Leslie Lee '91

While she says her parents, and especially her mom, always presented physics as a fascinating field that wasn’t limited to just boys, Leslie Lee ’91 admits her path to STEM was also a bit serendipitous. 

“My junior year at GPS, I remember going to the guidance counselor's office, where there was a box full of summer programs and opportunities,” Leslie says. “At the bottom was a black and white pamphlet about an astrophysics program out in California. I always liked astronomy, so I ended up applying and spent the summer before my senior year learning advanced math, physics, and programming.”

The summer program inspired her, and she ventured back to California for college, earning her degree in physics from Caltech. Upon graduation, she moved to Washington to explore the possibility of entering science education and snagged an unpaid internship with Bill Nye the Science Guy while working at Barnes and Noble. Around then, a company called Amazon started up in Seattle with the groundbreaking idea of selling books online. Because of Caltech and her bookselling experience, she landed a technical job at Amazon early on and contributed to expanding its product lines, geographical markets, and revenue from $15M to over $1.6B. 

Leslie’s thirst for knowledge couldn’t be quenched with the odd book here and there though, so she decided to further her education, earning her master’s degree in international studies from the University of Washington while still working at Amazon.

Balancing her science background with her newly acquired liberal arts knowledge, Leslie’s next move was to Michigan, where she earned her MBA. She briefly took a position with Intel before California beckoned her back and to Google. Leslie spent over a decade and a half at Google working on dozens of products across the company as Director of Product Management. 

“As a product manager, you're responsible for coming up with the vision of a product that’s helpful and useful to your users and making sure it actually gets delivered to them in a timely manner,” Leslie explains. “It requires everything from listening to users and intuiting what they really need, figuring out what the product should do and what’s technically possible to determining the product’s pricing, its name, how it’s discovered, sold, and more.”

In this role, Leslie worked on many recognizable consumer and enterprise products and platforms, including Google Translate, Pixelbooks, and Google Cloud’s Data and Analytics products and its commerce platforms. “When I joined Google Cloud, cloud computing was still a novel and somewhat scary idea to companies, much like how generative AI is today.” By the time she left, her team of over 200 engineers and product managers had built a monetization platform that supported a $25B business and had acquired a handful of companies along the way.

But after more than 16 years with Google, Leslie was ready for a new challenge. Last year, she joined as the founding product manager and Head of Product at Squid AI, a startup based in New York focused on bringing generative AI to businesses. (She works remotely and still resides in the Bay Area with her husband and three boys.)

“I wanted to try something completely different, and you really can't get much further from working at a huge, well-known company than by going to an early stage startup,” Leslie says. “I’ve successfully scaled products, revenue, and teams through hyper growth multiple times, but doing everything it takes to build a successful company from scratch and in a brand new field has been exciting, fun, intense, and full of unending learning opportunities, which I love.”

Leslie’s desire to always challenge herself isn’t new. She came to GPS in the ninth grade because her previous school was not challenging enough, and the many opportunities she received while as a student here continue to benefit her.

“In product management, it doesn’t matter if you have the best idea in the world if you can't communicate your ideas. You have to influence other people, often without using authority. You have to be credible and humble yet confident. You talk to audiences as disparate as engineers who have deep technical know-how to C-level executives who are looking for long term vision and tangible business impact to users who want to know exactly how the product helps them. Each audience has different motivations, interests, and incentives,” Leslie says. 

“GPS was very good at teaching us to communicate, to be confident, and to adapt. Every teacher I had genuinely cared about their students’ education and who they were as a person. When you have that kind of support, it’s easier to try new things and take risks. That’s so important nowadays especially with technology, opportunities, and the world moving as fast as they do. Two of the companies and most of the jobs I’ve worked in since graduating didn’t even exist when I was in college. GPS exposed me to many things that I may not otherwise have had access to, and that helped set me up for success later on and with the right flexible mentality.”

With such rapid evolution happening in technology and AI, we are excited to watch Leslie in her newest chapter!