Don Le is the co-founder and CEO of Everest Education (E2), a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company that brings blended Math and English enrichment, test prep, and college admissions help to students from Grade 1 to 12. A Stanford economics graduate who started out at Bain & Company and Red Mountain Capital, he moved to Vietnam in 2007 and helped build finance, technology, and consumer businesses, including Highlands Coffee and Pho 24 operator Viet Thai International, before turning to education. Everest has raised about $5.4M, capped by a $4M Series B in 2019, and in 2022 launched a joint venture with Spark Education to localize world-class online learning for Vietnam.
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.