Jess Lee (born 1982) is an American venture capitalist. She is a partner at Sequoia Capital [1] and the former chief executive officer of Polyvore. [2] [3]
Jess Lee (born 1982) is an American venture capitalist. She is a partner at Sequoia Capital [1] and the former chief executive officer of Polyvore. [2] [3]
Jess Lee lived in Hong Kong until the age of 17, when she graduated from Hong Kong International School, then moved to California to pursue a bachelor's degree in computer science at Stanford University, [4] though she had initially been interested in attending art school. [5]
In 2004, Lee was recruited into Google's associate product manager (APM) program, [4] [6] which had been founded and was then still led by Marissa Mayer. [7] Lee started work on Google's shopping engine Froogle [6] before becoming product manager of Google Maps. [4] There she worked with a team of five engineers to create My Maps, a project that allowed users to create maps of their own. [6]
She joined Polyvore as a product manager in 2008 after providing co-founder Pasha Sadri with feedback on issues with the website. [8] Lee initially wrote code for Polyvore but later started to handle social media, hiring, and finding new locations for the office. [4] Her role expanded to honorary co-founder in 2010 and she was promoted to CEO in 2012. [6] Lee then guided the company to cut down on features such as the "Ask" section and opened another office in New York City. [6]
In 2016, she joined Sequoia Capital as an investing partner, [9] becoming the venture capital firm's first female partner in the United States in 44 years of operation. [10] Hired at age 33, Lee became one of Sequoia's youngest partners. [11]
She currently resides in Mountain View, California. [4]
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and mainly focuses on the technology industry.
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Polyvore was a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company's virtual mood board function allowed community members to add products into a shared product index, and use them to create image collages called "Sets". They could also browse other users' sets for inspiration, share sets with friends and interact with people through comments and likes. Due to the visual nature of the tool Polyvore was mostly used to build sets in the fields of home decoration, beauty and fashion. Online retailers, too, could upload their product images to Polyvore and link back to their product pages or use Polyvore to encourage users to showcase their products through such activities as board creation competitions. Polyvore opened an office in New York City in August 2012. At that point the company said it had amassed 17 million active users. By the end of 2012 the company said its site was receiving 20 million unique visitors per month, a number which continued to be used in 2016. The site was bought by SSENSE and, on April 5, 2018 it was completely shut down.
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