CASE MAGAZINE

FEATURES

I was a typical freshman: not sure what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. But then somehow, between high-school graduation and starting at Case, I decided I was going to be in business. So I went through a number of different majors. The first one was business. I took a number of different courses. I took accounting and econ, which were the required courses for a business degree, and I hated them both. I found accounting to be too rigid and structured.

At the same time, I found I was naturally tutoring people in computer science, which I wasn’t even taking, because I’d tested out of it. It was easy for me—very natural. So I started looking into that.

I started trying to do a psychology and a music degree, before I finally ended up in computer engineering. My sophomore year, I had been accepted into the joint program at the Cleveland Institute of Music with a declared major. I had taken [piano] lessons since I was eight. Classical. At that point I had not been playing for several years. I decided that I really enjoyed it and I would go for it. I still remember practicing really hard for the audition.

So I did that and tried the psych thing, but I soon realized that I couldn’t do both majors, because they took a tremendous amount of time. So, even though I had been juggling these different majors, at the end of my sophomore year I realized I could only do one, and that was computer engineering.

My major was computer engineering, which concentrated a little bit more on hardware. It prepared me—gave me a lot of good fundamentals and understanding—but, at that point, it wasn’t really clear in my mind what it meant to be a computer engineer. I did like the classes. I thought, “OK, this is something I can handle,” and it felt very comfortable.

I still played piano. I wasn’t playing it as much as I would have liked to. I also picked up the guitar and kept it in my dorm room. Just fooling around. I also did a little composing. It was a nice creative outlet. A personal thing. I didn’t really need to share it with the world.

In my computer engineering classes, I was usually the only woman. Maybe, at most, there would be two of us in class. It’s been nice out here, once you’re working, to see that there are a lot of women in the profession.

I did two summer internships at General Electric in Willoughby [Ohio]. That was a really valuable experience. It was my first time working on a project that people actually used. It wasn’t just somebody checking it and grading it, but a program where I could see how it was improving the quality of life for people in the factory. They wouldn’t have to shuffle papers around as much and would be able to use bar-code scanners. Not only that, but I programmed on a database application, and that was something that my first employer found valuable.

Shortly after graduation, I started working for HP. I had gotten the offer before I graduated. I did the software side for about three and a half years, then moved into performance/benchmarking.

Our project had hundreds of engineers working on it, so the piece that I ended up working on was fairly contained and small. One of the things I learned at HP was that, while it was nice to be part of a really large organization, it can be frustrating at times working on one tiny thing—part of this whole. Not frustrating, but less satisfying than if you’re with a small company and you make a large impact.

At that point, I felt I wanted to have a role where I wasn’t in my cubicle all day long, just being on my computer. I’ve always been pretty social and enjoyed working with people. In this role, I was part of a team, but I was working mostly on my own. We’d meet weekly, but that was pretty much it.

I found a position with Acclaim Technology, in San Jose. It was a value-added reseller. I worked with them as a senior systems engineer. I was a technical consultant. And it was great. I loved being able to work with different customers pretty much on a daily basis. Getting to know them, understanding what they needed, and being able to provide them with solutions. That was very rewarding.

In some cases, I was doing the pre-sale. I would go on the sales call and size up what the client would need. Come back, work with the sales person to come up with a quote on exactly what was the right solution for them.

One of the great things about being in the computer industry is that the culture really encourages innovation. When I’m hiring someone, I look for a person who asks why—who doesn’t accept things the way they are, but is always trying to find a better way of doing things.

A person who really inspires me is Steve Jobs at Apple. I’m excited about him, right now. Talk about innovation! The things that he and his company come up with are amazing. They really make you look at things differently. He always stands behind what he believes in and comes at things from the standpoint of the customer rather than simply from the company’s point of view. For example, the new iPod and iMac. It’s amazing how beautiful they are. The lines, the sleekness—just go on the Apple website and see for yourself.

Success for me on the management side is all about communication. You have to build relationships with people so that you can communicate why the project that you’re working on is important. If you don’t build a relationship with someone, you’ll never know what motivates them. I can say, “This will save the company a lot of money,” and they could respond, “So what?” But if they can see that I’m passionate about what I’m doing, it rubs off. In many cases, I try to provide them with opportunities to get involved with something they’ve never done before.

The most important things in my life are my sixteen-month-old daughter, Alicia, my husband, Edward, and my work.

Balancing family life with work is pretty easy, right now. Every day I pick up Alicia from day care, and from that time until she goes to sleep, I’m 100 percent focused on her. It’s amazing having a daughter and watching her grow up. She’s at the age where she learns something new every day.

Before Alicia came along, I loved going out and having a leisurely dinner with friends. The hardest thing about having a sixteen-month-old is that now we only pick places where she can get her food quickly.

Music inspires me. I used to go to concerts every other week. You really get that energy from great musicians in live performances. I love musical theater, the symphony, even opera.

During the dot.com boom of 1999, I quit my job and started my own business, which was called SoInviting.com. The inspiration came from a website I designed in 1998 as part of our wedding. My husband and I put together information about the two of us and our families, and had information about the area for out-of-town guests. We even sent many of our friends invitations with links to the website, so they could RSVP online. People kept looking at it and saying, “Wow! We’ve never seen anything like this.” Maybe half a year went by, and I said, “That’s not a bad idea for a business.” So I started playing around with a wedding website, and then somebody gave me the idea that it could be used for any event.

I started SoInviting with a couple of friends. About a month after we got going, a company called Evite came out with their beta launch. They had just picked up $7 million in funding, and there we were, basically being funded by my husband, trying to keep up with this company. We had a total of about seven people at our peak, and all of them were working part time. Their commitment was amazing, and it was exciting—the challenge of it and the urgency of feeling that we had to beat Evite and get out there first. It was totally a David and Goliath type of thing. We looked at what they were doing and thought, “That is really not a quality product.” Then they announced that they had gotten another $30 million in funding, and we said, “OK, it looks like they won.”

But we still pushed forward and did a beta launch. And it was pretty cool. Pretty nice looking. We enlisted all our friends to help us. We also got their input on what could we do to make it a better product.

I brokered a deal to sell SoInviting to another company called GreatEntertaining.com. It was an online party supply store. I talked with the CEO and showed her a demo of our product. She was very excited about bringing our team on board.

While they didn’t technically buy my company, they essentially did when they purchased our technology and hired the core team. I worked with them for about a year. It was an interesting experience—a somewhat typical dot-com experience. When I joined them it was still ramping up. It looked like it was golden. The company was hiring a lot. Almost immediately, I was able to hire people, as well. It grew to about 120 people.

Then we laid off a third or half. We went to one layoff, then another. By then, we were down to sixteen people. Of the four of us who joined from SoInviting, three of us were in the last sixteen.

The dot.com bust was, I think, the market’s realization that companies need to make profits.

In a year and a half, the company had burned through 26 million bucks. The sixteen of us hung on until January 2001, and that’s when the investors told us there was about $4 million in cash left, and they wanted it back.

[Ms. Lee moved to a job at Loudcloud as a manager. After a little more than a year, her position was eliminated in a round of layoffs. She took the next year and a half off, during which time she had her daughter. She looks back fondly on her dot.com days.]

I really felt like we were doing something in those days. What kind of hours was I working? A lot. Married but no children. My husband and I were working 10 to 12 hours a day. He was also at a dot.com. It was pretty easy for us to work from 10 to 9. It was fun. I guess you’d have to be there to think of it that way.

The work and the team: I can’t stress that part enough. The people that you work with affect how you work. When they’re putting in 100 percent, it motivates you. And when they’re excited about what they’re doing, it changes the way you feel about work.

Google seemed like something that had been created for me—like all of my experiences in all of my jobs led up to it. It was a position managing programs and projects in the operations world: servers, data centers, networking security.

I had been using Google for four or five years, and I always loved the product. I’d always imagined that Google would be a really good company to work for.

The company motto is “Don’t be evil.” Really, it’s something that you can apply to almost every decision you make. Like, “Should I do this? Well, I shouldn’t be evil, right?” If you’re managing a project, you could easily say, “It’s not my problem. I’m just going to let it burn up down the road.” And you’re sort of laying mines out for others. This motto really helps to remind you that it is evil leaving problems that people will have to clean up later.

People here really believe in the company and want to do the right thing. It’s an amazing group. We have a beautiful campus [in California’s Silicon Valley]. With the exception of dressing up to meet with clients, it’s very much shorts and T-shirts, people walking around barefoot. You can bring your dog.

Here at Google, I’m operations program manager. The makeup of my team would depend on the project. It’s fluid.

One of the challenges in my position is working with people in all kinds of different organizations, where they all have different priorities and I’m trying to get them to focus on the same things that I’m focusing on. All of the team members have five to ten different projects that they’re concerned about, and they may be getting different direction from their management. I need to herd them all—herding cats—and get them to work on what I consider to be the highest priority.

What this requires is strong relationships with people. It’s so true that one of the keys of success is surrounding yourself with good people. One of the things about Google is that they’ve given me this great pool of talent to pull from, and that’s been great.

Google is my dream job, if I have to be employed. Obviously, I went into SoInviting hoping that the product would be the leader—the gorilla of that field. When Evite got their huge round of funding, it was disappointing. It was disappointing that they were able to come up with that and we weren’t. I think a lot of it was that I didn’t have the networking savvy—the business experience. I wasn’t able to get out there and meet with the right people and get my ideas in front of them to get funding.

But I like to look at the bright side of things, and the fact that Great Entertaining did buy us was amazing, given that I tried to shoot for the stars. I try to go for the big win. But I’ll take the little ones, too.

I know plenty of people who have good ideas and never do anything with them. I’m a person who will try things. If I were asked to address your graduating class, I would say, “Go after your dream. Get to know yourself and what drives you and inspires you, and go for that. Life is too short to just do what society expects, if it’s not the right thing for you. And don’t be discouraged by failure, because that’s a learning experience that makes you better. The mistakes I’ve made have always made me stronger.”

As told to Stuart Kollar