Thao Nguyen

About Thao Nguyen

Since her departure from the classroom, Thao Nguyen has weaved between the education, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors, driven by the North Star of scaling upward mobility, grounded in her identity and experience as a 1.5 Vietnamese immigrant from a low-income background in the 626 of Los Angeles Area County.As a product of Houston, TX, holding a B.S. in Teaching & Learning from the University of Houston, Thao served as a teacher and technology liaison at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the classroom served as the formative environment in which her skills as a jack-of-all-trades took root, mobilizing her to a 3-year ramp into founding ops in tech and venture capital.Thao scaled her vision for bridging resource gaps to overcome barriers to success through her work with systems in the Greater Houston Area as a community-based mental health clinician at The Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD. As arturo advisory’s Executive Business Partner, she cultivated her understanding that all systems are powered by relationships through work such as Houston’s bid for fund allocation from the $504M Tech Hubs grant, which aimed to galvanize fragmented efforts to pivot the city’s economy from oil & gas to tech. Through her Impact Fellowship at Education Pioneers in the San Francisco Bay Area, she delineated this skillset as ‘strategic partnerships’ while coalition building with senior-level district leaders at the Alameda County Office of Education to leverage data to align $3.65M in public funding to advance state equity and performance goals. At Sidecut VC, she advised pre-seed startups in deal pipeline, leveraging her prior knowledge of user adoption, proprietary data, bureaucratic systems, and partnerships to unearth previously unseen gaps and advantages with founders and industry experts within her network.Most recently, as the Founder & CEO of The Common Thread Collective, she strives to bridge generational wealth gaps of underserved small business owners by preserving, transitioning, and transforming their businesses through education, connection to community stakeholders, and access to ownership & opportunity. Thao currently resides in Houston, TX, with Bluebell, her bunny-tailed cat she rescued and rehabilitated after Hurricane Beryl in 2024. While she is not boot-on-the-ground with small business owners and connecting with partners over Zoom, she can be found writing and reading literature that engages her identity and lens as a post-war Vietnamese Diaspora woman, no-code tools and front-end tinkering, and hiking off-trail.

Experience

1. Associate

   Sidecut Ventures

   Jun 2025 — Present

   Sidecut Ventures is a pre-seed venture capital firm backing \"coachable superheroes\" who are passionately fighting for equity by building scalable solutions that address the biggest problems our society faces: a lack of economic mobility, broken healthcare access, a \"one size fits all\" education system, and climate change.

Education

• University of Houston

  Bachelor’s Degree