VietNamNet Bridge - During his busy working visit to Hanoi, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai met Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, spoke with Vietnamese startups, and met with young game developer Nguyen Ha Dong and Truong Gia Binh, president of the Vietnamese largest information technology group FPT.

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai meets Truong Gia Binh, president of FPT.

With nearly 100 million people, Vietnam is a vast market which can offer great opportunities to startups. Therefore, startups should take full advantage of the vast market to develop their business here, in Vietnam, before thinking of approaching the world market. That was what Google’s CEO told Vietnamese startups on December 22 afternoon.

During his 45-minute talk, the CEO many times repeatedly said that Vietnam could serve as the jumping board for Vietnamese startups to develop. He said that Chinese startups focused on the domestic market before reaching out to the world market.

The same thing occurred in India, his homeland. The startups operating in the fields of e-commerce, and online payments mostly develop domestically first and then attack the world market when they become stronger.

A young Vietnamese man said that some friends of his went directly to Silicon Valley, which they believed is the ‘technology holy land’ to develop their business, because they did not think they would have future in Vietnam.

In reply, the CEO said that every market has its own attractiveness and sets its requirements. A small team in Vietnam can become famous all over the world. Nguyen Ha Dong and his team is a typical example. 

With nearly 100 million people, Vietnam is a vast market which can offer great opportunities to startups.

The CEO had a meeting with Dong, the young IT engineer. Dong gained great achievements with his Flappy Bird the online game which had the highest numbers of downloads from app stores. With just a very small team in Hanoi, Dong and his co-workers have gained global success.

The meeting between the CEO of a technology giant conglomerate and the head of a small studio took place at a street pub in Hanoi. After that, both of them wrote about the meeting on Twitter.

The Google CEO wrote he ‘enjoyed meeting with @dongatory, creator of Flappy Bird, in Hanoi today, amazing where next great developers can come from’. Meanwhile, Dong said the Google CEO was a ‘nice and humble gentleman’.

Local newspapers, when reporting the meeting between the Google CEO and FPT’s President Truong Gia Binh, said its was an ‘interesting conversation’.

When Binh told Sundar Pichai that the world sees Vietnam as a market with low labor costs, Sundar replied that Google considers Vietnam a large market.


CV