Saturday night in the big smoke of Ho Chi Minh City—and while elsewhere the rest of Sài Gòn Ward hums with the restlessness of a city thriving on cosmopolitan influence, Mâm Mâm Vietnamese Eatery and Lounge tucked alongside prime Saigon River estate becomes the quiet living room for a new class of entrepreneurial ambition.
The invite reads:
Private dinner. 30 pax, invite-only. Shared dishes, small tables, plenty of mingling, light agenda.
In the relational economy that is Vietnam, connection is the currency entrepreneurs learn to live by. But connection of the deal-making kind differs from connection of the human kind. And building a business can be its own kind of loneliness.
Here, you’re invited to talk about it.
Meet the movers and shapers
The monthly private dinner for Viet and Vietnam-focused entrepreneurs is co-hosted by Quang Do (Overseas Vietnamese, “OV”) and Hảo Trần (Vietcetera), two familiar names in Vietnam’s startup and business circles.
One simply arrives and permits himself to be absorbed by the crowd.
The other navigates the edges, observing the spaces and corridors of conversations which might need tending to.
It’s a co-hosting dynamic which German-born OV founder Quang describes as efficient: “Hảo provides the location, I bring the crowd.”
The Vietnamese fusion-style Mâm Mâm, launched in March 2025, is Hảo’s first restaurant project since 2020 — built around the spirit of commensality and captured by the traditional Vietnamese “mâm cơm” which features in full brass specularity from the restaurant’s ceiling.
A multi-meter panoramic rendering of Ho Chi Minh City’s transformed city skyline across the past decade wraps across the walls in a depiction of the city’s hunger for growth and newness—an appetite for “building” which has captured the hearts and minds of many an entrepreneur, Viet-Kieu or foreigner, looking for a place to build.
“You need to have some conviction to come to Vietnam to build a business—that makes for very interesting stories and conversations, because everyone has a very unique story, especially if they’re foreigners,” Quang says.
“The purpose is for us to come together, get to know each other, and then anything that derives from that: whether that be collaborations, partnerships, more friendships.”
Curated environments optimizing the ‘luck’ of interaction
The format is simple as promised: a light Happy Hour followed by an intimate dinner setting focused on small table groups and a closing round of drinks and mingling.
Quang and Hảo are adamant the “event” shouldn’t feel like an event, but rather an intimate environment for connections to form organically among highly relevant peers.
“This should just feel like a dinner for friends,” Quang says.
“We’d been running informal dinners with friends anyway, so this was just the natural extension for us to open it up to more folks. New, fresh faces, friends of friends.”
“We come to connect. We see what happens. Everyone brings a different flavor, and we just throw it all into the pot to see what kind of magic emerges.”
While the co-hosting pair are aligned on the event’s raison d’etre, there’s a quiet divergence in thinking between what might draw people in, and what might influence them to come back. That disparity lies in how you define connection.
The elusivity of connection
For long-time Vietcetera CEO Hảo Trần, Entrepreneur’s Dinners are a welcome opportunity to intentionally connect with peers new and old after waxing and waning periods of socializing across his decade-long journey of building in the public eye.
The 33-year-old says he’s re-acquainting himself with the rhythm of putting himself out there, despite the busy schedule characteristic of most founders.
“It’s a space to talk to people when you have dedicated time to share a meal,” Hảo says.
“You hear a lot about people’s stories, their opportunities. It’s just so fascinating to see we’re all doing our own thing.”
“I think for anyone, learning how to learn again is important. So getting out there and talking to new people about new ideas over dinner—it’s nothing super complicated.”
There’s a level of trust in the quality of people who make the guest list: everyone who attends has their own reasons for coming.
A French-born, Asia-travelled entrepreneur seeking to enter the Vietnamese textile manufacturing industry with an AI-driven quality control solution says he’s come in hopes of finding a co-founder and community of peers on the same path.
Another Canadian-born founder says he’s building his AI startup on the sidelines of a US-time zone cybersecurity engineering day job while navigating life as a new father—an isolating schedule, to say the least: “This kind of dinner is a chance to get out there and start connecting with people again.”
How connection on the “person” level translates to connection on the “transaction” level depends on the person, but the co-hosts hope there’s a level of proactivity among the invited guests which will continue to organically take shape post-dinner.
The real value, Quang and Hảo suggest, lies not in the dinner itself—but in what unfolds after.
Interested in attending one of the future Entrepreneur’s Dinner?