Esther Nguyen has what may be a stereotypical story for a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur working in Vietnam. Her parents fled the country when Saigon fell in 1975; Nguyen, born in Michigan and raised in the Bay Area, had long felt the pull of her family’s former home.
“I knew I wanted to do something in Southeast Asia, and specifically Vietnam,” Nguyen tells Fortune. “I thought about what really resonates with the local culture, and landed on music.”
