Thai Lee

President, CEO and co-founder, SHI International

Name: Thai Lee

Role: President, CEO and co-founder, SHI International

Context:

When this Thai-born Korean America co-founded SHI in 1989, it was a $1m software reseller.

Today, it is the US' largest Minority/Woman Owned Business Enterprise with 2020 revenues passing $11bn for the first time.

Lee herself was recently pegged by Forbes as the US' eighth richest self-made woman, with an estimated fortune of $3.2bn.

She moved to the US from Korea as a teenager, and started up SHI in 1989 with her then husband when the duo bought the software licensing arm of a struggling New Jersey software company for "less than $1m".

She has a double major BA in biology and economics from Amherst College and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Although we could not reach Lee for this article, you can read more about her story in this Forbes article.