Before she became one of the most powerful executives in artificial intelligence, Clara Shih was a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong. Her family moved to the United States when she was four, and her parents—an engineer and a teacher—made education the center of their household.
By high school, Clara was scoring a 1420 out of 1600 on the SAT and working minimum-wage tutoring jobs to help support her family. She was often the only girl in advanced math classes, a fact that pushed her to work even harder.
She went on to study computer science and economics at Stanford, later earning a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, before returning to Stanford for her master’s in computer science. That mix of technical training and global perspective gave Clara the foundation to become one of the most important voices in the next wave of technology.
From Hong Kong to Silicon Valley
Clara Shih was born in Hong Kong in 1982 and raised in Ohio and Illinois. Her upbringing in a working-class immigrant family shaped her relentless focus on education and self-reliance. Her parents believed education was the one currency that could never be taken away, and Clara absorbed that lesson fully.