Taking Risks - Yuchun Lee's Journey from Blackjack to Big Blue

Our final speaker for the Spring 2011 series Is Yuchun Lee, currently the VP of IBM's Enterprise Marketing Management Group. He will tell his personal story - about his days counting cards on the now-famous Blackjack team at MIT, his experience at Unica running a small company, and what it's like going from a startup to being bought out by a very big company.

About Yuchun Lee

Yuchun Lee is a born entrepreneur who came to the U.S. from Taiwan when he was 13. By then he was already “fascinated by the concept of commerce,” he says, in particular, “how to accumulate business and make more money.” He started a software company while in high school in Houston, TX, and says he got in his proverbial “10,000 hours” of experience with computers and programming during those formative years.

In the mid-1980s, Lee came to Boston to do his undergraduate and master’s degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. After graduating in 1989, he went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation, the venerable Route 128 computer company. Lee left DEC and started Unica in 1992, together with two other MIT grads. Unica was acquired by IBM in 2010.