Co-founder and former COO of Grab | Entrepreneurship & Southeast Asian Markets
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Tan Hooi Ling connects the design of a digital service with the organisation needed to deliver it. Her experience building Grab adds an operating perspective to discussions of regional growth: how teams define experiments, connect technology with customer experience and develop capabilities across different markets. For leadership audiences, the useful conversation concerns what needs to be learned locally before a business commits to scale.
Expansion across different markets raises questions about what a business can share and what it needs to learn locally. Tan's experience as a co-founder and operating leader offers a starting point for examining the teams, capabilities and feedback needed to turn regional ambition into delivery.
An experiment needs a definition of success before activity begins. This discussion explores how leadership teams can frame a test, learn from results and decide whether to adapt, stop or commit more resources. It connects an entrepreneurial approach with the discipline required for execution.
A digital service depends on the organisation around it. Drawing on experience across operations and technology, Tan's perspective brings product development, customer experience and delivery capability into the same conversation. The question is how those elements can develop together as a business grows.
Leadership teams do not need identical personalities to work effectively. Tan's reflections on introverted leadership and her partnership with Grab's co-founder open a discussion about trust, different strengths and the working relationships that support organisational learning.
Tan Hooi Ling co-founded Grab in 2012 and later led operations and technology teams within the business. She served as Chief Operating Officer until January 2022 and subsequently led its technology organisation, spanning product, design, engineering, data science and analytics.
Before rejoining Grab full-time in 2015, she worked at Salesforce and McKinsey. Her background includes a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Bath and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
She stepped down from operating roles and the board at the end of 2023. Grab's 2026 shareholder materials confirm that she no longer holds a position at the company. Her perspective is grounded in her experience building the business rather than a current executive mandate.
In her public reflections on leadership, Tan has discussed complementary leadership styles, experimentation and the importance of defining success before a team starts testing an idea. These themes make her experience relevant to executives examining how a regional growth strategy becomes an organisation capable of learning and delivering.
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