Welcome

A little bit about me, why I started this substack, and what to expect!

Hi, it’s Thắm. Some of you may know me as Sylvia.

When you think about me, I guess most of you will remember this photo:

It’s understandable. I used this photo all the time as a profile picture for almost all my social media accounts. It’s one of the few “proper” photos I had of myself (I don’t take photos a lot!). But in real life, I look more like this 99% of the time:

I’m a 22-year-old self-taught software engineer, an indie hacker turned VC-backed startup founder, a college dropout, a lifelong self-learner, and above all, a proud daughter (of 2 wonderful parents) and sister (of 3 awesome siblings).

Since starting my startup journey, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of providing “value” to other people a lot. In the end, almost all activities in society boil down to value exchange. Startups succeed when they could provide some value to some people at scale.

There are many things I could do to provide value to others, but few of them have built-in “leverage”. “Leverage”, to me, means whatever I do that could provide value to others even when I sleep, or as Naval once said, “products with no marginal cost of replication.” Building a software product is one of those few things, which I’ve been doing with MindPal and EverLearns. Writing is another.

I’ve benefited so much from other people’s writing. Paul Graham’s essays, arguably the most influential writing I’ve read over the past few years, have taught me so much about building a startup. I want to bring a similar impact to other people through a candid sharing of my learnings and stories as well. What time is better to start doing that than now?

In fact, I’ve seldomly written a few pieces of long-form content before, but they were never consistent and scattered across platforms. With the launch of this substack, I want to take writing more seriously and centralize all my essays in one place for easier navigation.

But this substack also comes from a personal reason. Lately, I’ve found my thinking to be not always as clear as it could be. Writing is my attempt to restore my clarity of thinking, and continuously sharpen it. I know it will, because I did it before. During my childhood, I always dreamt about and wrote so many little stories and even novels. During my middle and high school years, I was specialized in Vietnamese literature, so writing was something I did on a daily basis. This feels more like returning to my root as a writer. This time, I’ve got even more experiences to reflect on, and share about.

Another personal reason is that I want to start documenting my journey. So many things happened to me over the last 2 years alone that made it probably the most vibrant and exciting chapter in my life yet. I started a startup, failed, self-learned coding, started another startup, and dropped out of college. My second startup took off. I got VC-funded. Now I work with customers and clients from around the globe. The best part? It’s just the beginning. I haven’t found Product Market Fit for my startup yet, so it’s still a long way ahead to go. I want to document all of these things so I can look back in the future, especially when I am living through such an exciting time like today, with the emergence and proliferation of AI.

Given all of these compelling reasons, I find no excuse not to start my substack.

I will try to write at least once a week. There isn’t really a focus at this moment. I will just write about anything on my mind: making a product, building a startup, reviewing a weakness, reflecting on an experience, etc. — any thought that I have as a curious young person in life. I probably won’t share a lot about personal stories and relationships, as I prefer to keep them dearly to myself.

So, welcome to my little home on the Internet!

Thắm