“According to Vong Thanh Cuong, CEO of Kompa Group, “In fact, there has been a wave of salmon taking place in Vietnam over the past year, where a number of young people working for large Internet companies in the US quit their jobs and returned to Vietnam to start businesses, with some initial success.”, Vòng Thanh Cường, CEO Kompa Group chia sẻ.
“Start-up, in my opinion, is a journey and a passion rather than a career growth path with a specific objective. In order to start a business, you must first clearly define your objectives, commit to achieving them, and be aware of the risks involved”, according to Vong Thanh Cuong, co-founder and CEO of Boomerang Social Listening Consultant and Chairman and CEO of Kompa Group. The first organization in Vietnam to offer social listening solutions was Cuong’s Boomerang, which was founded in 2012.
Vong Thanh Cuong believes that half-hearted things or temporary passions will hardly lead a start-up to its final destination. According to him, the flashiness and sparkle of start-ups are often just the overly rosy tip. There are statistics pointed out by Cuong that show that more than 95% of start-ups fail due to lack of preparation of a solid initial foundation and no plan to deal with risks when starting the entrepreneurial journey.
“Before starting a start-up, you need to answer the question: am I really ready in terms of ideas, finances, relationships and failure if it happens?”, CEO Kompa shared.
In addition, when starting a business, some young people often fall into the misconception that raising capital is already a success, leading to the tendency to “polish” the company after receiving investment such as renting a nice office, participating in seminars, competitions… rather than focusing on developing products, human resources and the market.
“You should remember, success is not how much capital you raise but is measured by the effectiveness of using that capital in the following years. Because if your start-up cannot prove its true effectiveness, it will be difficult to maintain and prepare for the next capital calls,” Vong Thanh Cuong emphasized.
Starting a business is a journey full of hardships and is not easy, so why has Vong Thanh Cuong not stopped despite success with Boomerang? In 2016, when Boomerang reached the number one position in social media listening services in Vietnam, he realized what he thought before had and would come true: data will be a new resource for businesses. And the data that Boomerang is providing is just a small slice of the pie of new resources that all businesses will need. Therefore, he wants to do greater things than the achievements Boomerang has achieved.
This young businessman shared with Tri Thuc Tre via email from Silicon Valley: “I decided to transfer Boomerang to an Australian corporation in the same industry, to have capital and confidence to enter a bigger game in the industry life.”
After withdrawing from Boomerang, Cuong returned to the US and “embedded” himself in Silicon Valley to see where big businesses here have gone in the revolution of Big Data and AI (Artificial Intelligence), at the same time how they apply it, learn about the barriers and achievements they have achieved. From here, he redrew a new business model to suit the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian markets: combining a technical team that has experienced big problems with engineers and experts in Vietnam, which has a lot of experience in the local market.
He founded Kompa Group in the US in 2018 with the desire to go beyond listening and collecting data and through technologies and experts to understand, optimize and take advantage of all data sources from Big Data to analyze applications in different industries, from Marketing to finance, manufacturing…
The keywords ” Big Data”, optimization are the guiding principles for the development model of Kompa Group. With nearly 10 years of experience in the field of technology products, Big Data and AI in Vietnam, Kompa’s team is building an operating model to make the most of its data resources to help businesses make the fastest, most optimal and accurate decisions.
Unlike Boomerang, which only exploits social network data, Kompa researches products more in-depth from the perspective of public user information on social networks and other channels such as Google Search, e-Commerce, sales data, and content… to complete the overall picture of data application in Marketing for businesses. With finance, this group provides a number of services and tools to help analyze and process big data so that organizations can make more accurate data-based judgments. Cuong calls it decision by data driven (decision by data driven).
On January 31, 2020, Vong Thanh Cuong shared a short article on his Facebook profile titled “2 years and 12 hours”, which clearly explains the purpose of Kompa Group’s activities:
“Two years ago, when establishing Kompa Group from the US and then setting up a development office in Vietnam, the team always determined that Big Data, AI and Optimization would be Kompa’s cross-cutting keywords to develop its products in the global market. I don’t have any experience in building Data Lake, real time processing & streaming data, but thanks to the opportunity to jump into building a related product, Kompa’s Data Lake is now at a top level. Plus, don’t hesitate to invest maximum money in R&D so that today we are ready for Big Data related technologies such as NLP, realtime data pipeline… And when the Corona virus is raging, the Development team proposed to create an official and fastest information monitoring page to serve the community, to limit fake news and predict the situation, I’m OK now. After 12 hours of cross-border work, a small product combining Kompa US’s Data Science team in the US and the development team in Vietnam was born.”
Immediately, the article received 481 likes, 84 comments and 137 shares.
When asked to comment on start-ups in Vietnam, Vong Thanh Cuong said that through actual observations of the Vietnamese and US markets, he noticed that in addition to the difficulties and failures of some start-ups like WeFit recently, Vietnam is truly a “paradise” for start-ups. Explaining the above statement, CEO Kompa said there are 3 basic reasons.
“Firstly, we have a large market with 100 million people, the majority of whom are of consumption age.
Secondly, we have a team of skilled engineers whose skills are superior to some countries in the region.
Thirdly, Vietnam has just begun to enter the process of digitizing the entire economy, so there are many new or successful business models abroad that can be applied to our country and opportunities to expand to East South Asia”.
According to the founder of Kompa Group, in the past year there has been a “salmon wave” taking place in Vietnam, meaning that many young people working for giant Internet companies in the US quit their jobs and returned to Vietnam to start a business and step into the future first there were certain successes. The most obvious in this “salmon” wave is that they learn a new business model in the US that has been proven to be successful, then develop a local version suitable for Vietnam. With a brand built from Silicon Valley and a proven business model, these young startups can quite easily attract investment capital from domestic or regional funds in the Southeast Asia region.
And this is truly an encouraging sign for the start-up sector in Vietnam in the post-Covid-19 context, especially when the startup world witnessed the recent collapse of domestic start-up WeFit
From Cafef.vn (https://cafef.vn/ceo-boomerang-va-kompa-group-vong-thanh-cuong-lan-song-ca-hoi-dang-dien-ra-cho-thay-viet-nam-van-la-thien-duong-cho-startup-20200518135418869.chn).
