The Entrepreneur I Didn’t Know I Was

Before INSEAD, I had built my career around building brands. I had spent 4 years at PepsiCo as a Brand Innovation Manager. Here, I crafted campaigns, managed portfolios, and launched products through a well-structured corporate global process.

I was excellent at it.

But a startup? Becoming an entrepreneur myself? That was someone else’s story, the kind of story I’d always scrolled past in the Forbes “30 Under 30” and thought, ‘Good for them’. At that time, my perspective about founders was simply this: founders are a different species from me. Founders are typically sleep-deprived visionaries who thrive on chaos. I was a proper corporate warrior who valued process and carefully evaluated risk options before mitigating them.

Then I got accepted to INSEAD. And somewhere along the way, my lens has changed. Quietly and irreversibly.

THE START OF THE JOURNEY

My INSEAD journey didn’t begin in a classroom. Instead, it started months before with a question in the INSEAD Summer Start-Up Programme (SSUP), a student-led immersion into startup ecosystems. I teamed up with Mary and Melisa, two people I had never met in person, but who would soon become my first two friends at INSEAD. As we honed in on where to focus, we realized how different our backgrounds were. Mary was interested in technology. Melisa came from healthcare. I came from the food industry. Rather than narrowing our scope, these differences became our edge. We were facing a problem space wide enough that no single one of us could own it, and it had to survive all three lenses: technology, clinical, and food commercialization.

We asked ourselves: How can technology help us treat food as medicine, not just purely indulgent pleasure? Over the following weeks, we refined the problem statement, searched companies sitting in the intersection of food and health, and built (and rebuilt) the pitch more than I wanted to count. The proposal landed us among the top 7 selected SSUP teams – and  the only 26J cohort to join the programme.

This was the moment when our SSUP journey started. Over the summer, we spoke with nearly 30 founders, investors, and VCs across Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Canada – all working at the intersection of food, health, and data. We tried to answer two questions:

1) How is nutrition being reinvented by food tech entrepreneurs and emerging technologies?

2) What is needed for these solutions to be broadly adopted?

For someone who had spent six years inside a global FMCG machine, this experience was my first real look behind the startup curtain. Honestly, the view was nothing like I’d imagined.

FOUNDERS WEREN’T WHO I THOUGHT THEY WERE

The founder who surprised me most was Dragos Mircea of Good Tôm, a European who moved to Vietnam and became a “farmer”. He decided to grow shrimp the way he believed it should be done – with microbiology, data, scientific research, and sustainable water treatment systems. “I realized I couldn’t convince farmers to do things differently,” he told us, “So I became a farmer.”

For someone trained to observe consumers through dashboards and market research, it was the first time I understood that the powerful entrepreneurial move is from an outside expert to an inside practitioner.

Then there was Tim van Vliet, founder of INSEACT. He built a business out of something most people would swat away: insects. Tim emphasized the value of testing ideas early and personal resilience in his entrepreneurship journey. His philosophy could be summed up in four points: Move beyond theory. Spend time with real customers. Understand their true motivations. Then adapt. He’d done it before, in e-commerce and dairy, before bringing that same iterative rigor to insects. His questions were brutally honest: Are the costs realistic? Will this scale? What are people actually willing to pay? For someone trained to build brands around consumer desire, hearing a founder interrogate his own business that relentlessly was quietly humbling.

SSUP didn’t hand me a startup idea. It handed me something more valuable: a dismantled stereotype. The founders I met weren’t sleep-deprived visionaries chasing chaos. They were practitioners who are careful, evidence-driven, and honest about what they didn’t yet know. That was the version of entrepreneurship I hadn’t seen before, and the version I couldn’t unsee afterwards.

THE CLASSROOM GAVE IT LANGUAGE

If SSUP gave me the raw version of entrepreneurship, INSEAD’s classrooms gave me the realization that the entrepreneurial mindset isn’t only reserved for founders. It’s a way of thinking that belongs in every room, whether it is the boardroom or the farm.

In Technology and Innovation Strategy (TIS) – taught be Professor Michael Bikard – one idea stayed with me: innovation is rarely about sole novelty.

In the world where foodtech, biotech, and AI are emerging, the next disruption to the FMCG industry may not come from a competitor with a huge budget. Instead, it may start with someone in the farm asking a question: Why has no one done this before?

That idea came to life in the case of FUL foods, a venture founded by three INSEAD alumni who turned spirulina into a mainstream functional beverage. In fact, the ingredient wasn’t new. The problem it solved wasn’t new. But the combination: taste, scalability, sustainability, and timing was new. The intersection between supplements and food had always existed. Yet, in the past six years, I had never once asked to explore that space, despite living inside that dilemma for years without even realizing it.

The question wasn’t radical. It was simply never asked.

THEN THE QUESTION TURNED INWARD

If TIS changed how I see innovation, Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) by Professor Joachim Vandaele reshaped how I see myself.

I had always seen myself as a typical corporate employee, the one who cannot follow the entrepreneurship path. I always believed that corporate and entrepreneurship simply cannot co-exist in the same organization, at the same time.

That assumption was challenged in the course. Professor Joachim taught us to distinguish between two modes of action: causal reasoning, where you start with a goal and assemble the means to reach it, and effectual reasoning, where you start with what you have, who you are, what you know, who you know, and ask what you could build with it. Or, as he put it: “to the extent we can control the future, we don’t need to predict it.”

Effectuation isn’t reserved for founders in garages. It is, in many ways, exactly how the most resourceful people inside a large company already operate.

I realized that I had already applied the spirit even before I had a name for it. A few years into my time at PepsiCo, Mirinda was in trouble. The brand was declining, and the consumer trend was moving sharply toward lower-sugar choices. A reformulation that the standard process would have taken two years to deliver, but we had six months. The official process would have required us to sequence the stages, lock the plan, and scale nationally. I did the opposite.

I led R&D, supplier conversations, and marketing prep in parallel rather than in sequence. We piloted in a single region first, treated the launch itself as the experiment, watched how consumers responded, and only then rolled out nationally. It was, in effectuation terms, an affordable loss, small enough to absorb if it failed, fast enough to matter if it worked.

It worked.

I hadn’t called it effectuation at the time. I’d called it getting things done. But the principle was the same, and entrepreneurship, I came to realize, isn’t necessarily founding a company. It is a spirit.

Then it came together in a line from Professor Joachim that struck inside me:

“You are the asset.”

Not the brand. Not the company. Not the title.

You.

THE QUESTION BECAME A PROTOTYPE

Somewhere between the TIS & CE classes and the realization that I had been thinking like an entrepreneur all along, there was the question that I’d carried since SSUP: How can technology help us treat food as medicine?

It started feeling like a startup idea for me.

I drew an idea about a foodtech potato chip, built on the conviction that the snack aisle, the only snack that your doctors approve. I tested it in the Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) elective, run as a bootcamp by the INSEAD Blue Ocean Institute. Leveraging six years of FMCG experience, the founder interviews from SSUP, and key learnings from my classes, I sharpened the concept. And I won the pitch.

For the first time, I did not see entrepreneurship as something external to me. I am now seriously working on the idea, talking to professors and alumni, sourcing suppliers, and mapping technology partners. Out of the hundred directions I imagined after INSEAD, I am preparing for one I would never have imagine a year ago: I am building a company myself.

WHAT INSEAD ACTUALLY CHANGED

I came to INSEAD to accelerate my career and become a global business leader. Entrepreneurship was never in my mind. But somewhere between a shrimp farm in Vietnam, a classroom exercise, and a professor’s words, that distinction began to blur. I’ve come to believe that entrepreneurship is not a career path, but a spirit. At its core, it is a refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they must remain. And that refusal, for me now, looks like a potato chip that has no business being good for you.

I am Nami Nguyen, an INSEAD MBA 26J and former FMCG Brand & Innovation Manager with experience across Southeast Asia. I am also a semi-professional photographer who enjoys capturing everyday moments across culture – a lens that influences my perspective on culture, authenticity, and leadership in global settings.

Nami’s LinkedIn

Nami’s Photography Instagram

DON’T MISS: STUDENT VOICES: WHY ‘FITTING IN’ IS THE WRONG STRATEGY AT INSEAD

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.