'Never Give Up, And Never Say No'

Indochina Capital CEO Peter Ryder first went to Vietnam to do business in the early 1990s and he’s stayed there ever since. Vietnam, he says, has a “hyper-entrepreneurial Culture” – An exciting market for any businessperson.

- Oliver Featherston

Peter Ryder, CEO of property and financial services firm Indochina Capital, may never have ended up in Vietnam, had it not been for a fateful business proposition in late 1991. Yet the image he conjures of that moment seems almost more akin to the start of an Indiana Jones film than the first steps of successful entrepreneurship.

“I was sitting in my office in New York at Salomon Brothers, the investment bank,” he recalls. “I was literally within a day or two of leaving the place. I’d resigned a few months earlier to go off and start my own firm. I was staying just through the end of the year – I can’t even remember why.

“Anyway, my fax machine began to buzz and hum and whatnot, and it spat out an old tourist map of Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City. And on it was marked an ‘X’, with a line up to the border of the map, where it said, ‘Would you be interested in this site?’ That was really the last piece of the puzzle, if you will.”

Vietnam had sunk into Peter’s awareness long before, albeit from a vastly different angle. In 1969, when he was attending prep school in Boston, the anti-war movement was in full swing. At the same time, his CBS-employed father had the station’s news on every night at 6.30pm, so the war was broadcast into his living room, courtesy of news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America”. At the age of 15, Peter found himself deeply invested in Vietnam, through a growing, ardent opposition to the war (while it’s known as the Vietnam War in America, it’s called the American War in Vietnam; Peter just calls it “the war”).