Ho Chi Minh City. It's been exactly 365 days since we switched on the lights of our Ho Chi Minh City office. What started with six desks and one very ambitious to do list has grown into a team of 28 developers, designers and project managers. This week, we're celebrating.
This isn't a story that started from zero though. Our HCMC office had something most one year olds don't have: a blueprint. Everything our Hanoi team learned over five years of building software got passed down south, from coding standards to client onboarding playbooks. That head start let our Saigon team skip some of the early growing pains and jump straight into delivering work.
"Being the younger office means you get to stand on someone else's shoulders. We didn't need a year to figure out what works. We got to spend the year actually doing it." said Aba Nguyen, CEO.
The numbers back that up. In twelve months, our Saigon team shipped 22 projects for clients across Vietnam, Japan, Singapore and the US. Our office grew from 6 employees to 28. Somewhere along the way, we also went through roughly 4,200 cups of coffee and pulled more than 60 late night release pushes, according to an informal (and mostly accurate) office tally.
Looking ahead, we're aiming to double headcount by the end of next year and open a dedicated QA and DevOps team. It's a fast pace for a one year old, but if the first 365 days are any indication, our Saigon office isn't planning to stay with the smaller sibling for long.
Happy 1st birthday to our HCMC office. Here's to the next 365 days of building something worth celebrating.
