam. Rowen describes the challenges and opportunities in Vietnam and how the government should build a solid foundation if Vietnam wants to be nation that becomes successfully involved with startups.


I thought that this book easy to read because it was not the longest book. In my opinion, there was some information I thought was deemed interesting. However, I somewhat felt that he would be repetitive on the things he mentioned. Vietnam must recognize what the country needs to fix and improve on to excel forward.

Works Cited

Rowan, Andrew. Startup Vietnam: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Socialist Republic. GKTA Group, 2018.