The first thing Leh does is slow you down. You step off the plane at roughly 3,500 meters and your body files a complaint before your brain has finished reading the itinerary. Climb a flight of stairs too quickly and you are reminded, politely but firmly, that ambition does not oxygenate blood.
For a founder, that is a strange and useful humiliation. Most of us run our companies on the assumption that more effort produces more output. Ladakh does not care about your effort. It cares about your pace.
In August I joined the AiViet Founder Summit 2026, a Himalaya workshop run by AiViet Venture, the Vietnamese VC founded in 2023 by seasoned Vietnamese entrepreneurs, which has since backed more than 30 startups. For six days, around twenty founders lived together at the Mahabodhi International Meditation Centre outside Leh and hiked the Sham Valley Trek. Twin-share rooms. Vegetarian meals. Sessions that started before breakfast.
The Mirror Ms. Hoa Holds Up
The heart of the program was a multi-part series on self-awareness led by Ms. Dinh Thi Hoa, founder of Galaxy Entertainment & Education, board member of TVS and ACB, and co-founder of AiViet Venture. If you have met her, you know she does not waste words. Her stated goal for us was blunt: to increase our IQ, EQ and leadership “tenfold”.
She used the Enneagram as the frame. I went in skeptical of personality typing; I have seen too many decks that reduce people to four colored boxes. But the point was not the label. It was what each type does under pressure. One session was titled “Blind Spots and Self-Imposed Limits”, and it walked through how those patterns show up in the three places founders bleed the most: hiring, co-founder conflict, and decisions made under stress.
Here is what struck me. In Saigon, I am rarely in a room where people have no reason to flatter me. Staff, partners, clients, even friends all have some stake in how I feel. At 3,500 meters, among founders who owed me nothing, the feedback came clean. That is rare, and it is valuable precisely because it is rare.
The final session, “Living and Leading From Self-Awareness”, made the argument I keep returning to: self-awareness is not a mirror you look into once. It changes how you lead on an ordinary Tuesday. Knowing your pattern is useless if you only notice it in retrospect.
Founders Talking To Founders
The other half of the summit was the people. The cohort spanned hardware, fintech, insurance, education, consumer goods, climate and venture. Fireside chats brought in founders like Linh Nguyen of Athena Studio and Earth VC and Nguyen Hai Ninh of M Village.
The most honest session was the cohort sharing on resilience. Founders told stories they do not put on LinkedIn: near-death moments for their companies, partnerships that broke, the loneliness of being the one who has to decide. Vietnam’s startup culture still rewards projecting strength. Hearing peers say “I didn’t know what to do” out loud was quietly radical.
What surprised me most was how practical the community side became. Before we left, AiViet circulated a cross-buying list: concrete commitments from founders to buy or support one another’s products. It is a small mechanism with a big idea behind it. A founder network is only as strong as the business it actually sends to its members. Goodwill is cheap; purchase orders are not.
Resilience You Can Feel In Your Legs
After the summit, a smaller group stayed on for a trek through the Sham Valley: 6 to 8 hours of walking a day at 3,500 to 4,000 meters, from Yangthang to Hemis Shukpachen to Ulley. No porters. A car carried our tents and sleeping bags between camps; we carried ourselves. The organizers framed it as physical resilience training, and that is exactly what it was. I finished it, legs and lungs both protesting.
What stayed with me most, though, was the border. Ladakh sits wedged between China and Pakistan, and you feel it in the landscape: army camps, convoys and checkpoints set against some of the most peaceful scenery on earth. Days earlier I had been wandering Leh’s market, where the pace is unhurried and everyone seems to have time for tea. The contrast was jarring.
It left me with a question I am still turning over: how do you manage that? How does a place hold calm and vigilance at the same time? Leh does it every day. The monasteries keep their rhythm while the soldiers keep their watch. Founders need the same skill: protecting a calm, generous culture inside the company while staying alert to the pressures massing at its edges. Lean too far either way and you lose something.
There is a specific kind of clarity that comes on hour six of a climb, when you have stopped narrating your discomfort and are simply putting one foot in front of the other. I think most of the hard years of building a company feel like that. You do not get through them with a breakthrough. You get through them with pace.
What I Brought Back?
Three things have stuck with me since returning to Saigon.
First, pace beats intensity. The altitude enforced it, and I suspect my team would like me to keep enforcing it on myself.
Second, feedback is a gift that only arrives in safe rooms. If I want honest input at Vietcetera, I have to build the conditions for it rather than wait for people to volunteer it.
Third, communities that last are built on exchange, not inspiration. The cross-buying list will matter more in a year than any speech.
The Himalayas did not give me answers. They gave me a slower heartbeat and a clearer view of the questions. For a founder, that may be the more useful gift.