Who is on your stage

For more than 25 years Nguyễn Phi Vân has done the very work she is now invited on stage to talk about: building brands, developing retail models and designing franchise systems. That journey runs across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe, and it began in senior leadership roles inside multinationals, long before she became a speaker.

Perhaps that is why what she brings on stage is rarely just a good-sounding idea. It has been tried, run and tested in practice — practical enough that the room can carry it back to the office and start on Monday morning.

She is Chairwoman of Go Global Holdings, which has invested in 14 Vietnamese small and medium enterprises, an angel investor with a portfolio of 34 technology startups, and Founding Chair of the Vietnam Franchising & Licensing Network. She also sits on the board of the ASEAN Business Angel Alliance Network and serves as Vietnam's Senator to the World Business Angels Investment Forum. For years she has advised the Government of Vietnam on building the startup ecosystem, and has made angel investments in 34 technology startups across the United States and Southeast Asia.

But that journey is not measured only in deals and titles. She founded Library of Dreams, which has built 376 creative libraries for children across 29 Vietnamese provinces and cities, with a target of 1,000 libraries by 2030. She also founded Go Global Learning Hub, a free skills-learning platform for young Vietnamese that now carries more than 100 courses.

She is the author of 11 books in Vietnamese and English, on franchising, technology, the future of work and the capabilities the next generation will need. One of them, NYM, was written together with an artificial intelligence — at a time when a human and an AI sharing a byline was still a fairly new thing.

From the boardroom to the stage, from investing to community education, her path has one thing in common: she does not talk about the future from the outside. She steps into it, works with it, and tests what she believes is possible.

And perhaps that is also why what she says on a stage rarely stays on the stage.