Category: Jake

My last days in Saigon are dwindling down. I have had an amazing experience overall. I’ve traveled all over Vietnam and the surrounding Southeast Asian countries, and I had a great learning experience via my internship with spiced. Overall, I think my performance was fantastic. I showed up every single day, on time, ready to streamline operations. I accomplished every task given to me, and even went beyond what was asked. For example, to expose more people to the coworking and event space within our company, my coworker Garrett and I organized a presentation on financial basics for the locals. We created financial statements for spiced, attracted investor partnerships and funding, and most importantly, we had a great time.

I think I excelled most in teamwork. I got along great with my employer and the employees of the company. I also made a great friend in my fellow intern Garrett. We were a very efficient team, and morale was always extremely high regardless of circumstance. I would say the area I need the most improvement is perhaps networking. When we hosted networking events or attended any, I was a little on the shy side and did not quite present myself as forward as I would have liked to. This experience contributed a lot towards my personal growth. It taught me how to be much more flexible with people and situations that arise. It also taught me better organization and time management skills that will filter into my future career. I also have gained some great business knowledge and learned how a company operates from the ground up. I am sure all of this will be useful in the future.

Overall, I loved my time in Ho Chi Minh city. It was a rewarding experience filled with adventure. I got to immerse myself in an extremely unique culture, and I truly felt I was experiencing the world in its raw beauty. It certainly has had its challenges. However, the lessons I learned and the friendships that were fostered in Vietnam will last throughout my entire life. I’d like to thank the University of Florida, Jason Ward, and Mike Fitzgerald for helping me find and execute this opportunity. I’d also like to thank all my fellow UF interns in Vietnam, I truly had an amazing experience with everyone! Vietnam has been great, and the people I went on this journey with turned it into the adventure of a lifetime.

So far, my proudest moment in my internship has been given the responsibility of creating a pitch deck for institutional investors with my co-worker, Garrett. Together, we ran through the company’s financials, created a DCF revenue model, and lastly assembled a beautiful presentation on the strengths of the company. We also created a general estimate of how the allocation of money would be disbursed within the company, and how much we would need to expand operations, while not taking on too much debt.

I would say my biggest professional accomplishment within the internship has been Garrett and I’s presentation/workshop we gave to the local Vietnamese. While we certainly are not CFA regulated industry professionals, we do have a fairly high level of education with the realm of the finance world. We organized a presentation to give to the local Vietnamese to bolster their knowledge on the stock market, basic money management, and recommended portfolio diversification depending on their goals. We walked them through various financial markets and how to invest in each of them. We managed to gather a crowd of about 15 people to attend our presentation. We were super pleased when they stayed for an extra 45 minutes during the Q&A at the end to ask us questions. The Vietnamese stock exchange opened recently, around 2000-2001, so it is a relatively new way of utilizing their money.

One way I look at life differently after spending the last two months living and working in HCMC is that of gratitude. Vietnam is a beautiful country, but they are not in the first world yet. There are so many challenges ranging from every single direction just to get through daily life. They do not have nearly the same amount of modern luxurious, healthcare, or general infrastructure as we do back in the states. Regardless, they are an optimistic people, always seen with smiles. This country is certainly on its’ way to greatness. Living here has been an extremely humbling experience and has widened by perspective on overall life. It also has taught me how to be much more adaptable to challenges thrown my way.

During my internship I have learned numerous things about this industry. First and foremost, it is relatively young. The major corporations did not start until 2012. Overall, it is a very difficult industry to maintain steady income in. Profit margins are razor thin and success relies on developing relationships with real estate companies or landlords.

My company’s strength is its’ community feel. Unlike other coworking companies, they try to foster growth for a sense of belonging. In a foreign country, it can be difficult to make friends and like-minded individuals. My company hosts a multitude of social events, has “community meals”, and we also have high expectations of hospitality between employees and the customers.

Our weakness comes in the place of competition. Larger companies (such as WeWork) have the power to take over multiple floors in skyscrapers in downtown Saigon. They also have a much larger customer base and can target a wider range of clients, from a single digital nomad, to being able to host an entire company within their walls.

The opportunity for growth is certainly present in Vietnam, There are not a ton of competitors yet, and the population is slowly shifting to the first world and more and more people enter the city each day looking for places to cheaply work or house their startups.

Our threats can come from a variety of places. Dealing with landlords and forming partnerships with real estate companies can be a very political and unstable process. A communist government has many more regulations about the rezoning and ownership of land. One loophole we utilize is registering properties under a Vietnamese partner’s name. Foreigners cannot acquire property in Vietnam.

One of my favorite moments in Vietnam thus far has been my trip to Ninh Binh. It is a city a few hours south of Hanoi, the spectacles on nature there are absolutely fascinating.

The most challenging part of my internship is probably the need to constantly adapt to the flow of business daily. It is a recent startup, in a communist country, with significantly less quality of infrastructure than America. Each day tends to present a new challenge on top of the regular workflow. Whether that be random power cuts, Vietnamese workers not properly doing their jobs (or taking 3-hour naps during the workday), or lack of reliable contractors to perform proper maintenance in our building, it adds an extra variable each day. I certainly have learned to be flexible and help deal with these issues quickly and effectively, even with the language barrier constantly effecting each interaction.

I think although this is a challenge, it also is the best part about the experience. Learning how to run a company on a smaller level, dealing with everything from operations, finances, to marketing, is a wonderful experience. The unpredictability of the job also adds an extra layer of excitement. Instead of doing the same exact task every single day, it rather is approached as an “What can we do to make this company better today”.

Changing subject, my favorite dish in Vietnam so far actually is not a dish, but rather the coffee. The Vietnamese increase the amount of caffeine in a typical cup, as well as add condensed milk. It adds a certain twist to it that I personally think can sometimes be superior to a typical cup back in America. It is extra sweet without adding a ton of sugar. It also provides quite the kick and enough to get you through and lack of sleep experienced the night before!

I have officially reached the halfway point in my time in Vietnam. It is quite surreal that I have already been living in this country for an entire month. For my remaining time at spiced, my coworker Garrett and I have much to do. The company officially launched today, with quite a crowd arriving. We will now be able to track the profits spiced will create over the following weeks to revise and strengthen our pitch deck, as well as make operations more financially efficient. The next few months for the company are of great significance. If profit margin is high and the company is thriving, it may attract sizeable investments from institutional investors.

The relationship between my superior and I is fantastic. Sometimes the language barrier can get in the way as he speaks mostly French, but other than that we have no issues on communication or finishing tasks. I also have a fantastic relationship with my main coworker, Garrett Ort. We are a great team and our supervisor enjoys letting us do projects together as we are efficient and creative.

One thing I’ve learned from living/working is HCMC is that the work schedule is much more fluid and even more efficient than America. The workday differs from place to place, but it often has a lunch break and even a nap break. They work hard and rest hard. They also care a lot about work/life balance. Their time with family is just as important as them putting in hours. It also is a much more capitalistic economic structure than I ever would have thought. I feel no communist economic influence when at work or when in any store in the city.

My supervisor is the CEO of the company. His responsibilities include essentially running the entire company from the ground up. He oversees client relationships, tries to acquire funding, and runs operations. My team is that of financial services within the company. Daily life includes assembling and editing pitch decks for institutional investors, aiding the accountant with budgeting and funding allocation, and analysis/development of the company’s financial statements. We also have been tasked with doing market research and developing potential revenue models for various services the company may roll out. We tend to get into work by 9am, have a meeting, perform tasks for the day, have an end of the day meeting, then are out of the door by 6pm.

One of the interesting personal experiences I have had within HCMC was certainly a grab ride on a motorbike. The traffic here is an epic chaos. Streetlights are essentially non-existent, road rules do not apply. Any larger vehicle typically bullies their way through the millions (yes, millions) of scooters that assemble the main traffic congestion in HCMC. My experience was more of a roller coaster ride than your typical “Uber”. My driver was certainly skilled at navigating the local traffic, weaving in and out of cars and other scooters as he pleased. At one point we even leaped up onto the sidewalk to skip a half mile or so of traffic. After all, each ride has a fixed price so the quicker each trip, the higher his profits each day will be. At no point did I feel unsafe though. I was surprisingly calm among the insanity around me, as I trusted my driver dealt with this on a daily basis. It really was an interesting experience, and I would recommend the experience to those who seek something more interesting than the typical car ride.

I am working for a co-working/co-living startup. The industry is rather new, as the trend of digital nomadism and freelance work continuously grows. The information era has led way to the possibility of people in certain fields working directly from home. A lot of studies have taken place and proven that those whom work in their own off-site workspace often are significantly more productive and lead higher quality of work/life balance.

My company, Spiced, specializes in supplying and maintaining a co-working building. They plan to differentiate from competition by offering onsite co-living, as well as other amenities and services to adopt a more community driven environment. They aspire to bring people together and increase networking potential, rather than to simply supply a bland office environment. They also plan on increasing revenue for their location by adding a high-quality eatery within the building, run by a masterchef. This will lead to increased revenue, as they will be strategically re-purposing their office space to decrease the impact of overhead fixed costs.

The first days of my internship were rather hectic. In Vietnam, everything is a challenge, and the building was behind schedule on several renovations. Spiced also has ambitious plans of expanding operations. We arrived at a time where we were tasked to aid in the review of company financial statements, as well as sitting in on meetings to assemble a pitch deck for institutional investors, which included an internal evaluation process. The environment and culture of the workplace is certainly fluid, fast paced, and exciting. The company is scheduled to launch in a few weeks, and there is much to be done to prepare for customers. All while in the background we figure out ways to raise additional capital for the company, whether that be applying for loans, pitching investors, or optimizing revenue streams.

Vietnam was a culture shock. My world was thrown into complete disarray as soon as I arrived, it was comparable to landing on an alien planet. It was mesmerizing. There was an immense amount of beauty within the bustling and chaotic streets of this rapidly expanding city. I was greeted by street vendors hustling for an extra few cents on their sales, to then look up to a Lamborghini passing by without garnering much notoriety.

Another shock was the amount of English-speaking citizens here. Essentially every young person under the age of 35 has been able to communicate effectively with me. Diversity within Vietnam is quite unique as it shifts onto its own platform within the world economy. I have to say my expectations were exceeded. I knew this would be a challenge, and it has been. However, learning to adapt and thrive on the go is certainly a skill I am developing.

Life in Saigon is nonstop, and it is a hustle. You can feel the influence of an economy shifting towards a western capitalistic mindset as it sheds its’ socialist past. Vietnam is also a place of extremely unique and beautiful cultural background. The people are proud of their past and open minded to influences from abroad. There is no official religion here, and you can see influences from each major belief system. Our trip to the Black Lady mountain was highlighted by a visit to a Cao Die temple where I got to see this mixture of religion in action. “Cao Đài” is a relatively new, syncretistic, monotheistic religion, officially established in the city of Tay Ninh, southern Vietnam, in 1926. This belief system is a combination of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It is rapidly growing within Vietnam. Our trip there was a beautiful cultural experience. We visited the main temple of the following and were welcomed with nothing but smiles and open arms. It was similar to our earlier trip to a Buddhist temple, except after the service, the members hopped on their scooters (of which there are 45 million in Vietnam) and returned to their normal lives instead of retreating back to temple life.

The culture here is a mixing pot of various Asian influence from the surrounding countries. It is interesting and even reminds me of America being influenced by European culture. As this trip continues, I would love to learn more about the local culture within Vietnam from a social standpoint. Such as learning what the locals do in their free time and where they hangout or network. It truly is an amazing and unique country.

The class on Vietnamese culture was a fantastic learning experience. It certainly expanded my previous knowledge on their history and ideological values. I would say the most surprising aspect was their acceptance of capitalism! I knew Vietnam was a politically communist country. However, I did not realize to the extent of how their economic model imitates western ways. I feel as this exemplified their resilience and desire for the people to prosper. When the communist socialist model was failing and Soviet support disintegrated, the Vietnamese showed their capability of adapting and doing what is best for all. A similarity between Vietnam and the United States culturally is their stress on education. The Vietnamese have been building a fantastic network of public schooling, especially considering they haven’t even fully developed into a middle-income nation yet. I feel as if the emphasis on receiving a quality education in both countries is very important on an individual basis. A cultural difference is an individual vs. group mentality. In the United States, we certainly think about our existence and goals from an individualistic perspective, whereas in Vietnam, it appears they think more about unity and what is best for the group. This is best exemplified with the concept of family “face”. In Vietnam, if one person in the family does something shameful, they believe it will inflict a negative connotation on the entire family. I believe this likely will directly impact my experience in my internship. When I arrive, I feel as if I will be welcomed immediately into a “team” mindset. As opposed to emphasizing the immediate and direct desire to achieve individual goals. Also, I might experience my employers attempt to save face if they are displeased with any work I do. I feel as if there also won’t be any outbursts of emotion. In Vietnam, if you showcase extreme negative emotion publicly, they associate this with a loss of face. Perhaps if I make a mistake, my managers won’t express their displeasure too openly. This might require me to decode their thoughts with more attention when they are addressing my effort and the level of quality of the work I will be doing.