Sustainable and Profitable Is Not a Consolation Prize

Insights from the Scaling Business Summit 2026, Ho Chi Minh City.

Both of them came out of the same world: a decade-plus each in corporate tech, building careers at Oracle, Salesforce, Google, and Facebook. Then they left. Nam Nguyen, Founder and CEO at OplaCRM, is now in year five of building a CRM that competes directly with his former employers. Phoebe Tran, Founder and Chief Everything Officer at The Village Château Distillery, left a senior role at Google to make liquor.

The session they ran was less panel, more conversation, rapid-fire openers that gave way to something more honest: what the transition from corporate leader to startup founder actually costs you. Not in money. In identity.

Five years and two startups between them, the insights they shared were not polished. They were precise.

1. The Identity Shift No One Prepares You For

The first thing the session established was that there is no single version of the founder identity shift. There are at least two, and they run in opposite directions.

Nam's version: he spent fifteen years being the expert. CRM, enterprise sales, corporate dynamics are his domain. When he founded OplaCRM, the domain stayed the same. What changed was the disposition. “I was a "yes" guy. I was willing to help everyone. But now I am a "no" guy.” The shift was not from uncertainty to confidence. It was from deference to decision-making. He had to stop saying yes to everything and start protecting the direction.

Phoebe's version was the harder one. She moved from an industry she knew well into one she knew nothing about. From tech to spirits. “I have always been in technology and that's my comfort zone. I moved over to the alcohol and spirits industry. I know nothing about it.” The ego death required of her was literal: she had to hire experts who knew more than she did, trust them, and stop pretending otherwise. “From being always the one who knows the right answers to not knowing anything, I just had to put the ego aside and say: I trust you to do the job.”

Lesson 1: The corporate identity that built your career is not the founder identity that will build your company. Know which one you need to shed.

2. In Corporate, Decisions Are Reviewed. In Startups, They Are Owned.

Nam described the transition with a clarity that most founders recognize only in retrospect. In his final corporate role at Salesforce, his instinct when facing a difficult call was to wait. Watch for signals from his manager. Ask for direction. The infrastructure of corporate decision-making had trained him to be a receiver, not an originator.

As CEO of OplaCRM, that option disappeared. “I cannot ask. When something comes to me, I need to make a decision.” His framing for where he landed: “I am the last samurai in the battle. I need to stand. I need to make my decision and take responsibility for it.”

Phoebe arrived at a different solution to the same problem. Because she entered an unfamiliar industry, she had a built-in reason not to be the decision-maker on everything. She made it structural. “My way is to empower the team. I say: you guys make decisions and let me know.” The result was a team that felt ownership and moved faster. Two approaches. Both valid. The common element: the founder cannot wait for someone else to decide.

Lesson 2: The hardest part of founder decision-making is not having more information. It is accepting that you will never have enough, and deciding anyway.

3. Everyone Thinks About Quitting. The Best Founders Do It Anyway.

Nam answered the question directly. He had thought about quitting. More than once. He described the expectation he had carried into year one: two years, then a successful exit, then the wealth that would follow. Five years in, the timeline had not played out the way he had imagined. The investment market tightened. The competition stayed large. The compounding pressure of people, product, and finances was constant.

He named the thought that visited him during those stretches. “I thought about going back to corporate life. Getting a monthly salary. Becoming rich again.”

Phoebe's version arrived earlier and harder. Her first startup, a fintech company she had raised nearly $2 million for while completing an MBA at INSEAD was shut down six months after she left Google when she discovered her partner had stolen from the company. She lost the money, the company, and the certainty that had made the leap feel worth it.

She came back anyway. “I did not give up yet. I returned to the startup scene.” The Village Château Distillery is her second attempt. She is still in year one. Her honest admission at SBS: “I do miss the money part of the corporate job. I do miss it. But I am happy now.”

Lesson 3: The thought of quitting is not a warning sign. It is a standard feature of the role. What matters is what you do with it.

4. The Company's Problems Are Usually Your Problems

Phoebe runs her distillery while based in Singapore. Her team operates in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. For a long time, she reviewed expense claims from a distance and kept saying no. Entertainment costs, client meals, relationship-building activities that looked excessive from a spreadsheet.

She flew in and watched how the business actually worked. In Vietnam's F&B industry, especially when approaching major chains, those investments are not optional. They are the cost of entry. Her team had known this. She had been overriding them.

The realization landed clearly for Phoebe. “I stopped the team from doing the right thing for the company. The problem is me. I need to change the mindset.”

Nam offered a quieter counterpoint. He had not yet had a comparable aha moment with his own team. His read: he may have built a team that functions well and challenges him productively. Or, as Phoebe suggested with some warmth, his team may not be challenging him enough yet. Both interpretations were left open. The point was not that every founder must have the reckoning. It was that the ones who avoid asking the question are usually the ones who need it most.

Lesson 4: When the company is stuck, the honest question is not what the team is doing wrong. It is what the founder is blocking.

5. Sustainable and Profitable Is the New Definition of Success

Both speakers had come from a world that celebrated the unicorn. Fast growth, large raises, high valuations, clean exits. Nam had modeled his early startup thinking around it. Phoebe had admired it from inside Google, studying MBA cases about companies that scaled and exited brilliantly.

Both had changed their minds. Nam had met with several VCs in the past year, walked them through OplaCRM, and turned them down. Not because the conversations went badly. Because they went well enough that he believed what he was saying. “When I told VCs my company is good, I realized it's true. So I said no. It's not the right time.”

His critique of the VC growth model was direct. “They spend money to get customers. When they have more money, they spend more money to get customers. But that's not the success formula. You cannot continuously spend money forever.”

Phoebe's framing was simpler. “Success means a sustainable business. It can be boring. But it's profitable. People's jobs are being secured.” No high-growth hiring cycles followed by layoffs. No growth-at-all-costs.

Nam summarized the shift in three words. “Hard to die is the new term of success for me.” Not glamorous. Not a story that makes a conference keynote. A business that is very hard to kill.

Lesson 5: Sustainable and profitable is not a consolation prize. For most founders who have done this long enough, it is the actual goal.

The CEO Execution Playbook: What to Do Tomorrow

1. 1. Audit your yes/no ratio this week. Which decisions are you approving out of habit or to avoid conflict? Which ones are you blocking because they don't match your corporate instincts? Both patterns are worth naming.
2. 2. Decide whether you are domain expert or builder. Nam's path and Phoebe's path are different. If you have moved into unfamiliar territory, you need to hire expertise and get out of the way. If you are the expert, the work is learning to say no cleanly, not learning everything from scratch.
3. 3. Build your response to the quitting thought before it arrives. Write down what you would lose by returning to corporate. Write down what you have already built that has value. Both lists will be useful when the investment market gets cold or the timeline extends.
4. 4. Find out what you are blocking. Ask your team directly: is there something you have been saying no to that you should be saying yes to? The answer may not come immediately. Ask twice.
5. 5. Define success before your next investor conversation. If a VC gave you money tomorrow, would it accelerate the business you want to build or just the business they want to fund? Nam's test: if you believe your own pitch, that's worth protecting.

→ Watch the full session on YouTube