vietnamese-american
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Ben Pham and the life of a brand after goodbye
He helped build Character around the identities companies show the world. With Obello, Ben Pham is working on what happens after the agency hands over the files.
Nhan Le and the education of a landlord
A scholarship brought Nhan Le to UC Berkeley; a duplex kept him there. Now the founder of Valiance Capital is building student housing - and trying to give others the access that changed his own life.
Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
Don Le
Don Le is the co-founder and CEO of Everest Education (E2), a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company that brings blended Math and English enrichment, test prep, and college admissions help to students from Grade 1 to 12. A Stanford economics graduate who started out at Bain & Company and Red Mountain Capital, he moved to Vietnam in 2007 and helped build finance, technology, and consumer businesses, including Highlands Coffee and Pho 24 operator Viet Thai International, before turning to education. Everest has raised about $5.4M, capped by a $4M Series B in 2019, and in 2022 launched a joint venture with Spark Education to localize world-class online learning for Vietnam.
Tony Tran
Tony Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Lumanu, the payments and financing company building the financial infrastructure of the creator economy. A Vietnamese refugee who grew up in South Carolina, he studied computer science at MIT, advised at McKinsey, and built product at Google before starting Lumanu in 2017 after watching his mother discover YouTube creators on an iPad. Lumanu now moves money for thousands of creators and brands - from Jessica Alba and Snoop Dogg to DoorDash, Pepsi, and Sony - and made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
Cali Tran
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Thuan Nguyen
Thuan Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Loan Factory, the No. 2 mortgage brokerage in the United States. A Vietnamese refugee turned UC Berkeley grad, he became the No. 1 loan officer in America in 2021 and 2022, and the first broker to cross $2 billion in annual loan volume. He runs the company out of San Jose and built MOSO, an in-house digital mortgage platform that now powers a network of more than 2,000 loan officers.
Chris Do
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.