Grab co-founder Tan Hooi Ling steps into the spotlight

Tan Hooi Ling may help run a US$14 billion tech startup in an industry that favors 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 startup.

Tan Hooi Ling / Photo credit: Rise/Flickr

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 she was the focus of a widely-anticipated, onstage interview with Kara Swisher, venerable US tech journalist and co-founder of technology news site Recode.

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.

“When I have to do day-long activities, conferences, be on a panel … it’s not that I don’t enjoy speaking to people, but it takes energy away,” said Ling in an interview with the Post. “After I do it, I will just hole myself up in my apartment or hotel room for the entire evening, with activities like reading a book, taking a walk, or having a meal by myself.”

In this interview series, where a Post journalist interacts with an interviewee over an activity of their choice, settling on the activity took some doing. We toyed with the idea of swing dancing, which Ling tried for a brief period of time while working in San Francisco, but the logistics did not work out.

Tennis was also floated as a possibility, but we eventually settled on rock-climbing: an activity she tried and enjoyed at a teambuilding event in Boulder, Colorado.

Ling showed up right on time for our 10am indoor rock-climbing session at Climb Central, a gym with rock-climbing walls that tower through the center of Kallang Wave mall, next to Singapore’s national stadium.

Dressed in a dark gray T-shirt, coupled with shorts worn over a pair of black tights, she looked ready for the two hours of climbing we had scheduled.

“This is the most fun start to a work day I’ve ever had,” she said as we put on the required safety harnesses.