Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is Google’s Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny). His unusual job title started as a joke, but eventually became real.
Meng was one of Google’s earliest engineers. Among many other things, he helped build Google’s first mobile search service, and headed the team that evaluated and kept a vigilant eye on Google’s search quality. After a successful 8-year stint in Engineering, he now serves with Google University, where he is the Head of the School of Personal Growth. One of his main projects is Search Inside Yourself – a Mindfulness-based Emotional Intelligence course, which he hopes will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.
Chade-Meng Tan, “Jolly Good Fellow” at Google, says his gift to CCARE was motivated by a desire to promote world peace, which “can only happen when people have inner happiness and inner compassion”.
Outside of Google, Meng is the Founder and (Jolly Good) President of the Tan Teo Charitable Foundation, a small foundation dedicated to promoting Peace, Liberty and Enlightenment in the world. He is also a Founding Patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE).
Meng earned his MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He went to Santa Barbara mainly for the beach, but didn’t mind the graduate degree either. He has won many computing-related awards, including the Championship of Singapore’s National Software Competition. Prior to coming to the United States, Meng had a successful engineering career in Singapore. (He knew it was successful because nobody offered to fire him).
Meng created one of the world’s earliest websites on Buddhism in 1995. He considers himself a Buddhist “on most weekdays, especially Mondays”. He is an avid meditator, because meditation facilitates in him inner peace and happiness “without doing real work”. Meng occasionally found himself featured on the New York Times and other newspapers. His personal motto is, “Life is too important to be taken seriously”.
Meng hopes to see every workplace in the world become a drinking fountain for happiness and enlightenment. When Meng grows up, he wants to save the world, and have lots of fun and laughter doing it. He feels if something is no laughing matter, it’s probably not worth doing.