Jeannette H. Lee (born in

Seoul, South Korea Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

) is a Korean–American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

based in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

, and later in

Kansas City, Missouri Kansas City, Missouri, abbreviated KC or KCMO, is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri by List of cities in Missouri, population and area. The city lies within Jackson County, Missouri, Jackson, Clay County, Missouri, Clay, and Pl ...

. Lee was also known for several years under the married name Jeannette Lee White.

Early life

Lee moved with her family from

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

, South Korea, to the United States at age 12. They moved first to

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...

, and settled in

Bethesda, Maryland Bethesda () is an unincorporated, census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. Located just northwest of Washington, D.C., it is a major business and government center of the Washington metropolitan region ...

, when she was 14. Her first work experience was there, in her father's

convenience store A convenience store, convenience shop, bakkal, bodega, corner store, corner shop, superette or mini-mart is a small retail store that stocks a range of everyday items such as convenience food, groceries, beverages, tobacco products, lotter ...

Career

Lee founded the information-technology and government-contracting company Sytel, serving as its president and

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

(CEO) from its inception in 1987, Alternative cop
here
originally as Tasque Inc., in

Gaithersburg, Maryland Gaithersburg ( ) is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. At the time of the 2020 United States census, Gaithersburg had a population of 69,657, making it the third-largest incorporated city and the ninth-most populous communit ...

. She took no salary for the first four years and financed the company with personal credit-card debt, but grew it to 275 employees and approximately

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

40 million in revenue by 2001. She continued in her dual-title role after Sytel was acquired in 2005 by TechTeam Global (later itself acquired by

Jacobs Engineering Group Jacobs Solutions Inc. is an American international technical professional services firm based in Dallas. The company provides engineering, technical, professional, and construction services as well as scientific and specialty consulting for a ...

). Sytel's early-2000s major governmental clients for systems integration work included the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

Department of Agriculture An agriculture ministry (also called an agriculture department, agriculture board, agriculture council, or agriculture agency, or ministry of rural development) is a ministry charged with agriculture. The ministry is often headed by a minister f ...

, and

Federal Emergency Management Agency The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), initially created under President Jimmy Carter by Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1978 and implemented by two Exec ...

. The sale to TechTeam netted an $18.5 million profit, split with her by then ex-husband. Lee has been a governor-appointed board member of the Maryland Technology Development Corporation and a member of the High Tech Council of Maryland. In 2016, Lee became the CEO of MoboTour, a workforce-reporting software company headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. In April 2018, Lee became the CEO of Information International Associates (IIa), a company involved in enterprise IT and data management,

Big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

analytics,

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

data exploitation, and

information security Information security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized or inappropriate access to data ...

and threat intelligence.

Awards

Lee received a triple National Entrepreneurial Excellence Award (a national award in the "Innovative Business Strategies" category and two regional ones, in "General Excellence" and again in "Innovative Business Strategies") from '' Working Woman'' magazine in 2000. '' Washingtonian'' magazine listed her among the US capital city's "100 Most Powerful Women" in 2001, and received the Executive of the Year award from the High Tech Council of Maryland the same year. She was also named among the "Top 100 Greatest Entrepreneurs in America" of 1998 by ''

Success Success is the state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations. It may be viewed as the opposite of failure. The criteria for success depend on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person mi ...

'' magazine. Under her leadership, Sytel appeared on '' Inc.'' magazine's annual "Fastest Growing Private Companies in America" list five times, and was inducted into the ''Inc.'' Hall of Fame in 1999.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lee, Jeannette American women chief executives American women company founders American company founders Living people Businesspeople from Seoul South Korean emigrants to the United States Year of birth missing (living people) Businesspeople from Bethesda, Maryland 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century American businesswomen 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesswomen