What we talked about
Ninh Tran joins the PreVetted Podcast to share his journey from Vietnam to the Czech Republic, and later to the United States:each move opening new doors and reshaping how he thinks about opportunity, work, and impact. He talks honestly about growing up as one of the only Asian kids in his class, facing discrimination, and eventually building deep friendships that still last today.
Show notes
Ninh Tran grew up as one of three Asian kids in a Czech gymnasium, moved to the US to study economics at Berkeley with a mission to solve poverty, then watched that goal pivot from policy to entrepreneurship, and eventually to a grant platform with a 100% win rate on its own applications, landing in the top ten out of 3,500 proposals. What makes Gravity different isn’t just the software: Ninh built it by first winning nearly $978,000 in grants himself, then quietly handing the tool to nonprofit customers to test before they even knew what they had.
What we covered
- Ninh’s family moved from Vietnam to Czech Republic when he was four, shifting from farming and street markets in Hanoi to international trade in Europe. He describes it as one of several life-changing “access to opportunity” jumps, each move opening a fundamentally different economic environment.
- After working at Google and other large tech companies, Ninh went back to startups, eventually co-founding HireEasy, where the team helped approximately 928,000 people find jobs in 2021 during COVID, a number he still refers to with precision.
- Gravity was born from a simple request: nonprofit customers kept asking Ninh to fundraise for them. Instead, he built a grant proposal tool, tested it on his own applications, achieved a 100% win rate, and then let customers try it. A few months later, one called to say they had won a $500,000 grant using the tool.
- About half of Gravity’s clients are now for-profit impact founders, not nonprofits, a development Ninh didn’t plan. AI startups working in healthcare, education, and community tech have found grant funding through the platform, including SBIR and research grants. Since AI-generated applications flooded the market, win rates on some grants dropped from 10% to 1%, making quality and matching more critical than ever.
- Ninh identifies five factors that drive grant success, with the most important being a prior relationship with the foundation. He tells clients to attend galas, connect on LinkedIn, and get on board members’ calendars, because a familiar name on a proposal carries real weight when decisions are made.
- He also shared the story of a Hawaiian nonprofit making soap for indigenous communities that turned away hotel buyers to preserve its nonprofit identity, until a $300,000 funding gap forced a rethink. Using a buy-one-give-four model, they made back the gap entirely through soap sales to local hotels. Ninh uses the story to push founders toward sustainability thinking, regardless of their tax status.
About Ninh
Ninh Tran is the CEO and founder of Grav.ID (Gravity), an AI-powered platform that helps nonprofits and impact founders find and secure grant funding. He previously co-founded HireEasy, where he led growth across product, operations, and community, scaling a hiring platform that helped close to a million job seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninhtran08
- Website: https://grav.id
Episode 102 of the PreVetted Podcast.