I've always wondered why there's so may 🇻🇳 Vietnamese indie hacker and startup success stories like @tdinh_me and so few from 🇹🇭 Thailand
It seems the Vietnamese have 2 important things the Thai don't:
- a very strong STEM education pipeline
- agressive founders that like to go global
- a relatively open market with space for startups to operate
Thai's education system is legendarily bad and its founder are scared of confrontation because its culture is scared of confrontation (always smile and be happy)
Great if you want tourists, terrible if you want succesful startup founders
Ironic because Thailand has been the #1 spot for nomads and indie hackers for a decade (along with Bali), the Thai could have easily gotten knowledge how to do it from all the foreigners there but they just really didn't at all?
Thailand has startups but they're mostly domestic or are just subsidiaries of large Thai conglomerates, a real failure also considering how many programs the Thai governments has created to promote startups for the last decade and the result has been, well, literally nothing!
I think it's because the Thai economy is ruled by a few rich families and private conglomerates (like chaebols) while in Vietnam these got wiped out by communism in the 1970s/1980s so they started from a clean slate with almost nobody being rich or powerful
Which gives more space for people to do startups
I love Thailand and it's one of my favorite countries and people but this is something to really consider: do you want to remain a country for tourists forever and keep lagging behind or become a place for startups, tech and innovation? Because you tried for the last 10 years and failed at it quite spectacularly