Week 10 - Percy Yan

In the article Startup Vietnam by Andrew Rowan, he talks about Vietnam and how it has created and experienced a remarkable growth and development in the last 30 years. This book also captures the challenges, efforts, and successes of Vietnam’s youth, local startups, and foreign entrepreneurs during a time of transition between tradition and
modernity. Having significantly evolved during the last 20 years, Hanoi's leadership is committed to making Vietnam a “startup nation” in an attempt to accelerate the country’s growth over the next 20 years. The spirit and promise of a resilient, improvisational, driven, and entrepreneurial people in this Southeast Asian nation are presented within an understandable operational landscape, in addition to creating a vision for what a 21st century Vietnam might become. We also learn that Vietnam doesn’t have a market of over a billion people like China or India. Yet, with a population of over 90 million people, it has more than 1,500 active startups, making Vietnam the third largest entrepreneurial ecosystem in Southeast Asia (behind Singapore, the major financial hub in the region, and Indonesia with 240+ million people, respectively). The World Bank and the IMF have both recognized Vietnam’s development success. In 2013, the World Bank acknowledged Vietnam’s path from one of the world’s poorest countries to a lower middle-income country in the span of 25 years. Last year, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of IMF, delivered remarks in Hanoi about Vietnam “gearing up for the next transformation.” If Vietnam is able to avoid the middle-income trap, it can then provide a blueprint for similar countries. Furthermore, as a country among the first to be impacted by climate change, Vietnam will serve as a litmus test for how a rising sea level will impact countries around the world.