The Atomic Unit

When people ask what UpYouth does, I have always struggled to answer in one sentence.

Some know us as an incubator. Others know us through our builder community, coworking sessions, or partnerships with universities and investors. None of those answers are wrong, but none of them have ever felt complete. They describe what we do, not what we are actually building.

Thanks for reading Phan’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Looking back over the past few years, I realized that almost everything we built worked through the same mechanism: bringing the right people, support, and opportunities around a builder at the right time.

Our incubator connected founders with mentors. Demo Days connected startups with investors. Coworking sessions brought builders together. More recently, we have worked informally with individual founders at different stages, sometimes helping them through a problem and sometimes simply building alongside them.

When I wrote Why We Built UpYouth last year, I described how we had shifted from thinking our job was to provide knowledge toward helping more young Vietnamese cross the line into full-time building.

We realized that the biggest barrier was not a lack of workshops, mentors, or even capital. It was the pull of the safer path. Starting was difficult, but continuing long enough to see building as a viable career was even harder.

Builders needed enough progress, support, and conviction to keep choosing to build. We began to think of that accumulated progress and conviction as momentum.

Shortly after that essay, we launched a build-in-public challenge that reached more than 600 new builders. It was one early attempt to move from teaching entrepreneurship toward giving people a reason to build, share their work, and follow through.

Since then, we have moved beyond fixed incubator cohorts toward supporting builders year-round.

Beyond the Scoreboard

As that work continued, another question began occupying my mind.

If our mission is to create more real young Vietnamese founders under 30, how should we know whether we are succeeding?

The obvious answer is to count founders. In practice, the clearest signal is whether someone commits full-time to building their company. It is a high-conviction decision, often made despite social expectations, the loss of financial stability, and deep uncertainty. Crossing that line matters.

But going full-time is only the clearest visible milestone. It is not the whole story.

Before someone reaches that point, they may have spent months or years talking to users, abandoning ideas, meeting future cofounders, shipping products that nobody wanted, finding mentors, getting rejected, trying again, and gradually becoming someone who believes they can build.

That idea reminded me of Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself. In building the San Francisco 49ers into one of the NFL’s most successful teams, Walsh focused less on winning championships and more on consistently executing a high standard of performance.

You do not coach the scoreboard. You build the system that eventually produces it.

Founders are not that different.

If we only count the outcome, we are measuring the scoreboard. The harder question is whether we can understand the process while it is happening and use what we learn to support builders more effectively.

That is what led us to Committed Builder Momentum, or CBM.

CBM asks a simple question: is this person continuing to move closer toward becoming a founder?

It considers the goals builders set, whether they follow through, and what happens as a result. Activity alone is not momentum.

The details of CBM deserve their own essay. Here, the more fundamental question is what allows us to understand that momentum in the first place.

The Atomic Unit

The more we worked with builders, the more we saw how small interactions could shape what happened next.

We introduced one builder to a founder and later watched the two begin working together. We facilitated mentor conversations that led builders to rethink the business models they were pursuing.

Neither interaction looked decisive at the time. Their importance only became clear through what the builder did afterward.

The challenge was that we had no good way to represent this process. Most systems only begin tracking someone once they have a company or join a program. We wanted to understand the journey before that.

What is the atomic unit of a startup ecosystem?

At first, I assumed the answer was the startup itself. After all, startups are what get funded, regulated, acquired, and written about.

But companies do not choose to exist. People choose to build them.

A company does not start another company after it shuts down. A product does not decide to pivot. An organization does not wake up one morning and take responsibility for a difficult problem.

People do.

They decide which problems are worth solving, whether to continue when things are not working, who to build with, and which risks are worth taking.

A builder might begin with one product, abandon it, join another team, meet a future cofounder, and eventually start something new. The products and organizations around them may change, but the person carries their relationships, judgment, and experience forward.

The person became the atomic unit. Products and organizations became the contexts around them.

To understand their progress, we needed to see what they were trying to accomplish and what actually happened along the way.

Making Momentum Visible

That is where the idea of touchpoint emerged.

A touchpoint is an observable event in a builder’s journey. It could be a conversation, an introduction, something shipped, a commitment completed, or an experiment that changed what the builder chose to do next.

No single touchpoint proves that someone is becoming a founder. Its meaning comes from the context around it. What was the builder trying to accomplish? What happened afterward? Did they follow through, change direction, or set a new goal?

Viewed alongside the builder’s goal and the outcome that followed, touchpoint show what happened, how their thinking changed, and what support might help next.

The outcome does not always have to be a successful product. A builder can follow through, discover that an idea does not work, and leave with a clearer understanding of what to pursue next.

We began thinking about this history in the same way accountants think about transactions.

An accounting system does more than show your balance. It preserves the transactions that produced it. Git does not decide whether software is good. It records how it changed.

Builder momentum should work the same way.

Instead of periodically asking someone how committed they feel, we can record what they set out to do, what happened, and what they did afterward.

CBM can summarize patterns in that history. The ledger tells us the story behind them.

From Core to an Open Ecosystem

That idea eventually became Core.

Core is not another community platform or startup CRM. It is our attempt to build the underlying ontology for a founder ecosystem, a shared model of a builder’s goals, work, relationships, and progress over time.

As code becomes cheaper and people increasingly work alongside our trusted consultant (Claude and GPT), creating another application is becoming easier. The harder problem is giving those applications a shared understanding of the world they operate in.

Without that shared ontology, every tool creates its own definition of a builder, a goal, or an outcome. Information gets trapped, relationships lose their context, and each new product starts from zero.

With it, people and software can build on a shared history and on what the ecosystem has already learned.

Builders can choose which parts of their journey remain private, which they share with particular people, and which they make public.

Because Core is open source, other builders can create products on top of this shared foundation. People are already working on build-in-public features, mentor matching, coworking tools, and other parts of the founder journey they care about.

Each product can support builders differently while contributing to the same broader understanding of how people become founders.

Core has also changed how we think about UpYouth’s role.

Today, UpYouth is run entirely by Builders-in-Residence. Each takes responsibility for a product or problem in the founder journey that they care about, rather than operating a centrally designed program.

One Builder-in-Residence works alongside Build Stuffs as an ecosystem partner, supporting the builder who founded and continues to run the community. Build Stuffs has now held 37 sessions and recently expanded from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi.

Others are helping university students enter the startup ecosystem, creating build-in-public media, or exploring how to connect Vietnamese builders overseas.

For a long time, we thought our impact came from the programs we ran. Today, I think our impact comes from something more fundamental.

We are a relationship broker. Every day, we try to increase the probability that the right people meet at the right time.

A student finds their first builder community. A founder meets someone who has solved the problem they are facing. Two builders decide to work together.

The better we understand what someone is trying to accomplish, what they have already tried, and where they are stuck, the more useful those connections can become.

UpYouth cannot and should not own every part of that journey. Universities, communities, mentors, investors, operators, and founders all have something different to contribute.

That is why we see UpYouth as an open ecosystem rather than a single organization.

Core is the infrastructure underneath that vision. It allows the work of one builder, community, or organization to become useful to others.

We do not know every product or community that should exist on top of Core. That is the point. We want anyone who cares about this mission to be able to contribute, with each contribution making the ecosystem more useful.

Vietnam’s founder ecosystem should not have to start from zero with every new builder. Each relationship, lesson, and contribution should make the path clearer for the next person who chooses to build.

Core is how we are trying to make the ecosystem remember.

Thanks for reading Phan’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.