I started by asking
data what it meant.
Then I started
building things with the answer.
From Laredo.
Vietnamese family, Mexican-American border town, English at school — bicultural before bilingual, before international. Breakfast tacos and big sky for life.
Trained in big tech.
UT Austin → Microsoft → Google → Waymo. Data & product across ads, search, and self-driving.
Now: founder.
HBS MBA, then YC W22. Today building Reforged Labs — between San Francisco and Saigon.
Four things have been true for a long time, easier to see now than they were ten years ago.
I write the app for my own life. Fitness, travel, family, money, games — most people use off-the-shelf apps. I keep building my own. The pattern isn't AI; AI just made it cheaper. The corpus is mine, which is the whole point.
Games are my thesis, not my hobby. Reforged Labs is the company-scale version of something I've been doing since I started collecting board games. The work on game-design primitives is upstream of the company, not a side interest.
Diaspora work is institutional, not occasional. Hyphen across five Alphabet bets. Xoogler Vietnam. Overseas Vietnamese. A 250-person family tree. These aren't five things; they're one practice on a 10+ year arc.
Boundary-crossing started in Laredo. Vietnamese family, Mexican-American border town, English at school. Three study abroads, two work abroads, then Saigon. I've been the only-one-of-something-in-the-room for as long as I can remember. It's the comfort, not the credential, that compounded.
