Lam Nguyen-Phuong

"Spirituality without social engagement is self-centered; social engagement without spirituality is an exercise in power and ego." A former Vietnamese refugee who became the first Vietnamese student at Stanford Business School, Lam Nguyen-Phuong spent three decades climbing the heights of global finance — only to find himself, in his own words, "stressed, angry, arrogant, full of desires" and empty inside. Today, he is a committed meditator and chairman of the Nguyễn-Phương Family Foundation, channeling decades of investing wisdom into a quieter project: promoting inner transformation as the seedbed of systemic change.

Lam's life has been shaped by displacement and reinvention. A native of Vietnam who fled the war as a refugee, he graduated from high school in Brazil, earned an engineering degree from École Centrale in Paris, and then an MBA from Stanford — the first Vietnamese student to do so. He went on to work at JP Morgan in New York, Brussels and London, co-founded a London M&A boutique, and in 1992 joined Capital Group, where he would help build its Private Equity business from scratch.

As Co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Capital Group's Private Markets division, Lam oversaw nearly USD 6 billion worth of investments across emerging markets in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. The work took him to over 130 countries — an education in diversity, but also in suffering. The wealth and access grew; so did the hollow. In his youth, he had written three volumes of poetry dedicated to love and humanity. Somewhere between Saigon and Wall Street, "the poet within me went into exile."

He began meditating in a disciplined way, reading only spiritual books. Real understanding, he would later say, came through contact with people who suffer — encounters that "rekindled compassion" and revealed how soul-destroying the world of high finance had become.

In 2018, Lam retired and stepped fully into what he calls "radical philanthropy". Through the Nguyễn-Phương Family Foundation, he and his family fund and mentor changemakers across Acumen, Ashoka, Endeavor, SEE Learning/CBCT, TeachForAll and the VietSeeds Foundation, and he chairs the finance committee of the Asia Philanthropy Circle. The family's work organizes around four pillars — Education for All, Poverty Alleviation, Inner Change and Systems Change — guided by the conviction that without inner change, no sustainable societal change is possible.

Lam speaks of three contemporary divides — within the self (a mental-health crisis where suicide now outpaces deaths from war and natural disaster), within society, and with nature — and insists they can only be bridged by a rise in collective consciousness. "If we shift the paradigm, and see us all as interrelated, it would be a world of abundance. There are enough resources in the world for everyone," he says. He warns leaders to act mindfully, asking continually: "who are we hurting — our employees, our suppliers, our children, future generations, the planet?"

A monk once told him, "Do not mistake Philanthropy for Compassion. If driven by the ego, philanthropy is a transaction, not compassion." The line has become something of a north star. A practitioner of Interspirituality who draws from the teachings of the Ascended Masters, Lam reminds social entrepreneurs that without inner work, even good causes hollow into burnout, power and ego.

Based in Singapore with his wife since 1995, Lam now teaches what he learned the long way around: that lasting change doesn't begin with strategy, but with stillness. Join us in conversation with this self-described "Agent of Change and Human Bridge" — a connector across cultures, classes and levels of consciousness — who invites a generation of changemakers to lead from the inside out.