The Non-Coding Majority: Understanding the 64%
According to the survey on the Startup Ecosystem in Vietnam 2019, 64% of startup founders reported not having coding skills. This data point challenges the conventional image of a startup founder as a developer writing code. In Vietnam, the reality is different: most founders come from business, economics, or non-technical backgrounds.
This is not an isolated anomaly. Vietnam’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly in the past decade, but it remains dominated by founders with entrepreneurial drive rather than technical depth. Many startups emerge from founders’ experience in the market, not from an engineering prototype built in-house.
This pattern reflects the nature of Vietnam’s startup development stage. In ecosystems where infrastructure and support systems are still evolving, many founders take the role of opportunity spotters, rather than product builders.
While Vietnam is globally recognized for its IT outsourcing and software engineering workforce, those talents are often employees, not founders.
A comparison with other emerging ecosystems, such as Indonesia or India, also shows a similar trend. In these regions, non-technical founders often launch consumer apps, marketplaces, or platforms using outsourced or hired tech teams.
In Vietnam, this figure (64%) is both a realistic reflection of founder diversity and a starting point for rethinking what tech founder truly means in the local context.
Non-Technical Founders
A founder who doesn’t code isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. In fact, many of Vietnam’s non-technical founders bring strengths that are just as essential to a startup’s survival: a deep understanding of the market, strong sales instincts, and the ability to pitch, fundraise, or manage operations. These are traits that often distinguish successful founders from skilled technicians.
For example, many education and consumer startups in Vietnam have been driven by founders with expertise in pedagogy or business, not software. They understand pain points and customer behavior, and they prioritize getting the product-market fit right—even if they’re not the ones building the tech themselves.
However, in sectors where technology is core to the product, lacking a technical co-founder or internal tech capacity can limit speed and innovation. Take Vbee, a Vietnamese AI voice startup, Gcalls, which builds integrated telephony solutions, or Vuihoc.vn, an edtech platform, all of which have technical co-founders or founding teams with coding capacity. In these cases, being able to build and iterate quickly, without relying entirely on outsourced developers, has been key to their growth.
In practice, many non-technical founders bridge the gap by finding a technical co-founder or early employee. Some outsource MVP development to freelancers or studios, but this can lead to long-term problems if the codebase isn’t scalable or maintainable. Others rely on product managers or hire CTOs after finding traction.
Ultimately, the absence of coding skills is not a weakness. It becomes a liability when a founder lacks enough technical understanding to ask the right questions, vet the right people, or make decisions about a core part of their product. In that sense, tech literacy, not necessarily coding ability, is increasingly non-negotiable in a tech-driven ecosystem.
Ecosystem Factors: Why Coding Founders Are Still a Minority
Despite growing interest in technology and entrepreneurship, only 36% of Vietnamese startup founders have coding skills, according to the survey on the Startup Ecosystem in Vietnam 2019. That means a significant 64% of founders come from non-technical backgrounds. This imbalance isn’t just a matter of personal choice or skill, it reflects deeper structural factors across education, the labor market, and the support environment for startups.
In Vietnam, the traditional education system remains heavily theoretical, even in technical disciplines. Coding is not widely taught as a practical, hands-on skill in most university programs, except for a few specialized tech schools. As a result, even graduates of IT or STEM programs may lack confidence in developing MVPs or leading technical teams. Outside of university, access to quality coding bootcamps or self-study programs remains uneven across regions.
Meanwhile, early-stage startup support programs rarely emphasize technical capability as a key evaluation criterion. Instead, founders who can pitch well, show market insight, or come from business backgrounds often gain easier entry into incubators or acceleration programs. While this opens doors for diverse profiles, it can also contribute to a technical gap when those startups attempt to scale.
Additionally, Vietnam’s strong outsourcing culture means that many founders view tech as something to delegate. With relatively affordable access to freelance developers or software agencies, some prefer hiring out tech work rather than learning to code themselves. This model may work in early stages but can lead to deeper issues in product development control, cost efficiency, or iteration speed later on.
The Cost of Not Having Technical Founders
The absence of technical skills in founding teams doesn’t automatically predict failure, but it does shape how startups grow, pivot, and respond to technical challenges. In Vietnam, many startups rely on external developers, technical co-founders, or agencies to build core products. This setup introduces several long-term risks.
First, the cost of iteration becomes higher. Startups without technical founders often struggle to make fast changes based on user feedback because they must go through a third party. This affects their ability to run lean experiments or improve UX quickly, key traits of successful early-stage companies.
Second, there’s a strategic blind spot. Founders who don’t understand the basics of how their product is built may misjudge timelines, underestimate technical debt, or fail to evaluate developer performance. This can limit trust within the team and erode investor confidence.
Third, technical debt accumulates. In interviews with Vietnamese ecosystem builders, a common challenge is startups launching with quick and unstable outsourced code, which becomes hard to scale. Without someone on the core team able to refactor or oversee tech quality, product stability can suffer.
A Balanced Team for a Complex Ecosystem
Vietnam’s startup landscape is increasingly sophisticated. While coding skills don’t disqualify startups from success, it raises important questions about how teams are built, where skills are outsourced, and how resilient a startup can be under pressure.
Rather than framing technical skills as a strict requirement, the takeaway is balance. Startups thrive not because every founder codes, but because teams collectively fill the gaps, through co-founders, early hires, advisors, or technical partners. The challenge for Vietnam’s ecosystem is how to close the skill gap to founders from diverse backgrounds, especially those with deep industry knowledge, customer insight, or market networks.
For support organizations and policy-makers, this means enabling access to technical talent and encouraging founder-CTO matchmaking. For founders, it means investing time to understand product architecture, even if they don’t write code themselves.
