On 13 November, I gave my talk, The Bigger GAMe, at EO Vietnam's RISE 4 in Ho Chi Minh City. It was about what a founder learns when winning stops being enough, and what kept me going when it did.
I shared the stage with Võ Duy Phú, co-founder and CEO of Every Half, who spoke just before me. Something he said about coffee ended up becoming the thread of my own talk. Here's the night, the talk, and how a coffee bean got into it.
A house built for a night like this
nanoHome Gallery is Kathy Luong's design space, spread across several floors, and she opened it to us for the afternoon.
The night moved up the building. Coffee on arrival, then upstairs for the talks, then all the way up to the top floor for happy hour, looking out at Landmark 81 with a glass of Glenmorangie in hand.
The people made it. EO Vietnam members, guests and future members, plus members who flew in from EO Philippines and EO Singapore. That's a part of EO people don't see from the outside: you join a chapter, and you get a region.
Phú and the robusta
Phú co-founded Every Half in 2021 and has grown it to 47 stores, backed by a US$3 million pre-Series A in 2025 and a US$8 million Series A this July. You'd expect a talk about coffee, or about raising capital. What he talked about was people. For him, the bigger game is building the people behind the business.
Then he talked about robusta, the coffee bean Vietnam is known for. It grows in the heat of the tropics where other coffee struggles, and as the world gets hotter, that toughness matters even more. Robusta is resilient by nature.
I was on next, and I knew I'd be coming back to that bean. Hold on to it.
The Bigger GAMe
I opened by asking for hands: who has played a game to win, and who has ever wanted to quit? Then I asked the question the whole talk hangs on. What game are you playing?
My first answer came from Nha Trang. Everyone there was playing the small game: be the best bar on the beach. With Skylight, we wanted to be the reason people came to Nha Trang. More than 2.2 million guests later, I learned that a bigger game pulls people in.
In 2021, I changed games. With GAM we won a lot: 11 VCS titles, and a SEA Games gold for Vietnam at home. But every team in the world tells the same story, and it's the same word. Win. So we stopped asking how to beat the other teams and started asking how to represent Vietnam.
Then came 2025. We had moved the whole team abroad to play in the LCP, and Worlds was in our plan. It was in our forecasts too. When we missed it, the loss ran to six figures, money we had already counted on. That was one of the hardest stretches I've had as a founder, and I wanted to walk away from everything. From the outside, I don't think anyone saw it.
Then Riot released "Sacrifice," the Worlds 2025 anthem. There was Levi, our captain, next to Faker and Caps, in front of the whole world. We hadn't made it to Worlds, and GAM was still in the story.
That video showed me which game we were really in. I had been playing the game to win. The game we're actually in is bigger: GAM as a movement for Southeast Asia, led by Vietnam. Wins and losses are part of it. They don't define it.
There's a saying I love: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. It's how I see the last five years.
Winning is the fast game. Representing Vietnam is the long game.
You can chase a win alone, and when you lose, you're alone with it. Nobody plays the long game alone. Playing for something bigger is what kept me going.
It also changed who showed up for us. GAM became one of 40 Esports World Cup Club Partners, the only club from Vietnam. Riot chose us as one of 8 VCT Pacific partner teams from 2027, the only one representing Vietnam. What got us there was what we stood for: Vietnam, and Southeast Asia with it. That's what our partners saw.
They don't partner with a team. They partner with a movement.
The weekend before RISE 4, 33,000 fans came to Mỹ Đình over two days for Liên Quân 10 Fest, a mobile game. Most of them have never watched our League of Legends team. They came as gamers from Vietnam, because we were playing for Vietnam. That's what a movement looks like: people who were never your fans show up anyway.
The lesson I left with the room: business gets hard, and when it does, what you stand for is what carries you. Then I closed on the three questions I want every founder to sit with.
The Bigger GAMe
What game are you playing?
What game are you really in?
What's your bigger GAMe?
I wrote how the story starts in The Bigger GAMe, a few days before the talk. This is the rest of it.
The part nobody sees
Kathy, Phú and I ended up saying the same thing without planning to. Building a company gets lonely.
I didn't walk away from GAM. "Sacrifice" showed me which game we were in, and EO made sure I didn't have to play it alone. So I tied it back to Phú's coffee bean and told the room:
Back to Phú's coffee bean
I was the robusta.
I stayed resilient, and I didn't do it alone.
What EO actually gives you
When people ask me what EO is, I talk about who you're surrounded by.
In EO, there's always someone a few steps ahead of you who has already been through whatever is keeping you up at night. There's always someone a few steps behind, who you can help. Everyone brings their own experience, and together it raises the standard for all of us.
For me, a lot of it comes down to my Forum, the small group of founders I meet with every month. They got me through the most difficult time I've had, and I gave them a shout-out from the stage. I'll do it again here.
What I learned is simple. You're not alone, and nobody has all the answers. That's normal. It's part of the journey.
Thank you
The feedback came in this morning.
None of that happens without the people behind it. A BIG thank you to the EO Vietnam team who pulled this off. I know the last few weeks were hectic, and you made it look easy.
We closed the night with dinner at NÚC Kitchen & Bar, next to Amanaki in Thảo Điền, with about 30 of us around the table. It was the right way to end it.
If you're a founder in Vietnam carrying it on your own, come and meet EO Vietnam. And to everyone who was there on Friday, thank you for the energy. See you at the next one.
Remember: if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
I'm thankful to be going together with EO Vietnam. 🇻🇳
