Brilio.net/en - When setting our eyes to a refugee camp, in Aceh, for example, we probably wouldn't see anything big in its inhabitants near future. But this man, who once a fled Vietnamese on a refugee boat, has proven otherwise. Once stranded on Indonesian shore, he is now one of the top executives in one of the worlds most successful digital startups.
As featured in Tech In Asia, Thuan Pham is the man behind Ubers technology. But it was a long, winding road he had been through before. It was in 1979 when Thuan Pham left on a refugee boat from Vietnam, a country torn by a two-decade-long war. The 10-year-old Thuan, along with his mother, young brother, and about 370 other refugees were stuffed into a 60-meter boat, sailing the wide ocean without life jackets.
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Upon arriving on the shores of Malaysia, Thuan and his family were denied accommodation. But his mother, who had enough with suffering from the long war, refused to go back to Vietnam. She decided to take her two kids on another boat, sailing to the island of Letung in Indonesia. They spent 10 months in the country.
Image viaJack Cahill & Toronto Star via Getty Images
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To support the family, the young Thuan used to swim to the nearby town to buy candies. His mother then sold those candies in the refugee colony to earn food for her children.
We used to make 10 cents of profit a day, and that would be a luxury. We could buy fresh fish, recalled Thuan, who is now the Chief of Technology Officer of Uber.
Recalling the story of how he made his way out of Vietnam, he said it was only a 50:50 chance of survival in those boat journeys across oceans. During the journeys, Thuan and his family were attacked by pirates twice. His experiences, which are rarely snared experiences of top executives in any companies, have taught him lessons of how to build a sustainable business.
We would not panic. In fact, we would be calm and surrender ourselves. Thats the way a startup journey is. Even if you lose all one day, you can build all over again if you retain your calm, he said.
He used to play with the bullets, both in war or in startup business
Thuans childhood in Saigon was spent under the bullets and smokes of war. It erased his fear of death and taught him to take everything, which includes building Uber, as a learning experience. We would close our windows and spend nights, under a table, whenever there was an air raid, he said.
In the sunny mornings, between the breaks of air raids, Thuan and other kids of his age would go out and play, collecting hundreds of bullet shells.
It taught me that life is ephemeral. I advise young entrepreneurs to treat their startups as a learning experience. Even if it all fails you can rebuild it again. Youre in a free world, he added.
Life in a refugee boat
Thuan analogizes a refugee boat to a can of sardines. The situation on his boat was similar to what we saw on migrant boats of Syrian refugees arriving in Europe recently. His boat, the MT-2377, which left the Vietnamese shores, was divided into three layers.
Image via AFP
Basically, one has to go down the layers and lean to one side. You have to just lay there till the end of the journey. There is no going anywhere, Thuan said. He was stuck in one of the layers for about three days, with only a small vent from which all passengers had to breathe.
They did everything inside those layers without many alternatives, even when nature called. According to Thuan, people have to do it where they were laying and just wait for nature to wash it away. My mom was in one of those layers, he said.
Beginning a new life in the US
After spending 10 months in Indonesia, Thuans mother applied for asylum in the US. The familys application was approved, and they were sent to Maryland. There, Thuans mother worked as a ledger keeper at a gas station during the day. In the evening, she worked as a grocery packer at a supermarket.
Thuan eventually had a chance to enrolled in a school in the US. On weekends, he worked at a car wash station. He used to wear donated clothes and shoes at that time. I remember wearing girl socks for almost two years in oblivion, until someone pointed, he recalled.
Thuan was admitted to a bachelors program of computer science at MIT in 1986, and graduated in 1991, when the internet was just emerging.
I strongly encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to educate themselves, even if they dont wish to graduate. College education opens doors for you, he said.
Out of MIT, the Vietnamese boy plunged into various tech companies such as HP Labs, Silicon Graphics, DoubleClick, and VMWare before he joined Uber in 2013. At that time, the company was already serving 60 cities and employed about 200 people around the world. The company has grown and is currently present in about 400 cities.
I am against spending precious years of your life doing a Ph.D., unless it contributes something to human lives. Instead building a startup can add value, he said.
Thuans father was a soldier and he had to stayed back in the country. He became a teacher in Saigon, and Thuan only could meet him after a decade when he completed his education and became a legalised citizen. We both had changed by then, he recalled.
Uber crashed around the world for a good reason
When the business had jus started, Thuan has seen the Uber application crash multiple times just because of a coding error by a single engineer or a bug in a single machine. Now we dont crash, because we have done that in our early journey. Entrepreneurs should fail fast in the early days, he said.
As a CTO, Thuan has rebuilt Ubers digital architecture in such a way that even if something goes wrong somewhere, the platform will still continue to work.
He is introducing a hybrid scalability model for the taxi app company. Uber is building its own server farms as well as relying on third party vendors such as Amazon Web Services to manage the load.
In some countries such as China, the requests are bounced off local servers, which makes the app more responsive.
Seeking to solve planet-level challenges
Recently, Uber has launched a technology centre in Bangalore. It aims at solving problems mainly found in India, such as accurate location mapping, cash payments, and making the app function on low bandwidth.
The company is also seeking to introduce new services such as UberEat. Folks behind it are thinking on a mega scale. We envisage a platform for on-demand consumption at the planet scale. It excites me to build a platform that can bring anything to you within minutes, Thuan said.
At Uber, Thuan is responsible for designing the engineering team and making critical technology decisions in the incredibly fast-moving company. According to Pedram Keyani, the engineering director of growth at Uber who have worked pretty closely with Thuan since he joined the company, working with him is intense as well as rewarding.
He is very self-critical, pushing himself and all of us around him to execute and grow past our current limitations and out-scale the demands of our incredibly fast-growing business, he wrote on Quora. He cuts to the chase and is very direct with his feedback, both positive and negative. At the end of the day though he is a teacher and works to empower all of us to take on more responsibility, develop new skills, and continuously grow.
Keyani said Thuan is facing hard challenges and tradeoffs every single day. To do his job well, he has to be decisive, direct,and lead a small force through uncharted waters.
Tips from the ex-Vietnamese refugee for startup founders
During his India visit last week, Thuan Pham also took the time to mentor a few startups as part of an UberExchange program. Here are some tips from him for startup founders and business executives:
Thuan believes that money will come when we are willing to do something that impacts a lot of people. If the only money that we chase, well be ended up unhappy.
He seeks to build things that that can impact and change peoples lives across the world. It will always keep him as well as we motivated to do extra miles.
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But no matter how bad you want to achieve a goal, he suggests not to take things too seriously. Thuan believes if we have a good sense of humour, we wont hesitate to take bold risks in life. Have fun along the way, he said.
And when you eventually make it to the top, dont forget to give back. Thuan knows that helping people (by developing them, in his case) will really make you happy at the end of it. Helping to develop the minds of the younger generation who can go on to lead and impact hundreds of life, even after youre gone, will leave you feeling fulfilled.