Founder Stories: Thai Lee of SHI International
The self-made Korean American billionaire you've never heard of.
You probably know the names Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Sheryl Sandberg, because they are all self-made billionaires. But did you know that a Korean American woman is worth more than all of them?
Thai Lee built IT provider SHI International from next to nothing to generating $15 billion in annual revenue, making her worth $6.1 billion. She is the president and CEO of SHI and owns 60% of the company.
Lee was born in Bangkok and grew up in South Korea. She moved to the U.S. for high school at the age of 15, before attending Amherst for college where she earned a dual degree in biology and economics. She was part of the first class of women allowed to attend Amherst. Her father was a prominent economist who was the first Korean to graduate from Amherst, after working as a translator for the US army in Korea and earning a full scholarship. Thai Lee earned the title of Amherst’s most successful entrepreneur ever in 2016.
After graduating from Amherst, Lee returned to South Korea to work at auto parts manufacturer, Daesung Industrial Co. to save money to pay for graduate school. She also attended Harvard Business School, where she became the first Korean woman to graduate with her MBA. She would work in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble for two years and then in the corporate card division at American Express after business school.
In 1989, she and her ex-husband purchased a software reseller called Software House for less than $1 million which later became SHI. The company focuses on designing cloud, data center and end-user computing strategies. It has over 15,000 customers including Boeing and AT&T and is ranked among North America’s top 15 largest providers of IT solutions. SHI recently invested $20 million in a newly launched AI lab where it tests out AI solutions for customers using NVIDIA’s technology. SHI is recognized as the largest minority and woman-owned business enterprise in the United States.
At the 2019 Women in Cloud Summit, she told aspiring female entrepreneurs: “It’s OK to fail. At least you would have tried and have done your best.”
Lee is a devout Buddhist and credits Buddhist teachings for helping her maintain perspective. "The foundational belief in Buddhism is that life is unavoidably about suffering. So, learning to adjust my expectation was really a huge advantage for me, combined with hard work and learning that education really allows one to achieve mobility.”
She established the Thai Lee Foundation after meeting an inspirational young girl who was hit by Syrian government shrapnel and paralyzed. The Foundation has helped humanitarian projects from building orphanages and libraries in Turkey as well as psychosocial support centers and schools in Syria, According to the website, the foundation has benefited 3.5 million individuals and organizations with $485M in previous and current financial contributions.
She sits on the Board of Trustees of Memorial Sloane Kettering Cancer Center.