There are times when it's like this:

Let’s do it! Go team! That’s one of the best livestreams ever! Good job everyone for a successful admission period! It’s okay if we couldn’t get any students for that course; we will do better next time.

But it can also look like this:

Just in case COVID gets more serious when we launch our pilot courses in the Fall… So here is what we will do given we can’t test the demand of the course… Just in case there are COVID cases close to the date of our trip… He/she might leave the team soon due to personal priorities…

To anh Tùng, chị Thảo, chị Hoa Lê, Loan, chị Linh, chị Mai Le, Hà Vi, Hằng, Heng Le, Phương Nam, Trang, Hoàng, Anh Phương, Phương Thảo, Khánh Ly, Chi, Nhi, Nghiên, Diệp, Nhật Minh, Thanh Thanh, Joey, Phương Thanh, Tâm, Ánh Dương, Diệu Linh, Cao Lê, Tracy, chị Linh Hà, chị Vân Anh, bác Hà, CLBMX, all the teachers who have taken the courage to share what you know and inspire students, speakers, visiting lecturers, parents, and students who enrolled in our courses and our summer trip and the whole community at MỞ.

To many of my managers Kelsie, Amy, Bryan, Michael who has influenced the way I lead and treat others.

Thinking back, it felt surreal how I stumbled upon random people, created various types of educational products together, and became a part of multiple communities. It must be the pandemic energy.

One year ago, around this time, I was stuck in my aunt’s house in Virginia due to COVID. I started overthinking way more than necessary. Despite the many negative thoughts that I had, I forced myself into learning new things which I heard somewhere can be effective. I learned more about alternative education models after experiencing it during my first year at Minerva. I wondered how I could leverage my opportunities to contribute to the existing education system in Vietnam and simultaneously learned more about the booming Edtech scene there. I might also have spent way too much time with my 6-year-old cousin which made me think a lot about how humans develop learning systems since when we were born.

On a random night scrolling through Facebook, I saw a post from Tung, now my current co-founder and ‘partner in crime’, about his upcoming education project idea. I had so many questions and thoughts on it so I decided to reach out. Just like that, after a few Facebook messages and a Zoom call, we embarked on a journey to start MỞ, an organization that connects those who want to teach and those who want to learn. Our vision is to bring back the joy of learning that has been stripped away from many Vietnamese students due to academic rigor. Freedom to teach and freedom to learn are our products’ core values. The organization’s name is a combination of two words meaning “to dream” (“mơ”) and “to question” (“hỏi”) and together creates a word that means “to open” (“mở”). To open your heart and mind to learn new things, to dream the dream someone has told you impossible, to question societal norms and the world around you. These words encapsulate the values and energy we want to channel in every person who joins the community at MỞ, from staff to students to parents to followers.

For me, the journey of building MỞ has been one of self-discovery and unlearning various assumptions.

When I joined the founding team with Tùng, chị Thảo, and chị Hoa Lê, I felt a bit inferior as they were able to articulate themselves well and think deeply, critically about a topic. I was also the one on the team with the least experience and influence. I was scared that I was not able to be on the same radar. So at every meeting that we had, every trial class we conducted with potential teachers, I took notes of the way chị Thảo and anh Tùng gave comments, both positive and constructive ones, the way they facilitated conversations, and asked questions. I still remember that Tùng told me I used “but” often when transitioning from positive to constructive feedback which could erase everything said prior; “and” can draw people forward emotionally. Every day during the summer of 2020, I felt so thankful to have met people from whom I learn so much despite the physical distances. I was able to get myself out of negative thoughts by working on something meaningful. I told myself that I got to work hard and not let my team down. I researched teaching methods, creating communities, writing a business plan, and the list goes on. Every day, I hold myself accountable for learning so that I can apply it to the project. During my semester in London, I took notes on everything I learn in business classes so I could share the resources with my team. I stayed after class to talk to professor E. to get advice on marketing and sales. The joy of learning is absolutely fulfilling and that’s exactly how I want the students at MO to feel when joining the community. I got more and more passionate about my project as every day passes. If you ever met some of my fellow Minerva classmates, they would tell you that at one point I talked way too much about MỞ.

Gradually, MỞ grew to have more classes and activities; thus, we needed to grow the team a little bigger. I went from being no one to co-designing an alternative education product to seeing my team grow from 2 to nearly 20 people, watching our project grow from a few followers to nearly 6000 in a year, to receiving cheers from people around me every now and then. None of this could ever be accomplished without my ‘one of a kind’ team. We are not genius engineers building the next disruptive Edtech product, we are not finance gurus, we are not any “con nhà người ta" (a common Vietnamese phrase referring to high achievers). We are a group of life-long learners, Vietnamese students who dream big, work hard and constantly look for ways to improve ourselves and the community. The content team is consistently producing articles and resources about learning for students. Their ebooks always have more than 100 downloads each. I honestly still don't know how they do it— true rockstar content creators and designers in my heart. The Student Life team is sometimes meeting at 10 pm to plan cool events for both students and staff. 10 pm because why? Because they have school and work throughout the day. The Sales team — the one that probably goes through the most stress, constantly changes in size, structures, and people and, despite all that, never fails to try their best to hit KPIs. I used to think “meh who needs sales". Yes, I know. It turns out to be one of the most important lessons I took away from running MỞ: your idea can be over the top and disruptive so much, but at the end of the day, if no one buys it, it's still in your head. Even though we have a sales team, I think that everyone is doing sales in some sense. Every work produced in every team has to convey its audience of key messages and drive a certain level of needs that we aim for. Stay tuned for part 2 where I share in full detail the lessons we’ve learned on marketing, sales, design, and building communities.