Pivotal Leadership Moments & Career Decision-Making
Summary
In this session, Thuan Pham (Board Director, Advisor, former CTO of Uber & Coupang) shares pivotal moments from his life, leadership journey & career with Li Fan (CTO @ Circle). They explore leadership insights from pivotal moments during Uber’s growth and principles and considerations for making new career moves. Plus Thuan shares perspectives on how engineering leadership has evolved the past two decades and work/life balance.
Speakers
Thuan Pham served as Chief Technology Officer of Coupang from September 2020 until September 2022, and of Uber Technologies, Inc. from April 2013 to May 2020. From December 2004 to January 2013, Mr. Pham served in various Vice President roles at VMWare, Inc., a software and technology company, including as Vice President of R&D – Cloud Management Platform from June 2012 to January 2013.
As an engineering leader, he is passionate about building talented, healthy, and motivated engineering organization and leading it to accomplish extraordinary things. He cares deeply about organizational health and principled leadership and believes these are the greatest drivers for any team to harness its maximum potential.
Mr. Pham holds both B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thuan's work and career contributions as an American immigrant were recognized by the Carnegie Foundation among its list of "2016 Great Immigrants: The Pride of America" honorees.
Li Fan is CTO at Circle, a global fin-tech firm enabling business to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains (Circle is the principle operator of USD Coin). Prior to Circle, Li was CTO at Lime, an innovative technology company that connects and empowers urban living through mobility.
Before Lime, Li was SVP of engineering at Pinterest leading all 600+ engineers to execute technology strategy and deliver company priorities. Li was a Senior Director of Engineering in Google, accountable for Google’s popular image search and was Vice President of Engineering at Baidu.
