From fleeing Vietnam in a refugee boat to becoming Uber’s CTO
techinasia.com
techinasia.com
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.
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.
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.)
Might as well tell people to gather inspiration from tales of lottery winners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As for paying, it's a big deal to me. Being able to just exit the car at the end of the ride is a lot nicer than waiting for the driver to scan my card, sign the receipt, etc.
These two small things greatly reduce the friction and make me more likely to use a cab over other options.
You might be the only person in the last 20 years for this to happen to.
It's a cab service that ignored the laws surrounding cab services in most of the markets they enter, backed up with enough lawyers to not instantly be shut down, thus they're able to offer a service other people cannot. That is what is disruptive about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
No, because for people like Leguelere, success via capitalism is a bad thing. It shouldn't even be reported. Only the failures of capitalism should be reported, then Leguelere and his ilk will be happy.
(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.)
2nd from the right:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487...
Most of the people(engineers) are struggling to overcome this one