Tan Hooi Ling

This woman co-founded a $40B company because she was scared to take a taxi home alone.

Tan Hooi Ling grew up in Kuala Lumpur.

With countless stories of robberies and assaults tied to the city’s taxi system, she developed her own safety protocol.

Texting license plate numbers to her mom and sending updates as she passed key landmarks.

Years later, while pursuing her MBA at Harvard Business School, she realized that fear wasn’t just personal.

It was a shared problem millions of women in Southeast Asia faced every day.

So in 2011, she teamed up with classmate Anthony Tan to build a mobile app that connected passengers with licensed taxi drivers.

They called their idea MyTeksi and launched the first version of the app in Malaysia in 2012.

Despite co-creating the company, she didn’t join full-time right away.

McKinsey had sponsored her MBA, and she returned to serve out her bond.

Afterward, she joined Salesforce in San Francisco, leading strategic and operational projects.

But even while she was working full-time in the U.S., she carved out nights, weekends, and vacation days to help build MyTeksi.

In 2015, she finally joined MyTeksi full-time as COO, overseeing product, technology, people operations, and customer experience.

She wasn’t interested in being the face of the company.

That was Anthony’s role.

Tan preferred the field.

She visited Indonesian wet markets to speak with merchants.

She sat with drivers and listened to their frustrations.

She even went undercover with her sales team in the Philippines to watch how they pitched to hesitant vendors.

As the company scaled, so did its ambition.

MyTeksi became Grab, and expanded far beyond ride-hailing.

It grew into a super app offering food and grocery delivery, parcel courier services, digital payments, microloans, insurance, and even healthcare.

It now serves 500+ cities across 8 countries and reaches over 33M monthly users.

Grab launched “Grab for Good” in 2019 to invest in social impact initiatives. Reducing plastic waste, empowering micro-entrepreneurs, and providing accessible transport for the disabled.

Internally, she championed diversity, setting a goal to raise the share of women in leadership to 40% by 2030 and enforcing equal pay standards across the company.

For all her impact, Hooi Ling remained intensely private.

She described herself as an introvert, more comfortable solving complex problems than speaking on stage.

In 2021, Grab went public via a SPAC merger, listing on Nasdaq at a valuation close to $40 billion.

It was one of the largest tech IPOs ever out of Southeast Asia.

In 2023, she stepped down from her operational role and left Grab’s board.

But she didn’t stop building.

Today, she sits on the boards of Wise, Endeavor, and continues mentoring and supporting a new generation of founders across the region.