More than two decades after founding VNG—Vietnam’s flagship tech company—Le Hong Minh still comes to the office every day. Not because he has to, but because he wants to.
“I come to work because I love building products and working with the people I love,” he shared in a recent appearance on Vietnam Innovators.
It’s a statement that reflects how Minh approaches his career: not simply as a CEO managing a company, but as a builder driven by passion and people.
And now, in a world swept up by AI, Minh is launching a new venture: building AI tools not for the typical office worker, but for the majority of Southeast Asia’s workforce. It’s the 80% who don’t sit behind a desk, don’t open laptops at work, and have never touched ChatGPT.
A Relentless Climber
Born in 1977, Le Hong Minh was once a gamer who could play nonstop for 48 hours before becoming an entrepreneur. In 2004, he co-founded VNG with a few friends, starting with online games and gradually expanding into other areas: messaging (Zalo), fintech (Zalopay), and digital enterprise solutions. Each venture bears the imprint of Le Hong Minh and VNG as a whole: a mix of unwavering commitment, boldness, and calculated risk-taking.
To him, entrepreneurship is a lifelong commitment. Once you choose it, you choose it for life.
This mindset isn’t something he shares just to inspire and it explains how VNG has continued to grow over time without losing its identity. With every product, from games to Zalo, from Zalopay to AI, Minh has been involved from day one, learning, experimenting, and making mistakes firsthand. He invests not just resources, but something more important: time.
“Our time is very limited, not just the time in a day, a time in a week, but our time in the world. So what kind of thing do you want to spend your time on?”
The AI Shift: Building for the People Who Never Had AI
On Vietnam Innovators, Minh introduced his newest mission: creating AI tools for non-knowledge workers who make up the majority of the workforce in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.
“All of us are using ChatGPT or whatever, the version of AI bot that we like, AI chat or AI model that we use. And we sit behind a computer every day at work, right? How many people in Vietnam sit behind a computer every day at work? There's a lot, but not a majority. So 60 percent, 70%, maybe 80% of the people who work every day never sit behind a computer at work.”
That question sparked a new chapter for VNG: designing smart assistants for those who have been left out of the AI wave. He posed a question: “So what kind of copilot, what kind of AI that we can have to really enable them to increase their productivity?”
This is more than just a tech problem. Minh sees an opportunity to democratize AI, reaching the overlooked majority rather than just the digital elite. Interestingly, the constraints themselves have created space to innovate. Global tech giants like Google or Microsoft often don’t prioritize Southeast Asia’s complex local needs.
People Have Always Been the Driving Force
Whether he’s talking about AI, product development, or business strategy, Le Hong Minh always circles back to one thing: people. To him, the real goal is growth: how individuals evolve through the work they do.
From building the original Zalo team with just a few hundred engineers to keeping products alive for years, Minh has always placed people at the heart of everything. He shared: “I'm motivated by seeing people become really successful.”
Minh doesn’t believe there’s a formula for picking the right people. Motivation and character, he says, can’t be judged at first glance. The only real way to know someone is to spend time with them—observe how they act, especially in small, everyday moments: how they treat a waiter.
As for himself, he trains his resilience through triathlon—running, swimming, cycling—for about 10 hours a week. Not for medals or social media clout, but as a reminder of discipline and intentionality.
“And when we choose to be an entrepreneur, that is kind of like a particular kind of journey because we have to be very intentional about what we do. But as an entrepreneur, you really think about your journey. You have to create, you have to make the path yourself.”
Minh rarely talks about VNG as a brand. Instead, he talks about learning how to live with purpose, how to ask the right questions, and how to pause when needed. It’s a mindset that makes him not just the founder of a major company, but a leader whose way of thinking resonates deeply in a constantly shifting world.
His choice to focus on non-knowledge workers is more than just a market play. It reflects his belief in what a founder should do: not chase what’s biggest, but build what’s most needed.
“And as a leader, the key thing is how you're going to make something more personal to yourself and also personal to a lot of people around you and really kind of like, you know, make it real.”
In Minh’s words, leadership is also about knowing how to “charm” people, his own term, half-joking but fully sincere. “You have your own dreams and imagination and goals, but at the same time, you need to kind of convince other people to go on the journey with you.”
That might be why, even after 21 years, he still shows up at the office every day. He’s not done climbing yet.