There were no Olympic medals up for grabs when Sim Yi Hui and Jane Lee, the co-founders of the Singapore Women’s Everest Team, set out to recruit team members to climb the world’s tallest mountain in 2004. “When we first formed the team my goal was just to climb the mountain,” Sim Yi Hui told me on stage at the recent FT Family Business Forum Asia. “It was really a pure passion to want to climb.”

Little did she know at the time but her goal would get a lot bigger. Once the newspapers caught wind of Yi Hui’s dream, she and her team members became the “Singapore Women’s Everest climbing team,” the first group of Singaporean women to attempt to reach the summit of the mountain. The nation was watching and expectations were rising.

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