about the founder
I know what it feels like to live a story you didn’t choose.
Hi, I’m Shi Choong, founder of Her Fire Within.
I grew up in Malaysia in a traditional Chinese family where there was a pretty clear idea of what a “successful” life was supposed to look like. Study hard, get a good education, find a stable career, make your family proud, and build a respectable life.
But my childhood was anything but traditional.
When I was 15, both of my parents left, and I suddenly had to grow up much faster than I was ready for. I helped raise my three younger siblings while trying to figure out how to survive myself. There were years when stability, safety, and even having a place to call home weren’t guaranteed. I learned very young how to be independent, how to keep going, and how to survive even when I didn’t know what came next.
Eventually, I came to the United States for college, went on to earn my PhD in Analytical Chemistry from Purdue University, and later built a career as an engineer at Intel. On paper, I had done everything I was supposed to do. I had the education, the corporate career, the steady paycheck, and the kind of life I had been taught was “successful.”
For a long time, I thought that meant I had made it.
But I did not feel fulfilled. I felt something was missing. Somewhere along the way, I started realizing that there is a difference between building a life that looks successful and building a life that actually feels like yours. I started questioning how much of my life I had consciously chosen and how much of it came from expectations I had inherited from my family, my culture, and society.
That question eventually changed everything.
Creating something I didn’t know I needed
While I was still working at Intel, I started planning events on the side. At first, I simply loved creating beautiful experiences and bringing people together. But over time, I realized the part I loved most had very little to do with décor, timelines, or logistics. I loved what happened when people gathered in the same room and felt safe enough to connect with each other.
I also started meeting women with incredible stories.
They were entrepreneurs, executives, mothers, immigrants, creatives, community builders, and women navigating major transitions in their lives. Some had overcome enormous barriers. Some had walked away from careers, relationships, cultural expectations, or identities that no longer fit them. Some had started over at 30, 40, 50, or beyond. Many of them had done incredibly courageous things without ever thinking of themselves as courageous.
The more women I met, the more I wondered why we didn’t hear these stories more often.
We hear plenty of stories after someone becomes wildly successful, when the struggle can be packaged neatly into a few sentences about perseverance. But I became much more interested in everything that happens before that. I wanted to hear about the messy middle, the moment someone almost gave up, the identity she had to let go of, the expectations she had to disappoint, and the fear she had to walk through before anyone was applauding.
Those were the stories I wanted to hear, and I wanted the world to hear them too.
So I created a stage for women to tell them.
In 2024, I made one of the biggest changes in my own story when I left my corporate career at Intel and became a full-time entrepreneur. A few months later, on International Women’s Day 2025, I produced my first women’s conference.
What began as one event continued to evolve. Women Who Dare became She Dares to Rise, and today, that journey has become Her Fire Within.
Her Fire Within is more than a conference to me. It is a platform for women to share the raw and real stories behind who they have become, especially the parts of their journeys we don’t always talk about publicly.
I have witnessed something powerful happen when a woman shares her story honestly. Someone sitting in the audience recognizes herself in it. She realizes that she isn’t the only one who has struggled, questioned the path she was on, disappointed someone, started over, or wanted something different for her life. Hearing another woman speak her truth can give her permission to look at her own story differently and, eventually, the courage to share hers too.
That is how I believe a movement begins.
I want the world to hear these stories.
My vision for Her Fire Within has never been limited to one conference, one city, or one year. I want to build a platform where courageous women from different cultures, industries, generations, backgrounds, and walks of life can tell the stories we don’t hear enough.
Not just polished success stories, but human stories about breaking barriers, challenging expectations, starting over, finding your voice, choosing yourself, reclaiming your identity, and discovering what becomes possible when you stop living according to the story someone else wrote for you.
While women are at the center of our stage, you don’t have to be a woman, an entrepreneur, or have an impressive title to belong here. Her Fire Within is for anyone who believes in the power of these stories and wants to be part of a community that celebrates people who have the courage to question what they were given and create something different.
Because when one woman shares her story honestly, another woman may recognize herself in it. It gives her permission to question her own story, find her voice, and eventually share it too. And when enough of us begin doing that, we create something much bigger than an event.
We create a movement that changes what becomes possible for the people who come after us.
That is why I created Her Fire Within.
And this is only the beginning.
Shi Choong
Founder, Her Fire Within