Summary
Paul Thienprayoon was 17 years old when he decided to fly. He was a first-generation American, the son of immigrant parents who had other plans for him, walking across the Georgia Tech campus when an Air Force ROTC cadet asked if he wanted to fly airplanes. He said yes, and that yes shaped the next three decades of his life. He went on to become a B-1 bomber pilot, flew 250 combat missions across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and led the first wave of aircraft into Syria in 2014. When he left the Air Force, he didn’t go to the airlines. He went to General Electric, built a real-time parts-tracking database that transformed how an entire division operated, then left industry behind to run a nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities, turning around four consecutive years of deficits in under three years. Today he’s the Chief of Staff for the Office of the CEO at the American Cancer Society, working alongside a new chief executive to build a strategic plan that will carry the organization to 2030. He’ll tell you the B-1 cockpit and the ACS boardroom require exactly the same thing of him. He means it.
Where You Come From
There’s a version of this story where Paul Thienprayoon becomes an aerospace engineer. He enrolls at Georgia Tech, buries himself in the mechanics of aircraft design, and spends his career in a lab making planes better from the ground. That version exists. He just didn’t choose it.
“I figured out it was better to fly them than to design them,” he says, laughing at the simplicity of the pivot. He was 17 years old when he started college. A first-generation American with immigrant parents who had a very clear vision for what his future would look like. The Air Force wasn’t in it.
But somewhere between engineering coursework and a chance encounter on the Georgia Tech campus with an Air Force ROTC cadet, Paul Thienprayoon found the thing that would shape everything that came after. Not just his career. His character. The way he sees a problem. The way he leads people. The instinct to diagnose fast, build what’s missing, and move.
Today, he’s the Chief of Staff for the Office of the CEO at the American Cancer Society, where he supports a new CEO, oversees executive operations, and is driving the development of a strategic plan that will carry the organization to fiscal year 2030. It sounds, on paper, like a clean executive résumé. But that’s not really the story.
The story is how a boy who decided at 17 that he wanted to fly ended up spending his 40s fighting cancer, and why, to him, those two things aren’t as different as they look.
The Boy Who Chose to Fly
Paul didn’t come from a military family. When you don’t grow up with service as part of your household vocabulary, when nobody’s worn the uniform before you, what you know about the military comes from movies and mainstream media. You get the recruitment posters and the action sequences, not the reality.
What surprised him once he was actually in wasn’t what the commercials had gotten wrong. It was what they hadn’t prepared him for at all: the people. The genuine diversity of backgrounds and ways of thinking, all moving toward a common cause. The closeness that comes from that kind of shared commitment.
“Different backgrounds, different ways of thinking, all coming together for a common cause. I was really excited to see that.”
He came in as a pilot, and he would spend his entire military career as one. First as an instructor, then as a B-1 bomber pilot, completing four deployments over a span of years that took him to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. He flew 250 combat missions. He was deployed every year between 2010 and 2015. Each deployment ran approximately six months long.
He doesn’t lead with any of that when you first meet him. He doesn’t put it on LinkedIn. He says so directly, with a self-awareness that runs through everything he does.
“I worry personally that too much combat conversation might be off-putting,” he said. “So I actually tamp that down a little bit.”
Paul Thienprayoon has spent years in rooms where people didn’t know what he’d actually done, and he let his presence and his work do the talking instead. That’s not humility as performance. That’s discipline.
250 Missions and the First Wave Into Syria
The part of the story Paul doesn’t often say out loud came out when pressed on the specifics of deployment. What he shared was something he typically keeps off LinkedIn and out of most professional introductions.
“I actually led the first wave into Syria, way back in 2014. Feels like forever ago.”
It wasn’t a boast. It was stated the way someone recounts something that is simply true, something that happened and that they’ve carried quietly ever since. Four deployments. Two hundred and fifty combat missions. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. That’s the life underneath the LinkedIn headline.
What did it do to him? Not the logistics of the missions, but what it did inside him?
“It gave me a sense of real responsibility and urgency,” he says. “A needing to be almost perfect, and to have a high level of excellence.”
He talks about close air support with precision. Troops on the ground were counting on his exact decisions. Not approximate ones. Not close enough ones. His. The weight of knowing that other people’s lives, people he would never meet, depended on decisions made in a cockpit at Mach 1.2 is something he hasn’t put down.
“I was responsible for those lives,” he says. “To make the right decisions, to make sure they were safe, but also to make sure that all the people around us were safe as well.”
He talks about the long nights planning missions. The intelligence briefings that had to be right before anyone took off. The discipline of starting from scratch and executing all the way through. For Paul, it was never abstract. It was literal life and death, and the precision required for one trained him for the precision required in everything else.
And then he came home.
When the Uniform Came Off
Paul left the Air Force by choice, and the decision wasn’t about burning out or reaching a limit. It was about his wife. Her career was starting to take shape, and their family needed a different kind of stability than military life allowed. So he made the call, walked away from the service, and started over at General Electric.
“I thought that was going to be my pathway going forward,” he says.
He wasn’t wrong, exactly. But the story at GE turned out to be more interesting than a corporate career track. What Paul did at GE Aviation is the clearest early demonstration of what happens when a military brain gets turned loose on a civilian problem.
Everyone was asking the same questions. Nobody was connecting the answers. The airlines GE served, Delta, United, and American, needed engines back in service. The information required to make that happen was scattered across emails and spreadsheets and days of lead time.
“There’s got to be a way to get real-time information in one singular place. A place of truth.”
So he built one. What started as a wireframe Excel sheet grew into a real-time database that let anyone ask what was available, get an answer around the clock, and make a decision right away. A process that used to take weeks compressed into seconds. The tool eventually reached more than 70 users across the division and logged roughly 9,000 minutes of use per month. It was written up in Fast Company in 2016.
“It’s now evolved many years later into something else, even more impactful,” he says. “It was just getting it started.”
That phrase, just getting it started, is the military mindset in its purest civilian form. You don’t wait for perfect resources. You don’t wait for institutional permission. You see the gap, you prototype something, and you iterate. The B-1 pilot who planned missions from nothing and executed them was doing the same thing at GE with a spreadsheet. Same brain. Different stakes. Same precision.
He stayed at GE for a few years, learned from people he still speaks of with genuine respect, and eventually felt something start to pull at him. The kind of pull you can’t logic your way out of.
“I really missed the mission,” he says.
From Aerospace to Purpose
Paul Thienprayoon went from managing aviation parts for major airlines to running a nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities. If you’re looking for the throughline that makes that make sense on paper, you won’t find one. That’s the point.
LADD Inc., based in Cincinnati, had been running deficits for four consecutive years when Paul came on as Chief Operating Officer in July 2019. What happened next isn’t really a turnaround story in the way business schools tell those stories. It’s a vision story.
“I wouldn’t say anything was broken,” he’s careful to say. “We were just definitely holding a solid path. But our CEO saw more. She had a huge vision for the future.”
That vision included remote monitoring technology, intelligent housing, and new community integration programs designed to give adults with developmental disabilities a fuller life than they’d had access to before. Paul came in as the operator, the person who could take a vision and build the structure around it, the processes, the rigor, the systems that let new ideas actually land.
Then COVID happened.
“It really provided a space for us to test the limit of that. Because we did that, those programs grew. Our ability to support people grew.”
The nonprofit achieved its first surplus. Services expanded by 16 percent in under three years. The roughly 600 adults LADD supported were thriving. And Paul is clear, even now, that the credit belongs to the CEO’s vision and the organization’s willingness to follow it. He was there to build what she could see.
“It wasn’t broken, but there was an opportunity to be a better steward of this need,” he says. “And I think LADD met that.”
He left LADD in May 2022 having built exactly what he came to build. Ready, again, for something bigger.
Cancer Doesn’t Respond to Orders
The American Cancer Society wasn’t looking for someone from aerospace or disability services. What they were looking for, at least in the mind of the senior leader who reached out to Paul, was an operator. Someone who could build. Someone who could bring process and rigor to a growing part of the organization called Patient Support.
“I have a chief of staff position that’s open,” the leader told him. “I could use somebody who can build things.”
Paul said yes.
He arrived as Chief of Staff for Patient Support in May 2022, overseeing more than 700 people, then moved into the Chief of Staff role for the Office of the CEO. Today he works alongside CEO Shane Jacobson, who joined in August 2025, to build a strategic plan carrying the organization through fiscal year 2030.
“My role was to bring him on board, support him, get him acclimated,” Paul explains, “and then start building what he needed to move ACS into the future.”
What he wants people to understand about ACS is the full architecture of the work. Four pillars: patient support, the discovery pillar funding researchers working to eliminate cancer, and advocacy operating in Washington and every state capital. All of it pointed at the same target.
And the standard he holds himself to inside that architecture is specific. For every donor dollar that comes to ACS, the goal is to put almost the full amount directly support the mission. He mentions the Hope Lodges by name, places where patients and caregivers can stay free of charge while undergoing treatment far from home. Programs like that are where the money becomes a person.
“We’re not just a website, not just a telephone call. We’re a team of people finding lots of different ways to solve this problem.”
On veterans specifically, he doesn’t hedge. Type “veterans and cancer” into your browser right now, he says, and ACS comes up first. The research is there. The advocacy is there. The patient programs are there. He knows the nation can do more, and he says so plainly, but ACS is at the forefront of it.
The question that frames everything he’s built comes back to the contrast that defines his career. You flew one of the most powerful aircraft the U.S. military has ever built. Now you spend your days serving cancer patients and their caregivers. Most people would see those as opposite ends of the spectrum. Do you?
He didn’t hesitate.
“When you’re in the B-1 going Mach 1.2, or sitting in a meeting thinking about the future of ACS, that responsibility is the same to me.”
That answer tells you everything about how he’s built his career.
The question that doesn’t get asked enough in conversations about veteran leadership is what it actually feels like to be the only person in the room who’s served.
Paul has been that person at almost every stop since leaving the Air Force. GE. LADD. ACS. He’s often the only one. He knows the number. Veterans represent about one percent of the U.S. population. In most professional environments, you’re statistically unlikely to encounter more than one in a given room.
“You carry that at times,” he says.
But he’s clear that he doesn’t want that statistic to feel like a burden to the veterans carrying it. His message on what it means to be the veteran in the room is more like an instruction.
“Lean in. You deserve to be at the table, and you’re going to provide value that brings that room to the next level.”
He’s equally direct for the non-veterans in the room. Pull that person in. Bring them in. Support their thoughts. Understand that they’re going to look at a problem a little bit differently. What happens when you pair a veteran with a non-veteran in the workplace, according to Paul, isn’t friction. It’s augmentation. The skills reinforce each other. The perspectives expand each other. The whole becomes something the parts couldn’t have reached on their own.
His military background has never been held against him. Not once, in any room, at any stop. In fact, the pattern has been almost the inverse of what you might expect. People see him. They understand his work. They respect his contributions. And then, when they learn where he came from, what he actually did, the deployments, the Syria missions, the 250 combat sorties, the response is always some version of the same thing.
“When they do hear the story, they get a real higher level of respect,” he says. “They’re like, OK, that makes sense. Tell me more. Because the skills that we see you have, we didn’t think that veteran leaders had that skill. But you do.”
He doesn’t let that moment pass.
“We do,” he says. “In droves. And I would love for more veterans to take advantage of that.”
What Civilian Organizations Are Still Getting Wrong
Paul’s doctoral work at Xavier University in Cincinnati is focused specifically on the military-to-civilian leadership transition. He’s in the dissertation phase. The research isn’t about proving that veterans are good leaders. That’s not the question. The question is about translation: how veterans present themselves as leaders and how civilian organizations actually receive them.
The gap, he says, isn’t really about bias. It’s about assumption.
“There’s a little bit of a concern,” he says of civilian hiring managers. “Because they don’t know. And so I think what civilian organizations should start to think about is not only just looking at the person’s background and saying, will that fit our organization?”
The worry that military people are too rigid, too locked into hierarchy, too committed to the yes-sir-no-sir structure doesn’t match the reality of what military leaders actually are. Paul is direct about that. These are 360-degree, high-EQ leaders who’ve been managing people, building culture, and navigating ambiguity since their early 20s.
“They can evolve so quickly, adapt so quickly. They’re going to make your organization better just the day they show up.”
He also makes a point that doesn’t get said enough: in the military, there’s no HR department. Every leader is, in effect, their own HR practitioner. The interpersonal work, the conflict navigation, the performance management, the morale stewardship, it’s all on you. That’s not a liability. That’s a competency most civilian executives spend years trying to develop.
“In the military, there’s no HR. So we’re our own HR practitioners, especially if you’re in a leadership position,” he says. “That’s a skill. That’s a skill that we bring to the organization.”
What He Tells the Veterans Who Are In-Between
For veterans in that in-between space, just out, not sure what comes next, Paul has a specific message. He mentors people there regularly and he’s thought carefully about what to say.
Paul mentors people in that space. He’s thought carefully about what to say to them.
The advice isn’t about tailoring a résumé or translating a military occupational specialty into corporate language. It’s about thinking bigger. Longer. Differently.
“Where do you want to be? What impact do you want to have? Where do you want to live?”
What are the environmental circumstances, he asks them, that are going to give you the most joy when you look back in ten years and say the journey was right? “It wasn’t about the exact job title. It wasn’t about the exact organization. It was about reaching toward that longer-term goal.”
The specific job title, the exact organization, those aren’t the starting point. The starting point is the longer arc. And when you start from the longer arc, the right choices tend to get clearer.
He tells his own story as evidence. He could have flown for the airlines. It’s a natural landing spot for a B-1 pilot with that many hours in the air. He chose not to.
“I wanted to try something new. I wanted to look further. I wanted to lead in places that I think I could be really effective,” he says. “That’s how I ended up in healthcare, having zero healthcare background in the service.”
No relevant occupational specialty. No roadmap. Just the skills, the instincts, and the willingness to apply them somewhere entirely new.
He also talks about the moment his understanding of service changed. Not the concept of it, but the weight of it. It happened a few years into his military career, when the responsibility started to land differently than it had when he was 17 and just excited to fly.
“When I started to get into a few years into my service and I saw the responsibility I had, the privilege of leading other young men and women into very difficult situations, understanding that your decisions impacted more than just yourself. It impacted lots of people. In my case, on the ground, people I would never meet, other cultures. That responsibility, the weight of that responsibility, that’s when I understood service to be more than just yourself.”
It happened quickly, he says. That’s one of the things the military does that civilian careers rarely replicate: it hands you real responsibility early. Not a simulation of it. Not a training exercise that looks like it. The actual thing.
The Throughline
Paul Thienprayoon was 17 when he decided to fly. He’s spent the years since that decision building things, turning around organizations, leading people through volatile and uncertain situations, and carrying the weight of missions that mattered. Not because someone told him to. Because that’s who he is.
The Air Force didn’t make him a builder. The Air Force gave him a language for something that was already in him. And every career stop since, GE, LADD, ACS, has been him finding a new problem that needed exactly that.
“Every single day, here in the chief of staff role for the CEO of the American Cancer Society, I’m applying a learned skill from all those stops before. Every single day. Without a doubt.”
He’s not flying Mach 1.2 anymore. But the cockpit is still where he starts from. The mission is still what he’s there for. And the people depending on him to get it right? They’re still depending on him.
Different window to the world. Very much the same thing.
RESOURCES
American Cancer Society
cancer.org | https://www.cancer.org
Information, support programs, caregiver resources, and research funding for patients navigating a cancer diagnosis.
ACS CAN | American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network
acscan.org | https://www.acscan.org
The advocacy arm of ACS, working in Washington, D.C. and every state capital to advance cancer-related policy for veterans and all patients.
VA Caregiver Support Program
caregiver.va.gov | https://www.caregiver.va.gov
Support, training, and resources for those caring for veterans affected by toxic exposure, illness, and service-related conditions.
PACT Act Resources for Veterans
benefits.va.gov/benefits/pact-act | https://www.benefits.va.gov/benefits/pact-act/
Eligibility, benefits, and health screening information under the PACT Act for veterans exposed to Agent Orange, burn pits, and other toxic substances.
Veterans Crisis Line
Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net
ABOUT PAUL THIENPRAYOON
Paul Thienprayoon is a retired United States Air Force officer and B-1 bomber pilot who flew 250 combat missions across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, including leading the first wave of aircraft into Syria in 2014. He left the Air Force after four deployments to join GE Aviation, where he built a real-time parts-tracking system that was recognized in Fast Company. He served as Chief Operating Officer of LADD Inc. from July 2019 to May 2022, turning around four consecutive years of deficits and expanding services by 16 percent. He joined the American Cancer Society in May 2022 as Chief of Staff for Patient Support and currently serves as Chief of Staff for the Office of the CEO, working alongside CEO Shane Jacobson to develop the organization’s strategic plan through 2030. He is pursuing a doctorate at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where his dissertation focuses on the military-to-civilian leadership transition. He is based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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