The hours between midnight and dawn
I started working in a café at twelve — my family's café. That early exposure to the rhythms of food, service, and people shaped everything that came after. Long before any formal training, I understood how a café actually breathes: the early rush, the quiet afternoon, the customers who linger.
In 2016, I founded Three O'Clock Coffee & Tea in Ho Chi Minh City — built around a simple but contrarian insight. The hours between midnight and dawn are underserved, and the customers who stay past 3 a.m. are the most loyal kind. So we stayed open while everyone else closed.
My path into entrepreneurship was self-directed from the start. Formal study wasn't the foundation of my expertise — nine years of building, operating, and expanding across four countries has been.
Since founding the company, I've led every dimension of it: product, brand, operations systems, franchise documentation, partner selection, and international expansion. The entries into India, Indonesia, and the GCC were structured and negotiated directly by me — and the whole network has been founder-led and bootstrapped to date, grown through disciplined systems rather than outside capital.
Beyond operations, I write and speak about what building an F&B business actually looks like — the processes, the mistakes, the unit economics. The content is practical, not inspirational. The goal has always been the same: to build a business that runs without the founder being the bottleneck.