Can a refugee from Vietnam become a successful tech entrepreneur? Can we tell what hides in a modest Vietnamese family? Here is the story of Eric Ly.Eric Ly is an entrepreneur and investor from Saigon, Vietnam. As a result of the Vietnam war, he and his family fled to the United States as refugees. He lived a few years in San Francisco, California, and when his parents found jobs in the Silicon Valley they all moved to Sunnyvale, California.
Ly attended Homestead High School where he showed his affinity for journalism and computers while working on the on-campus newspaper The Epitaph. With Apple inc. as a sponsor he transformed the production methods for the publication. This made Homestead one of the first schools in the country that used desktop publishing technology to publish its newspaper on the new Macintosh computers.
Regarding his university education, Ly attended Stanford University where he earned his bachelor degree in Symbolic Systems. Later he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he got his masters degree in media arts and sciences. He then returned to Stanford University for a PhD in computer science.
His career began at IBM where he worked on development of software from NeXT, a technology that would eventually become Apple’s modern day software platform. In 1993 he became part of the Sun corporation as a software engineer where he was in their first Java team. While he worked at General Magic as a senior software engineer, where he developed early mobile applications.
Image credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/9Zjd7PE_FRM - Alexander Shatov
Later, Eric Ly became an entrepreneur and founded several software companies in collaboration and technologies. He is best known as the cofounder of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking platform and there Ly served as a chief technology officer. He helped LinkedIn to be launched from a strategic perspective and also worked on the architecture and implementation of specific aspects of the networking and search algorithms, Ly was even vice president of desktop, where he put together a team of professionals to lead the desktop integrations.
In 2007, Ly founded Presdo with his own capital. The company’s first product was a meeting scheduler chatbot which was very sophisticated and made to understand real people, not just users. The technology eventually evolved into a mobile application called Presdo Match. Its purpose was to make networking easier and also to provide a searchable directory of attendee profiles which are imported from Linkedin. It was launched in 2010 at LeWeb conference.
Well, what to conclude… Let’s just say that we can witness that catastrophic events can result with innovative and creative people that make the world go round and become a productive part of our communities. Get inspired and continue dreaming…
Written by: Mislav Zlomislić
References:
https://golden.com/wiki/Eric_Ly-4NNWPJ4
https://www.virtualeventsinstitute.com/awards-judges/eric-ly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ly
Mislav Zlomislić is a digital marketing intern of PS Media Enterprise. He is a former student of Zagreb school of economics and management, Zagreb, Croatia
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