AV1 | How It Feels To Be An Early Employee

Hau Ly and Adrian Latortue kick off the season with a discussion about their own experiences as early employees in Vietnam-based startups. Hau discusses the pace of learning and early leadership lessons while Adrian talks about how he went about establishing a new team from scratch.

Discussion Topics: How It Feels to Be an Early Employee

• Introduction to Hau and Adrian
• Two people and a dog
• Imposter syndrome
• Hiring people better than you
• Culture is shaped by the early employees

Transcript: How It Feels to Be an Early Employee

Adrian Latortue: Hello to our early stage founders in Vietnam, our aspiring entrepreneurs and those just curious about the entrepreneurship journey. This is not just another VC podcast. AVV founders and friends is here to share candid stories about the founders in the ecosystem, really demystifying and bringing light to the early stage journey, especially those first 6 to 12 months. Now we all hear about the company’s raising funds and their success stories so we don’t always hear about the first month of their journey and the challenge is that each founder has encountered, and especially their personal trials and tribulations. If you have a story you’d like to share, definitely reach out to us. I’m Adrian.

Hau Ly: And I’m Hau.

Adrian Latortue: And we’re the hosts of the AVV founders and friends podcast.

Hau Ly: Ascend Vietnam Ventures or AVV is an early stage venture capital firm in Vietnam. Since 2015, we have been the most active seed investors here on the ground, having backed companies like XC infinity, trusting social, Elsa and so on. We’re here to find and back the next iconic tech companies arising from Vietnam. We have built a team with a lot of operational experience in the startup and tech space across different markets, including Silicon Valley. And yeah, we will be part of the journey for the next startups in Vietnam that will be market leaders, not just in this country, but in the region and also globally as well. I’m currently a partner at AVV. My main focus is on portfolio success, helping make sure that our portfolio companies will be able to achieve all the goals that they set out for themselves and reach their fullest potential. I’ve been in the VC space for about six years, having worked on multiple aspects of operating a VC firm. I’ve led deals including XA eternity based and peak for a firm in Vietnam, which was our prior firm.

Adrian Latortue: I’m a Portfolio Manager at 500 start-ups Vietnam, and I work with Vietnam non-ventures on portfolio success portfolio infrastructure. Before joining 500 Start-ups Vietnam and the AVV team I was a founder myself. So I’ve spent about 12 years in Vietnam working with early stage tech companies. This is my second home. I am really excited to be here, really excited to host this with you Hau. So the first season of the AVV founders and friends podcast is called two people and a dog. What is this about?

Hau Ly: Yeah, so this term was a term that I first heard from a serial entrepreneur and a start-up venture, when I reached out to him to chat about the different challenges that an early stage founder might have with regards to leadership and building the team and I really liked his term, because it’s so candid, it’s so accurate, this is where we start as any startup. And you don’t have investors, VCs, like us, who always look for the right team, or who always look for the best team you know, we’re looking for the world class team to build what you build, but how do you get there from this very starting point of having two people and a dog? And that’s what we want to uncover, that’s what we want to unveil How do you go about hiring your first hires? And these people are going to be very important to your business. It’s not just the people they’re not just coming in to do, maybe some of the work that you can’t do yourself. But they play a very important role in shaping your team. And so it’s a very, very critical decision to make the first few hires. And we want to talk about that and help founders in this market, understand and hear some of these stories and learn from some of the lessons and best practices as well.

Adrian Latortue: He talks about the kind of excitement, leadership, vision, fear and intimidation. So maybe the question is, tell the audience about an early team that you joined.

Hau Ly: I actually had a number of opportunities to join early teams. Some of these opportunities I took on, like with 500 Vietnam and Vietnam ventures. I joined the team about six years ago, when it was essentially just being Eddie and a couple of associates, and that has been a very, very exciting journey. Some of the other opportunities I turned down because I figured it was not the right fit for me. And when I reflected back on how I made these decisions, I think it came down to whether or not the opportunity would give me the space to really explore my range, and do a lot of things and make a lot of impact within the organisation. But on top of that, there’s also an element of leadership and learning opportunity than I was looking for, right? Can I learn from these teams, can I work with these people and really tap into their knowledge and experience and develop myself? When I joined 500 Vietnam, and got the offer from them, I was really, really excited. But at the same time, I was super nervous and intimidated by the team. I was looking at this all star team, you know, Harvard and Yale educated serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, very high flying, high potential Junior associates as well and I felt severely under qualify, but that fear also told me that, hey, I could really learn from these people, these are the people that I definitely should work with, if I want to grow myself. So yeah, as someone who was looking to join an early team, those are the things that really matter to me. I know, Adrian, you have a lot of experience on the recruiting end as well, we actually met when you were trying to recruit me for your team at Uber. So yeah, do tell.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, a lot of my experience, especially in the retail and in Vietnam, was building early teams that I’ve been a part of early teams, but I think one of the initial responsibilities after joining an early team is recruiting the other team members, especially if you’re a first person with boots on the ground and it overall is a very, very challenging responsibility. Number one, really understanding the dynamic of people on the ground, right? There’s no easy formula to identify the people that you’re recruiting and so looking for people who are not so risk averse, they’re excited to take on new opportunities, they think differently, they have an outlier factor. So yeah, the first job on the ground, had to hire Operations Manager and Marketing Manager and the GM. And so one of the biggest things that I learned about recruiting for an early team was to really have the courage to recruit people that I thought were better than me, better than me in everything that I was doing for the company. And what that meant was that they could truly lead and envision the future of the company in each of those respective areas. And so it was less of them saying, Hey, I’m going to work for this person, really, that we’re going to work together and build the future of this company, and so when you get the right people, the company is expanding very rapidly, because you have two, three people that are pushing in their respective directions, and also together to realise that vision, you know, when I was recruiting, one of the things I learned was like, you get these people who are absolute magnets, by default, they are the people who will build the culture, the people that the new candidates recruits that they look up to. And so there’s no document on culture values, and all of this and so it’s very intrinsic to who these people are and they’re going to be the first representatives of the company. And so, you can’t bake the values and culture into them. It’s almost like they’re coming with a pretty strong idea of what that is, and how they want to build that. And when you put all these people in a room, then that’s really where the magic happens. And so, really a lot of the best companies, they figured out a really powerful, motivating, captivating early team early on, and that was their secret to growth. So, that was like one of the biggest lessons, one of the ones I hold pretty, pretty close to heart, and I’ll share with a lot of founders really getting those magnetic people in the door.

Hau Ly: Yeah, I can definitely resonate with many points that you raised, like the first one is on people being adaptable and being able to evolve. I don’t think any of these initial hires do the kind of work that was initially put on the JD that they saw. The role that they took on would expanding very rapidly within the team and so we definitely need people who have an appetite for that, but to be able to deal with ambiguity in working for an early stage startup, and as another mentor that we have once said to our portfolio companies, they have to be able to pivot as the business pivots as well. So that’s one. And then the point that you made about magnet I feel like that’s something that a lot of founders might overlook when they made these hires, so hopefully, we’ll be able to dive into this a little more deeply in other episodes of this season.

Adrian Latortue: Yeah, absolutely. Overall, I’m really looking forward to hearing some of the struggle buster stories of recruiting the first team, but also the celebrations of how these early team members met each other. Some of it is very serendipitous, coincidental, but those relationships last a very long time. It’s similar to how you and I met when I tried to recruit you for Uber and you turned the opportunity down, that was back in 2015. Here we are sitting with each other, and now working together. So I’m really excited for this.

Hau Ly: Yeah, 100% I was really, really excited when we were able to bring you on. And it proved to me that people with similar values, and people who were very like minded there might be opportunities down the line where your hats will cross again. So that’s something that founders should keep in mind, to be able to go out there and meet people and really create an opportunity for them to be able to work with each other, if not right away then sometime in the future.

Adrian Latortue: Absolutely. This is a people’s business.

Hau Ly: Absolutely yeah 100%. Thanks for tuning in. If you like what you hear, subscribe to the AVV founders and friends podcast. This is Hau and Adrian. We’ll see you next time.

Our Guest: Hau Ly

Hau Ly is the partner at Ascend Vietnam Ventures focused on portfolio success and has been in the VC space for six years.

Adrian Latortue is portfolio manager at 500 Startups Vietnam, prior to which he was a founder himself and an early member of the Uber team in Southeast Asia. He’s lived in Vietnam, working with Vietnamese startups for 12 years.