Having grown up in the poorest district of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I was amazed at how my socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbors were able to create opportunities seemingly out of thin air. Their resilience, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit inspired me to follow in their footsteps by starting a business of my own in college. I started a buy-one-give-one clothing brand that would give away uniforms to children in need in my hometown. However, as we began to scale, I quickly realized that there were logistical and time-consuming forces preventing me from maximizing my support for those in need. In addition, problems such as increasing access to education or breaking the cycle of poverty cannot be addressed by consumer goods alone.

This led me to imagine a future where anyone can leverage their talents to optimally support causes they care about by strategically partnering with existing nonprofit organizations who are experts in their local community. When I moved to Silicon Valley and met my technical cofounder Shoaib at Stanford, we sought to create a solution to this problem.

At Aspired, our mission is to empower the world to create a positive and lasting social impact. Aspired is building the social (change) network where you can easily connect and partner with nonprofits anywhere, and a marketplace that enables point-of-sale transparency on every purchase of social goods.

I am deeply passionate about building easy-to-use, powerful, and elegant products that have a positive impact.