"In my youth, I was a rebel who challenged the status quo and wrote three volumes of poetry dedicated to love and humanity. I have always been a seeker for meaning and purpose. Yet, somewhere between Saigon and Wall Street, the poet within me went into exile. It is time to find him again."— Lam Nguyễn Phương
Lam fled Vietnam as a refugee, climbed to the peaks of global finance, then spent twenty years climbing back into himself.
From high school in Brazil to university in France to becoming the first Vietnamese to study at Stanford Business School, he made his way to Wall Street in the 1970s. It was a world where, as he recalls, "to rise, a person of color had to be sharper, work harder, and — most crushing of all — dismantle their own cultural identity simply to belong."
He went on to co-found the private equity arm of Capital Group, leading over $6 billion of investments across emerging markets — work that took him to more than 130 countries. By the early 2000s, his life outwardly suggested success. Yet the voice inside him caught up, "This life does not feel alive."
The poetry Lam longed for didn't return to him on the page. He discovered it in silence, observing his own breath. "That first 10-day Vipassana retreat, opened something in me. A direct experience of my True Self beneath habitual thought and emotional reaction."
And this time, he wouldn't let it fade into exile again. To this day, twenty years on, Lam hasn't missed a day of meditation, alongside multi-day annual retreats. He set aside all other books and has only read spiritual (and aligned scientific) books. Once a boy who longed to be a monk, he became "a person of all faiths and no organized religion" wary of how institutionalization can bend wisdom into power.
And just as the dip into the self transformed his relationship to religion, it inverted his philanthropy too. "As a philanthropist, I came to see the quiet hypocrisy at the heart of modern giving. A word that once meant 'love of humanity' had drifted into fear and hierarchy."
In 2018, Lam retired from finance and stepped fully into radical philanthropy through the Nguyễn Phương Family Foundation. The foundation supports changemakers in Vietnam and Southeast Asia across inner transformation, education for all, and thriving communities, alongside partnerships with platforms like Acumen, Ashoka, Endeavor and SEE Learning. Born of the conviction that "the supreme law in the Universe — seen and unseen — is Love," the foundation uses depth, rather than breadth, as a metric of scale.
More recently, Lam notes that selfishness and greed are rising to staggering levels — fuelling wars and mass suffering that would have been unimaginable even a year ago. And yet, he has moved from sorrow and anger to hope: "not because the world improved, but because I did." A rise in collective consciousness among ordinary people, together with new understandings of the human mind and interconnectedness emerging across science and technology, leaves him optimistic about humanity's future.
"We are not in decline. We are in labour. We are living the pain of a civilisational rebirth. The speed of the breakdown mirrors the urgency of the call — to grow into our true nature, and toward one another," he says. Join us for a conversation with this gentle visionary, lover of humanity, and reawakened poet, interviewed by his friends Abby Falik (Co-Founder, The Flight School) and Khang Nguyen (a community mediator).
