Over 100 years ago, Phan Châu Trinh, one of Vietnam's first modernists, wrote extensively that Vietnam could only modernize through ethics. He believed reform without a moral foundation would collapse under its own weight.

That idea holds today. Business ethics is the backbone of strong innovation — especially in emerging markets, where trust is scarce and every deal is a bet on character as much as capability.

There are shorthands for choosing the right partners. People join associations. People lean on personal networks, referrals, reputations passed hand to hand. These shortcuts work, to a point. But I believe we do better — as a whole, not just as individuals — when we hold onto human-centred values instead of relying on shortcuts alone.

Imagine what we could build if everyone simply chose to do the right thing in business, without needing a network to enforce it.

What's been interesting to me is learning how differently “ethics” gets defined across cultures. The rules aren't universal — they're local, historical, contested. I've seen worldviews that clash directly with mine: people who saw nothing wrong with shorting foreign investors on their true profit, or who believed it was fair to take from the rich regardless of property rights, as if fairness were a matter of who had more to lose.

I don't think ethics is relative in the way that lets any of this slide. But I do think it's learned, argued over, and rebuilt in every generation and every market that tries to modernize. Trinh understood that a century ago. It's still the work now — and it's the same work we're doing at Data River: building infrastructure that only works if trust is built in from the start, not bolted on after.