Thuan Pham

Thuan Pham
Born	1967/1968 (age 49-50) Vietnam
Education	MIT (B.S., 1990), (M.S., 1991)
Occupation	Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Uber (2013-present)
Children	1

Thuan Pham is an American engineer and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Uber.

Pham was born and partly raised in Vietnam, playing with the bullet shells of the Vietnam War during childhood. In 1979, at age 11 or 12, Pham, his mother, and younger brother immigrated as Vietnamese boat people on a crowded, unsanitary boat to Malaysia, where they were rejected as refugees after being twice-robbed by Thai pirates. They took another boat to Indonesia, where they spent 10 months in a refugee camp with similar unsanitary conditions. His life as a refugee included swimming to another town to buy candy for his mother to resell to the refugee colony for a 10 cent profit, which was "a luxury," with food aid from organizations like UNHCR, CARE and Feed the Children. Pham's family was granted political asylum in the United States because of his father and settled in Rockville, Maryland, where his mother lost her accountant certification due to language barriers and worked as a gas station ledge keeper during the day and supermarket grocery packer at night. He lived with six others in a roach-infested, two-bedroom apartment, worked at a car wash station on the weekends, and wore donated clothes and shoes including girl socks for two years. His father was a South Vietnamese Army soldier and teacher, who stayed in Saigon.

Pham graduated from Richard Montgomery High School in 1986, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in computer science in 1990, and MS degree in 1991.

Pham worked at Hewlett Packard for three years, then Silicon Graphics. He became DoubleClick's fourth employee through a merger, before joining VMware for eight years.

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