At 8:36 on the morning of 7 June 2017, I stood in line at the US Embassy in Hanoi. I was 16. The consul asked me the purpose of my trip. I mumbled, and I heard my own voice shake. Visa denied.

It was a routine question about a trip, but it stayed with me as a bigger one: what is my purpose? This post is my answer, nine years late. It follows a pattern that has run through my whole life: I set a goal, I go all in, I fall, and I build a system to get back up.

A dead-end alley in Hanoi

I grew up in a three-storey house at the end of a dead-end alley in Vĩnh Hồ, Hanoi. My father, who has a master’s degree in finance and banking, taught me maths with counting sticks on the floor. He never handed me a formula. I had to work it out myself, the same way he made me solve a Rubik’s cube without showing me the moves.

What stayed with me from those years is a habit I still have: if I don’t truly understand something, it bugs me until I do.

I started first grade doing maths years ahead of my class, and my friends called me “the professor”. Bullies at my primary school heard the nickname and beat me up for it. I called home with a bloody nose.

Violence was part of the world I grew up in. From the time I was four or five, I lived with domestic violence between my parents.

In third or fourth grade, a classmate got hold of a long knife and held it to my throat, twice. The second time, we were alone in the school garden. He asked if I knew what would happen if he drew the blade across my neck. I said I knew, then went quiet while he kept talking. Finally I told him, “I trust you.” He let me go. I never told anyone. He never bullied me again, and when other kids picked on me, he stood up for me.

Lost in Hong Kong

As a kid, I got lost at Hong Kong Disneyland for about half a day. Strangers everywhere, speaking a language I didn’t speak, and not one familiar face. When my father found me, he blamed me for getting lost.

His rule was simple: know your own way. “Next time you get lost, we’ll leave you here.”

The escape plan (2013–2016)

For as long as I can remember, I planned to get out from under my father’s discipline by studying abroad. He planted that dream himself, with stories of relatives who had studied in the UK and the US.

At the end of middle school, everything changed at once: a new house, a new school, a gaming addiction, falling grades. In ninth grade I went to my father and told him myself: “I’m addicted to games.” He put me under what I called martial law.

Meanwhile, I became a tutor too. From the time my little sister Mơ (I gave her that name) was small, I tutored her myself.

In 2015 he told me I wasn’t good enough for Phan Đình Phùng, one of Hanoi’s top public high schools. In Vietnam, public schools are more prestigious than private ones. I scored 55 on the high school entrance exam. That was enough for Phan Đình Phùng, whose cutoff was 52.5, and even for Chu Văn An, Hanoi’s best public high school, whose cutoff was 55. I hadn’t dared to put it on my list, simply because I was told that I couldn’t score that high.

In tenth grade I started with basic English, then spent four months preparing for IELTS. My father guessed I would get 6.5. A former teacher guessed 5.5. I said 7. In August 2016 I got 7.0.

Then I coasted. Four months later I retook the test and got 7.0 again. Two years on, I wrote that I had rested on a win that wasn’t even a win.

The second interview (2017–2018)

On 20 June 2017 I went back to the embassy, answered with confidence, and got my visa.

On 29 July I flew to Arizona: a 38-hour day from Hanoi to Phoenix.

That year at Mission Heights Prep, I placed second at a mathleague.org contest. I also negotiated my own financial aid with Lawrence University in Wisconsin. The result: $39,200 a year in scholarship and grants, $156,800 over four years.

Hitting bottom (2019–2020)

I paid my own way where I could. In my first two years I worked maximum hours a week at minimum wage, washing dishes, moving and installing equipment, doing repairs. Later I got paid film work. At LUaroo, the campus music festival, I ran a coffee and bánh mì booth that brought in $4,000 in a single day.

On paper, my first year in Wisconsin went well. Inside, it did not. On 16 January 2019 I wrote in my notebook that I felt there was no one left to trust. I got hit by depression. A lot was going on.

That summer, my father met me at the airport in Hanoi. His first sentence was: “I have to tell you the truth. I’m going to rehab, because I’m addicted.”

I wrote my way through it, sometimes in public. One post used Nietzsche’s philosophy to analyse The Lion King. In it I wrote that Nala did nothing wrong: she only reminded Simba of who he could be, and of his lifelong mission. My father read it. He told me it was profound, and that I was writing about him and his relationships. I believe it shaped his wish to be a responsible father. Later, he named our family’s resort after her: Nala. He found his new mission meaningful enough that he never turned to drugs again.

That summer I also directed a short film, Suffering Addicts. In 2020 it won Best Alternative at the Fault Line Film Festival. The film captures the idea of a suffering woman who chooses to blind herself with roses.

By November I was writing that I felt shattered inside and that I wasn’t living up to what I could do. I was still depressed.

So I built a system: a cold shower every morning through a Wisconsin winter, writing every day, a weekly self-review, and a rulebook I kept rewriting. And I got back on my feet once again.

Nala Boutique Retreat (2020–2026)

In September 2020, while I was still in the US, my father began turning my grandparents’ garden in Xuân Mai, about 35 km from Hanoi, into a garden retreat. The land had been in the family since 1993. Only one issue: we did not have the capital. The cash had to come from others. He envisioned it to be an ancient Northern Vietnamese village.

Nala was built with 30 billion VND (about $1.15M) in interest-free loans from friends and acquaintances. I have since repaid most of it on Nala’s behalf.

All in

In 2022 I had two options: work in the US, or come home and build a startup. I didn’t hesitate. I chose the startup.

I came home in mid-April 2022 and took over management and accounting, then marketing. Nala opened that June.

Naturally, I became a co-founder of Nala. While my dad envisioned its future and pulled in capital, I executed his ideas at the operational level.

In July 2023 I wrote a one-page review of the 16 months since I came home. About 25% occupancy at opening. By late 2022 we were running out of cash, so we went into survival mode and cut prices. By early 2023, occupancy was about 10%. The root cause: sales.

On 21 July 2023, after a meeting about rooms we couldn’t fill even on weekends, I wrote in big letters in my notebook: “Decided to keep Nala. All in.” The next morning I started on processes, sat down with each staff member one by one, and made a list of travel agencies to call.

The people who lent us money

Our lenders were tough to deal with, especially in a crisis or when they needed their money back. That experience has been extremely valuable to me.

The growth engine

In April 2023, three months before I went all in, I had posted my first TikTok, to sell rooms. With my sister Mơ, I built the family channels under the name Nàng Mơ – Tớ là Lộc. Our very first video passed a million views. So we kept rolling. We would go on to generate hundreds of millions of views, yet for the first eight months the channels earned nothing. I didn’t even have the money to bootstrap them, so I optimized: I used what I knew to train fresh college students into a professional media production team. I asked so-called professionals in the industry for advice, and they all told me the same thing: I couldn’t do it. Only then did I decide to change course. Our breakthrough came with a video that hit 20 million views, and money finally started to flow in.

The channels grew into a separate media business, run in parallel with the resort. The team had been working out of my bedroom. After we invested about 600 million VND (about $23K), we moved into a treehouse office.

In June 2024 I co-taught “Giác Ngộ Affiliate TikTok”, a two-day online course on TikTok affiliate marketing, with Phạm Củ and Chú Cá Review. My part was sustainable content and the vlog format. It cost 2 million VND (about $77) per person, and 800 people signed up.

I remember in January 2024 I put 10 million VND (about $400) of my own money into equipment. After that, the media business averaged about 350 million VND (about $13.5K) a month in profit, not counting the resort revenue. Revenue came from three streams: paid brand bookings, livestream fees, and e-commerce affiliate commissions.

Through 2024 we built Nala Media, selling through livestreams and affiliate links. Revenue was good, but we were still bootstrapping, and as the money came in, we hired more people. I spent most of my time envisioning the future, especially where AI was heading. In August I wrote a page for my team: “AI and the future of Nala Media”.

The fall

By October the media team had shrunk from 15 people to one. On 2 October 2024 I wrote: “Goal: survive until next year.” I was depressed again, in the middle of what looked like success: by November 2024, the three channels I had built had passed 1.2 billion views in a single year.

In my own list of “system errors” that quarter, two stood out: piling work on one person instead of hiring, and job descriptions that were too vague. This is a valuable lesson for me on the hiring process. I stepped back from the public to start building, while my sister’s modelling and acting career took off.

A year of breaking old beliefs (2025)

In 2025 I finally made time for something I had always been curious about: writing songs. I had never written songs before. No one believed I could write. I did not even believe it myself. Since April 2025, I have written more than a hundred songs. Publicly, I came out as a totally different stage persona of a musical artist. It broke the internet and I hosted events with a thousand people attending.

The deal

Fast forward to early 2026: a buyer agreed to pay 122.5 billion VND (about $4.7M) for Nala, below the 160 billion VND (about $6M) asking price. They put down a 7.5 billion VND (about $290K) deposit, recorded by a bailiff, then withdrew. Under Vietnamese law, a buyer who backs out forfeits the deposit, so Nala kept the 7.5 billion.

Now: 24m2 (2024–present)

Today I have handed over Nala’s operations and stepped down to start a new journey in tech.

I named my company 24m2 after the 24-square-metre bedroom in the wooden house at Nala where my first team worked. It was 2024, the year I turned 24. The name also carries my belief about the future: as founders and companies become more optimized, many billion-dollar companies will be built in small spaces.

I shipped 5 apps in three weeks. All built and shipped with Bitrig for Shipaton26. More details here: xlxx.vn/shipaton26.

Xan@xuanlocnalaPost on X

I made it! I shipped 5 apps this month! All built & shipped with @bitrig for @RevenueCat’s Shipaton26 !

Thanks to Sean, Nick, & Paul @seanallen_dev @swiftfulthinkng @twostraws @Apple for pushing out valuable contents over the past years!

#indiedev #shipaton #buildinpublic

2 October 2026 · View on X

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Kyle Macomber@kylemacomberCo-founder and CEO of Bitrig; co-creator of SwiftUI at Apple

Way to go! That’s serious hustle

2 October 2026 · View on X

People still ask me why I left entertainment while it was working. The truth is that, since around 2017, what I wanted was to stand behind a public figure, not to be one. I got to do that twice: behind my father, with Nala, and behind my sister, with the channels. Somewhere along the way I became a creator myself, by accident. It was never my dream. Building things was. In 2024 I could see where AI was heading and how small a team it would take to build something big, and few people around me saw it then. So I made my own decision, and that is the path I chose.

24m2 is where it leads: a small room, and the things I always wanted to build.