How Thai built the fortune
Thai Lee built her fortune by turning a struggling software reseller into a giant of corporate technology purchasing. In 1989 she and her then husband, Leo Koguan, bought Software House International, a small New Jersey company with a handful of employees and modest sales. Lee became its chief executive and renamed it SHI International.
Her strategy focused on volume software licensing for large organisations. As companies and public agencies bought desktop software, then server, security and cloud subscriptions in large quantities, SHI helped them negotiate licence agreements, manage compliance and buy hardware from many vendors in one place. The company kept margins thin and service levels high, winning large enterprise and government contracts. Over three decades revenue grew to many billions of dollars a year and the workforce to several thousand people.
SHI remains privately held, and Lee owns a majority of it. That ownership is the basis of her wealth, and the company is often described as the largest woman-owned business in the United States.
Lee has said that SHI's growth came from keeping a close focus on customers and controlling costs, rather than from large acquisitions. The company has expanded mostly by hiring sales and technical staff and opening new offices, and it has continued to grow even as many technology buyers moved to cloud subscriptions, because organisations still need help managing licences and spending across many vendors.
Lee's leadership has kept SHI's headquarters in New Jersey and its management team largely stable over decades.
Companies and holdings
SHI International is headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey, with offices across North America, Europe and Asia. Its services include:
- Software licensing and asset management for large organisations
- Hardware procurement and data centre equipment
- Cloud and security consulting and managed services
- Integration and logistics centres that configure equipment before delivery
Koguan retained a minority stake after the couple's divorce. Lee has focused her business life almost entirely on SHI and has not built a broader portfolio of public holdings.
SHI's customer base includes large corporations, state and local governments, schools and universities, and healthcare organisations. The company is a major partner of the largest software and hardware vendors, which rely on resellers like SHI to reach enterprise customers and manage complex licensing arrangements.
The company has also invested in services such as cloud migration, cybersecurity assessments and lifecycle management of devices, which add recurring revenue on top of product sales and deepen relationships with its customers.
Early life and career
Lee was born in Bangkok in 1958 to Korean parents and grew up mainly in South Korea, where her father was an economist. She moved to the United States as a teenager to finish her education and earned a bachelor's degree in biology and economics from Amherst College in Massachusetts, studying at a time when few Asian women attended the college.
She then completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1985. Before taking over SHI she worked in brand management at Procter and Gamble and later at American Express, experience that gave her a grounding in marketing, finance and large corporate customers.
Her studies in both science and economics, followed by work at two large consumer companies, gave her an unusual mix of analytical and commercial training. When she took over SHI in her early thirties she applied those skills to a business that was still small and had to compete with much larger technology resellers for corporate accounts.
Philanthropy and public life
Lee avoids publicity and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let SHI's growth and workplace culture speak for the company. She has supported educational institutions, including her alma maters, and has made gifts to arts organisations, but her personal giving is not widely documented and appears to be handled largely in private.
Within SHI she is known for a frugal, cost-conscious management style and for promoting long-serving employees into senior roles. She remains president and chief executive.
SHI has also supported diversity programmes in the technology industry and community initiatives in New Jersey.