Thuan Pham, an ex-CTO of Uber who stepped down last May, is joining the same position at Coupang.
Five weeks have passed since Thuan Pham joined the Coupang office in Seoul, South Korea.
In an interview with Bloomberg this June after he resigned from Uber, he said it was a hefty burden leading the ride-hailing giant’s technology.
After leaving Uber, Pham focused on teaching university students and mentoring entrepreneurs.
What motivated him to join Coupang as a CTO?
Meeting with Coupang Founder and CEO Bom Kim attracted him to Uber’s experience as a rocket company in a different sector. Pham told TechCrunch.
“It had to be even more interesting than what I did at Uber for me to jump in.”
He was not interested in working at another ridesharing company, but the on-demand e-commerce concept interested him in many similar ideas.
Even Coupang has a unicorn startup status with a US$ 9 billion valuation and reportedly going to IPO in 2021; Pham thinks the company is “still in the very early days.” Even though the company made the best logistics and fulfillment system among the eCommerce players in South Korea, other opportunities remain.
Pham joined Uber in April 2013. For seven years working as a CTO at Uber, the Uber service itself scaled up from 10 million ridesharing to 7 billion ridesharing over 800 cities worldwide.
Coupang is a company that grows the expectation of customers every day. Coupang is developing and launching a unique service every day, such as dawn delivery or return with just a touch. For Coupang customers, this is everyday life. Coupang has been changing the way of leaving via its service. I have a life-long opportunity to realize their bold vision to change people’s lives over the globe.Thuan Pham, CTO of Coupang.
Before joining Uber, he led the Cloud Management Platform and Virtual Infrastructure Management R&D as a vice president at VMWare.
He was also a Vice President of Engineering at DoubleClick, now part of Google. He got his M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science & Electronic Engineering from MIT.
