The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Business:Management
We’re sharing a session from ELC Annual 2023 – Thuan Pham (Board Director, Advisor, former CTO of Uber & Coupang) shares pivotal moments from his life, leadership journey & career with Li Fan (CTO @ Circle). Thuan shares his best leadership lessons & strategies for scaling during hypergrowth from his time at Uber and how those skills impacted him in roles since then. He shares stories about working at Uber – including both the highs & lows – and reflects on what could have been done differently or better. Thuan also shares advice on how to keep your eng org motivated during crisis; advice he would give his younger self; and skills that make a great eng leader today vs. 20 years ago. Thuan also shares stories from his upbringing and how his experience as a refugee & immigrant impacted him as an eng leader today.
ABOUT THUAN PHAMThuan 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.
ABOUT LI FANLi 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.
We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world!Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job.
New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now!
We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community!SHOW NOTES:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
Harnessing Professional Strategies & Tech Performance Tools for Personal Growth w/ Chris Cravens #177
Cold outreach & strategically expanding your business model into services w/ Jon Perl & Scott Wilson @ QA Wolf #176
Building & leading a combined engineering & security org w/ Mike Hanley #175
Adaptability in engineering orgs: how management systems, executive priorities & career transitions evolve w/ Cosmin Nicolaescu #174
“The Third Act” & exploring career paths beyond operational roles w/ Nidhi Gupta #173
Healthy Tension: GTM & Product/Eng Collaboration at Hundreds of Millions ARR Scale w/ Tido Carriero & Joe Morrissey #172
Driving innovation at large-scale orgs, translating leadership skills to successfully scale early-stage startups w/ Jeremy Burton #171
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: Using AI and Design to Maximize Customer Impact w/ Dheeraj Pandey #169
AI ethics/safety, applying AI to address societal challenges & becoming a board member w/ Lake Dai #168
Software Dev in 2033 w/ Tara Hernandez, Erik Meijer, and Jocelyn Goldfein #167
Career visualization, creating a pre-transition thesis & expanding your leadership to lead an entire business unit w/ Prashanthi Padmanabhan #166
Reinforcing consensus-driven culture, deploying the “inverse Conway maneuver” & the unique principles behind Two Sigma’s engineering culture w/ Matt Greenwood #165
Unlocking Empowered, Self-Sufficient Teams: A Deep Dive into 'First Team' Strategies w/ Monica Bajaj #164
Building a culture of experimentation & innovation at massive scale w/ Kristian Lindwall, Pooja Dave & Mark Grey @ Spotify #163
Move beyond measurement & inspire developer productivity w/ Laura Tacho #162
Navigating 2024: Engineering management principles to tackle the unknowns & challenges ahead w/ Andrew Lau #161
Building data engineering teams from scratch & transitioning to a full-scale data function w/ Colleen Tartow #160
Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159
Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models w/ Scott Woody #158
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