Tess Shih

Arrive 30 minutes early for everything, work harder and faster than anyone else, and always ask for more. That’s how to succeed on Wall Street, a mentor told Tess Shih, 36, when she arrived at JPMorgan in 2005. Not much different from home, thought the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants — a NASA rocket scientist father and a “Chinese tiger mom” (a term Shih uses with affection), who instilled a strong work ethic at an early age.

Attending the University of Southern California on scholarship, she discovered finance. An internship at Merrill Lynch led to the JPMorgan job, where she worked on corporate strategy. Shih returned to the firm in 2011 after earning an MBA from Harvard University, where she learned about hedge funds. In 2017, Capital Fund Management, a French alternatives firm, recruited her to lead its marketing efforts in the Midwest and South.

Recognizing the dearth of women, Asian-Americans and other minorities in finance, Shih is active in efforts supporting inclusion. She is a trustee of the alumni endowment of the Toigo Foundation, an organization promoting diversity that gave her a fellowship to study at Harvard, and she’s a member of the USC Tri-State Scholarship Committee.

– Evan Cooper