Skip to main content

Kien Pham

Vice Chairman, VietNamNet Media Group and President and Co-Founder, The Vietnam Foundation (Vietnam)

Kien Pham

Residency: Nov. 13–21, 2007

Residency Summary

Kien Pham along with Tuan Pham, senior visiting scholar, discussed case studies of foreigners and overseas Vietnamese entrepreneurs who have been successful in Vietnam at a public panel. He also visited Qualcomm Inc. and the World Trade Center, and attended a White House Fellows Dinner.

Biography

Kien Pham is CEO of VietNamNet Media Group and the founding executive director of the Vietnam Education Foundation. He has been an international executive in Fortune 500 companies such as Tenneco and Procter & Gamble, as well as an entrepreneur owner of high technology, energy and international consulting firms. In government, he has served at the White House under President Ronald Reagan and the pentagon under President George Bush, as well as in the U.S. Senate. He was a White House Fellow in 1985. He was awarded the Young Leader by the American Council on Germany (1986) and the U.S.-Japan Leadership Fellow by the Japan Society (1992). Kien Pham was the founder and chair of the Vietnam Forum Foundation, and was also a board member of the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped. He was a recipient of the “Never Fear, Never Quit” award. At 19 years old, he led his family to the U.S. They settled in Colorado, where he became a factory worker, learned English and later attended college on a scholarship. He received a B.S. in marketing and international business from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned an M.A. in international economics, an MBA in international and organizational management and a special diploma in public policy management from Stanford University. He received an honorary doctorate of law degree from Pfeiffer University. In 1990, Stanford University named him as one of the “Most Outstanding 100 Alumni” in the school’s 100-year history.