It has been demonstrated experimentally that pulsed pumping can significantly improve the thermal management in an optically-pumped vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser and upgrade the output power. In this paper, the transient heat conduction equation is solved by use of finite element method, and the maximum temperature rise in the multiple quantum wells active region of laser is focused. Based on the influences of repetition rate and pulse width of pump pulses on the maximum temperature rise, the repetition rate and pulse width of pump pulses are optimized. It can be concluded from the numerical results that, for a substrate-removed InGaAs quantum well vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser, the optimized pulse width is between 1 μs and 10 μs, and the optimized pulse repetition rate is no more than 50 kHz.