Gillian Tee is co-founder and CEO of Homage.
Tee co-founded Homage, which builds care systems that combine technology with the human touch, to make quality care easier to find, more human to experience and accessible to more families, while creating meaningful and flexible work opportunities for care professionals.
What has been the greatest challenge you have overcome—and what did it teach you?
Building Homage has meant navigating years of uncertainty: entering new markets, surviving difficult funding environments, making painful decisions and carrying responsibility for a mission much larger than myself.
It taught me that resilience isn't about being unaffected by difficulty. It is about continuing to move with clarity and conviction despite it—and learning to distinguish between what needs to change and what is worth holding onto.
Perhaps most importantly, I have learnt that endurance is not an individual sport. The people you choose to build alongside matter enormously.
How do you sustain yourself—mentally or physically—while doing your work?
Movement and quiet are both important to me. I exercise regularly, spend time outdoors whenever I can, and try to protect moments where there is no agenda—time with family and friends, or simply time to think.
I've also learnt that sustainability comes from being present in the life you're building, rather than perpetually postponing life until after the next milestone.
What impact do you hope to make over the next five years?
I want to help reshape how society thinks about care—not as something we scramble to arrange during a crisis, but as essential social infrastructure that allows people to live with dignity and agency throughout their lives.
Over the next five years, I hope we can use technology and AI to dramatically reduce the friction surrounding care while preserving what technology cannot replace: trust, empathy and human connection. A big part of that is strengthening the care workforce itself. Through Homage Academy, we have built a community of more than 30,000 care professionals, and my ambition is to train and mobilise an additional 100,000 care professionals—creating meaningful livelihoods while significantly expanding our collective capacity to care.
I also want to leave a legacy through people. Within Homage, that means developing the next generation of leaders in the care sector, giving them meaningful opportunities to lead across different roles, take ownership and ultimately shape the future of care themselves.
If we succeed, better care will not simply be more efficient or accessible; it will give caregivers more capacity, care professionals better livelihoods, individuals greater control over how they live, and a new generation of leaders the opportunity to carry this mission forward.
What's one belief about leadership or success you've unlearned?
That leadership means having all the answers. I've come to believe that leadership is much more about creating the conditions for good answers to emerge—bringing together people who see what you cannot, asking better questions, making difficult decisions when necessary, and giving others enough trust and space to lead.
Success has similarly become less about proving what I can accomplish personally, and more about what becomes possible through the people and systems we build together.
Name a person that has shaped you.
My nanny and my grandmother, who raised me. They shaped my understanding of care long before I had the language for it. Losing them relatively early gave me a deep awareness of the finite nature of time, and the recognition that it is often the moments of care we give and receive that have the greatest longevity.
That has influenced many of my choices since: to be deliberate about how I spend my time, to invest deeply in people, and to continually sieve out what brings a true sense of personal purpose. It has also shaped how I think about vocation—that with limited time, the work we choose should be selected with meaning, and should contribute to something beyond ourselves.
What is one barrier for women in Singapore that still needs urgent change?
We need to change the assumption that caregiving is primarily a woman's responsibility. Women have made tremendous progress professionally, but the invisible architecture of care—raising children, supporting ageing parents, managing households and carrying the mental load—still falls disproportionately on women.
Until care is treated as a shared societal and economic responsibility, we will continue asking women to make choices that men are less frequently required to make. Better care infrastructure isn't only a healthcare or ageing issue; it is fundamental to women's economic participation and equality.
Complete the sentence: The future will belong to women who… define success on their own terms—and have the courage to build the world they want to inherit.
