Jeannette H. Lee (born in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean–American entrepreneur based in Washington, D.C., and later in

Kansas City, Missouri Kansas City (abbreviated KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the central ...

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

Early life

Lee moved with her family from Seoul, South Korea, to the United States at age 12. They moved first to Hawaii, and settled in Bethesda, Maryland, when she was 14. Her first work experience was there, in her father's

convenience store A convenience store, convenience shop, corner store or corner shop is a small retail business that stocks a range of everyday items such as coffee, groceries, snack foods, confectionery, soft drinks, ice creams, tobacco products, lottery ticket ...

Career

Lee founded the information-technology and government-contracting company Sytel, serving as its president and chief executive officer (CEO) from its inception in 1987, Alternative cop
here
originally as Tasque Inc., in Gaithersburg, Maryland. 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 (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

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). Sytel's early-2000s major governmental clients for systems integration work included the National Institutes of Health,

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 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 Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

analytics,

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

data exploitation, and information security 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 mig ...

'' 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