When I returned to Vietnam two weeks ago I started my new gig as General Director of VietnamWorks. VietnamWorks is the number one online job finding site in Vietnam. It's kinda like Monster.com in the USA.
This job is pretty much exactly what I had in mind as the next step in my career. After seven years I was beginning to climb the walls in big-company corporate America, with its soul-crushing bureaucracy and political battles. Although I could have found a small company in the States, I'm hitting two birds with one stone by joining a small consumer-focused Internet company in Vietnam. What is the other bird, you may ask? It's living in an extremely stimulating and rapidly changing environment with a sense of adventure. It's also having the opportunity to make my mark. Kinda reminds me of the old adage, "Go forth young man, and find your fortune!"
My experience at Yahoo and AOL is a terrific fit for many of the challenges faced by VietnamWorks. For example, I drew on experience helping to design the new AOL home page to determine immediately that VietnamWorks needs some changes to its own homepage. At Yahoo I gained a real appreciation for how online users think and behave. I'd even go so far as to say I am the most qualified guy for the job in all of Vietnam. ;-)
Another thing I love about the job is that it's my first true general management job. In one day last week I dealt with sales compensation plans, personnel/personality issues, team planning, marketing strategy, product strategy and space planning. Wow. Talk about drinking from a firehose -- it's all here at VietnamWorks.
Morgan Stanley recently predicted that the Chinese online jobs market will grow at a compounded rate of 50% (that's fifty percent) a year for the next three years. Although Vietnam is no China, that prediction is exciting because the Vietnamese and Chinese markets have many similarities. In addition, Australian online jobs provider Seek paid $20 million for a 25% stake in Zhaopin, the #3 online jobs player in China. Goldman Sachs estimates Zhaopin's revenue at $8 million, which implies a valuation multiple of 10x revenue. I likes! Read the story here.