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From fleeing Vietnam in a refugee boat to becoming Uber’s CTO
- lpsz 11y agoStark contrast with New York Times pieces about struggling liberal arts majors with $120K in debt and no hope. Given what I feel like is a growing class war in modern America, I wish more could embrace stories like this, and not the culture of putting down others' hard work in the name of "equalization." Some accomplished people (such as Asian immigrants or refugees, in this case) have worked really really hard to get where they are.
- magic_man 11y agoThere are many unemployed engineers in India and china. If everyone did software engineering there would be a lot unemployed software engineers. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news/40049243_1_engineers-iit-bombay-batch-size http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news... There is a lot of luck involved in life. Maybe this guy dies on the boat like a lot of other people. I think silicon valley has a very skewed view of the world.
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- yummyfajitas 11y agoThe unemployed engineers in India are the bad ones - they got into engineering because it's an easy ticket to a flat/car/wife even if you have no real interest in the field. A few are stuck in a bad location due to family obligations. This is actually a common pattern in tech hiring; you see similar patterns in parts of academia (e.g. math). If hiring good people was easy then Bangalore wouldn't be paying more than Europe \ London (in nominal rupees, i.e. not adjusted for cost of living.) Having spent quite a bit of time hiring in India, good luck finding a competent unemployed engineer. (If you can find one, I'll make them employed very quickly.)
- Buge 11y agoI think the point is we should not be encouraging liberal art majors to do software engineering, because the liberal art majors will be bad at software engineering and thus unemployed.
- akilism 11y agoWell the difference is these stories are really really rare where as stories of struggling college graduates with mountains of debt are pretty commonplace. Might as well tell people to gather inspiration from tales of lottery winners.
- randomgyatwork 11y agoThey may be lottery winners, but you have to buy a ticket to play. Maybe the goal of stories like this is to inspire people to try, even if winning is very unlikely people have to play for there to be some winners.
- ap3 11y agoOne of them is easy, the other is hard. Getting into debt is easy. I could go out tomorrow and with 100% certainty buy an expensive car and enroll in an expensive college program. I could not say the same about going out and starting a billion dollar unicorn.
- stephenitis 11y agoIf you think being a refugee and having to flee your home country is winning the lottery?
- samfisher83 11y agoMost refugees don't get out so yes it is like winning a lottery.
- stephenitis 11y agoBeing a immigrant in my opinion is absolutely no like winning the lottery as adapting to the new culture, schools, and language was a terrible experience for many that are apart of the Vietnamese American story. Enduring the trauma of racism, bullying, gangs, xenopobia was not be what I would analogize as winning the "lottery". I'd dare you to ask Thuan, with a straight face, if he feels like he won the lottery. There was a element of luck but by no means you should think that refugees are winning the golden ticket by merely escaping.
- wimagguc 11y agoMany qualities required for someone to flee their home country in a refugee boat seem to be pretty useful for a CXO too. (I mean things like taking calculated risks, learning to navigate new cultures -- and just the cold blood you need to face those pirate ships. Pretty impressive.)
- kelukelugames 11y agoI agree there is an immigrant "gene" or advantage, but Thuan was 10 at the time. And people didn't need to be adventurous to see they needed to leave Vietnam in the 70s. Especially if they were American allies.
- violentvinyl 11y agoI have a particular interest in truly disruptive start-ups, especially ones thats really flout the law like Uber does. I'm under the impression that conventional entrepeneurial wisdom says "Go ahead and break the rules, by the time they catch up with you or you've gained their attention, you'll have the money or support needed to fight for real change". Of course, all you have to do is look at Zenefits to see this isn't always going to be the case. It makes you wonder what type of person it takes to run a company like that. I relize Thuan isn't the CEO/founder, but when I think about a disruptive business, I weight up the threat of serious fines/jail time against a relatively cushy life with a stable 9 to 5. It's really eye-opening to see what type of person it takes to drive a busines like Uber forward.
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- trhway 11y ago>when I think about a disruptive business, I weight up the threat of serious fines/jail time that is the point to Uber's (and the likes) success - they don't bear the risk of personal fines/jail time, it is the drivers who do. Similar setup to the one which prompted RICO.
- jacquesm 11y agoHelping your employees to cheat on exams versus openly breaking the law because you disagree with it or feel that a law should be changed is of a different taste though.
- a_imho 11y ago>I have a particular interest in truly disruptive start-ups, especially ones thats really flout the law like Uber does. Sorry if I sound ignorant but I don't see how Uber (or 99% of startups) are disruptive at all. I never used it because I prefer other modes of transportation, but it is basically a cab service, right? They just changed the packaging. To my knowledge here they charge exactly the same for a ride, without paying the fees cab companies are due. The hard problem is to convince (or scam - not talking about Uber here) people to perceive your service as quality over competitors, regardless of what you offer in reality. If you are successful, you can brag and call it disruption.
- iwwr 11y agoHow many world-changing individuals are being denied the opportunity to get started because of the politics of barbed wire...
- ptaipale 11y agoMany good ones - but of course, not all world-changing is for the good. And sometimes the barbed wire doesn't stop anything, anyway. 2nd from the right: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487691/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-life-and-family-in-pictures.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487...
- cbeach 11y agoHow many public services are being oversubscribed because the lack of politics of barbed wire [UK]?
- staunch 11y agoThe politics of poverty stop many more.
- rogersmith 11y agoArticle reads like paid advertisement for Uber tbh...
- legulere 11y agoUgh, another capitalist feel-good story about someone that worked hard and got to the top from rock bottom. It totally ignores that most of the people at the top were born into upper class and it ignores the billion of hardworking people that are still extremely poor.
- stephenitis 11y agoThis is a terrible complaint, should we not celebrate the victories of those who survived tragedy and made it through? I mean it's terrible that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have this model minority myth about it. There are still droves of Vietnamese American immigrants and second generation people who struggle to make ends meet daily but I don't think that should distract from this article.
- niccolop 11y agoPrecisely. We can celebrate someones success without ignoring the plight of others. It could even be an edifying story.
- akavi 11y agoNothing wrong with celebrating it! But "(I am|He is|She is|They are) made it out of poverty because of hard work and a can-do attitude." is frequently used as an argument that, conversely, those who fail to make it out of poverty somehow "deserve" their standing. So in light of that, it's important to keep in mind how much of an outlier such stories are.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoWhat evidence, if any, would convince you that those who fail to make it out of poverty do in fact "deserve" their standing? Note that I'm interpreting "deserve" as meaning "could have escaped with high probability had they engaged in different actions". Do you mean something different?
- Hydraulix989 11y agoThis really parallels the survivorship biased attitude towards starting a company in SV. No matter how good you are, there's always an element of luck. It's not all 100 million dollar exits and doors that open like this.
- stephenitis 11y agoAs a Vietnamese American working in San Francisco this fills me with pride in the strength of our Vietnamese people to persevere. My mother nearly died trying to escape Vietnam and through a successive string of luck ended up immigrating to America and opening a small business in our home state of Virginia. The article unfortunately skips from Vietnam -> Indonesia ->Maryland in a few short paragraphs. There is likely some amazing depth to this story that is not being surfaced here. I would love for a more in depth interview to be done al la Kevin Rose style.
- evmar 11y agoMy college roommate for a few years was also Vietnamese, born in a refugee camp. He went on to a top medical school and today is a specialist doctor. I often think about how I slacked my way through college, and how hard my friend worked. For me, I figured people were hiring programmers without college degrees, and I could always fall back on my middle class parents; for him and the sacrifices his family made, failure was not an option. It's a real reminder of what privilege means.
- stephenitis 11y agoIt's easy to forget sometimes even as a child of a immigrant parent who gave their sweat, tears, and all they ever knew for a better life. The further away you get from a real struggle story the more important I think it is to travel, give back, and volunteer. Walking the streets and living in San Francisco can really distort reality sometimes making a reality checks very much important.
- anpk 11y agoThank you. I've been trying to come up with a good way to describe privilege and 'having the option to fail' is an apt way to describe it.
- _navaneethan 11y ago> Don’t take yourself too seriously and you will not hesitate to take bold risks in life. Have fun along the way. Most of the people(engineers) are struggling to overcome this one