Grab co-founder Tan Hooi Ling has had to work hard to embrace the spotlight
- Co-founders of Southeast Asia’s most valuable start-up have become multimillionaires, with Anthony Tan estimated to be worth US$300 million
- Tan Hooi Ling says initial motivation was to solve Malaysia’s taxi safety problem but is now driven to help drivers and merchants
Tan Hooi Ling may help run a US$14 billion tech start-up in an industry that favours the outspoken, but she is not cut from the same cloth as your typical TED talk star.
Tan is co-founder of Singapore-based ride-hailing company Grab, which started as a taxi-hailing company but has since branched out into everything from payments to food delivery, in the process becoming Southeast Asia’s most valuable start-up.
For years the face of the company had been chief executive Anthony Tan (no relation), the more extroverted of the two who took the lead in pitching investors and speaking to media.
But more recently Ling – as she’s commonly known – has had to overcome her introversion and get out in front of people. Lots of people. She was the keynote speaker at the RISE technology conference in Hong Kong last year, and was the focus of a widely-anticipated, onstage interview with Kara Swisher, venerable US tech journalist and co-founder of technology news site Recode.
The 35-year-old Ling also co-chaired the World Economic Forum on Asean last year, spoke at Money 20/20 in March and gave live TV interviews with news outlets like Bloomberg and CNBC.
Ling acknowledges that such public appearances are all part of running Grab, but even her public relations team knows to only schedule such events once every couple of months. She admits that such engagements take a lot out of her.