Where does your attention go when the company already works?

On Mondays, Hoang Truong, founder of Vulcan Labs, spends his time reading and researching before anything else.

He starts the day with industry news and a cup of coffee, then opens his laptop to see how the company's apps are performing.

Meetings used to be on Mondays too, until they moved to Tuesday. For a good reason: starting the week with a meeting meant starting without the numbers to discuss. Monday is now for numbers, analytics and reports, to be dissected the day after.

This past October, I sat down with two members of Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) Vietnam and asked where their attention goes once a company is running well. Hoang was one. The other was Michael La, Co-founder and CEO of Xood, and Owner and CFO of KL Mining.

The standard secret

The AI chatbot Chat Smith is the flagship of Vulcan Labs' app portfolio.

OpenAI released the first ChatGPT model at the end of 2022, and it lived on a website. Its own phone apps didn't arrive until mid-2023. Hoang figured people would need an app to use it, so he built Chat Smith in about two weeks and took it to market.

And I was right, the demand is huge.

Other players entered the market within a month or two. By Hoang's account, Chat Smith is still in the top three AI chatbots on the App Store and Play Store four years later, up against rivals from Turkey, the US and Europe.

Holding that place has meant Hoang and his team continuously adapting the product.

Curious, I brought up his secret recipe.

There is no one secret. That's the whole holistic system.

He called it a standard one and listed a great product, an efficient distribution channel and a go-to-market plan. Sounds simple enough, but it took years of work.

We realize that the basic thing, the classic, is still the strongest weapon we need to win in any market.

At Vulcan Labs, an app goes from prototype to MVP, the first working version, and on to production in a few months. Hoang describes the work as catching a market trend and evolving to keep up with the competition.

His team's reports on how people use Chat Smith show that many are new to AI and ask basic questions.

People want to use AI in a more advanced way, but they don't know how to use it.

Hoang's response was to pivot Chat Smith toward a productivity platform. Its use cases are designed as end-to-end workflows for users, with their history saved. Several models are offered at good quality for an affordable price, including built-in connection for the web version and the app.

A mine that runs without him

Michael La runs two different companies. KL Mining is a mining and mineral processing company in Dong Nai. Xood, the second, is an AI platform of ready-to-run workflows for marketing, sales and HR.

He puts the split of his time roughly like this.

I don't need to change everything. We need to optimize what makes a meaningful difference to the overall operation.

The ratio works because of the foundation he built at KL Mining. The right people and established processes keep it going day to day without depending on him. Michael's role there is strategic direction. At Xood he is in the daily work, reviewing marketing and how the team measures it, product strategy, delivery and technology partnerships. The team is working on how AI can produce marketing content for businesses.

At the mine, quality control depends on the people on site and the weather, since moisture alone can affect product quality. Computer vision is used at the excavation sites, and a weekly report on production inputs builds itself. People still operate the machinery, collect inventory information, plan shifts and check records. When conditions change or a situation calls for someone's expertise, human judgment remains essential.

For me, having information in a computer is only part of the picture.

Employees fill in a form whenever inventory comes in or goes out, and someone enters it into the computer. Michael is moving to a form that is written once and scanned, so the system fills itself in, with less repetitive work and fewer mistakes. He expects the wider move to automation across KL Mining to take about three years.

Michael went to Canada in October with a question about the gap between what AI can do in theory and what companies actually adopt. The trip followed the 24 September announcement that Canada and Vietnam had entered a Strategic Partnership, which Michael sees opening the way for trade and investment in green energy, AI and cybersecurity. In Montreal he spoke with an EO member who has a solution for automated delivery routing. At Concordia University, where he studied, he met the chancellor and the chief of staff, with whom Michael shared his view of doing business in Vietnam.

By his estimate, Canadian fashion was two to three seasons ahead of Vietnam in 2016. This time, shopping there, he found Vietnam only one to two seasons behind.

He sees the same gap closing in technology. What he notes is how Vietnam's approach differs from Canada's.

For in-depth application, Canada right now has the advantage of a better understanding of domain expertise in every spectrum.

For their part, the Canadian founders he met want to see how Vietnam brings AI into the rest of the company and take it home. Their principle is that “what's hard is to start, and what's easy is to make it better.”

A different reference point

Session One of EO Vietnam's Leadership in the AI Era program took place at Hoang's office. Given that AI is his own field, I asked him what he took from it.

It's good to use AI to support our leadership practice, but the most impressive thing that I learned from the program is the structure of what the program covers.

Adding to that, he had one more reflection on EO's learning events, that they give him time to reflect and remind him of behaviors that are not good for leadership.

Michael joined EO Vietnam this year, and found that meeting an entrepreneur in another market gives him a different reference point.

When you spend most of your time inside your own business, it is easy to accept familiar ways of working as necessary.

What challenged his thinking most was EO's way of building a relationship and setting a clear expectation for it, which has helped members be more open and focus on the questions most critical to them.

A bridge to Canada

Concordia has asked Michael, verbally so far, to join its Advisory Board and be the person to go to in Vietnam for work tied to what Michael describes as a Canadian business fund that will back Vietnamese projects directly.

With thanks to Hoang and Michael.