Tan Hooi Ling

Tan Hooi Ling is a Singaporean businesswoman best known as the co-founder and chief operating officer (COO) of the ride-hailing company Grab Holdings Inc.; she was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company before she co-founded Grab with Anthony Tan while attending Harvard Business School ¹.

Tan was born and raised in a middle-class Malaysian Chinese household in Kuala Lumpur, to a civil engineer father and a remisier mother, alongside an older brother who is now a computer programmer based in New Zealand; she is the youngest of two children and attended state schools while the family lived in Petaling Jaya ¹. She moved to the United Kingdom to attend the University of Bath, graduating in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, and took a year-long industrial placement at Eli Lilly during her studies; she then joined McKinsey & Company in Malaysia, which sponsored her MBA at Harvard Business School, where she met her future Grab co-founder Anthony Tan in the class of 2011 — the two are not related, despite the shared surname — and both subsequently moved to Singapore in 2014 ¹. No source read gives a birth date or birth year for her, so no birth date is built in her record ^{1 2}. Tan describes herself as an introvert who keeps a lower profile than her co-founder, counts swing dancing, picked up in San Francisco, among her life accomplishments, and plays the piano and violin ¹.

While at Harvard, Tan worked with her classmate Anthony Tan on a business plan for a mobile app connecting taxi seekers directly with the nearest drivers in Kuala Lumpur's chaotic urban environment, which later became GrabTaxi; the inspiration came from her own experiences with unsafe taxis in Malaysia, when she and her mother devised a manual tracking system of car number plates and location pings so her mother would know she was getting home safely ¹. The plan was runner-up in the HBS New Venture Competition in 2011, winning $25,000, and with the proceeds and their own funds the pair launched the app, first called MyTeksi, in June 2012 ¹. After graduating she returned to McKinsey to serve out her sponsorship bond, later moved to the San Francisco software company Salesforce while helping Grab from afar, and returned to Grab full-time in 2015 as COO, focusing on product, human resources and customer experience; in May 2023 she announced she would step down by the end of that year ¹. No text read for this record names a faith for Tan herself — the single article is silent and Wikidata carries no religion statement for her — so her faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2}.

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