(Unedited) 168 - "Fail" at Stanford to Succeed in Life: Tony Ngo - Co-founder Everest Education

In this wide-ranging talk, we discuss how Tony Ngo went from overcoming failure and fear at Stanford to becoming an uber-networked professional, how the topic of du học sinh became the catalyst for Tony to develop a career bridging Vietnamese communities to international ones, and how he explained to his parents who left Vietnam as refugees his career pivot from the US to the country many of us left.

Tony grew up in Orange, CA as the oldest son of refugees, and has lived the idealized American immigrant story: parents working insane hours, focusing on education, and giving back to your community. In high school, he became involved in Vietnamese community engagements and co-founded his first organization trying to connect Vietnamese students across Orange County, which utterly failed.

However, that failure planted the seeds of his serial community-building activities: being president and pledge sensei of his fraternity at Stanford (Lambda Phi Epsilon) where he also ran into numerous leadership challenges, co-founding another non-profit the Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations (UNAVSA) where he laid the foundation for a scalable community-driven organization, creating Sponsors for Educational Opportunity - Vietnam (SEO-Vietnam) that is building a community of responsible leaders for Vietnam, and then of course, co-founding Everest Education which provides students in Vietnam access to international quality learning.

https://linktr.ee/thaytonyoi

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Welcome to The Vietnamese Podcast! I'm your host, Kenneth Nguyen. Join me on an exploration of Vietnamese experiences from all over the world.

I served in the U.S. Marines in the 90's and graduated from the University of Southern California in 2000. Today, I work as an LA based producer and entrepreneur and am currently a founding partner at EAST Films.

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