Curtis Lee (entrepreneur)


Curtis Lee is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, and co-founder and CEO of the on-demand car services company, Luxe. Prior to Luxe, Lee also founded workforce analytics company, WorkStory.

Early life and background

Lee was born in Los Angeles, California. He is the son of Korean immigrants who came to the United States to attend university. He was raised in Los Angeles and later enrolled in college at the University of California, Berkeley. Lee later earned an MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Career

Before Lee became an entrepreneur, Lee worked in venture capital and financial services for five years and as a product manager at various technology companies. Notably, he worked at Google as a Product Marketing Manager on AdWords and later as a Product Manager at YouTube. In 2009, he joined early-stage social gaming startup, Zynga as Director of Product Management for one of their franchise games, Mafia Wars, where he invented many of the company's monetization techniques.
Lee left Zynga in 2012 to join Groupon as their VP of Consumer Products. He left Groupon to pursue his entrepreneurial pursuits founding WorkStory an early stage workforce analytics company backed by Accel Partners. Lee folded WorkStory to pursue his idea to transform the parking industry. An idea that would turn into Luxe.

Luxe

In 2013, Lee cofounded Luxe, a mobile application that allows customers to have their car parked, fueled, washed, charged, serviced or driven home. Luxe was born out of Lee's frustration with finding a parking space where he lived in San Francisco. Luxe is credited as being an early pioneer in the on-demand economy having invented the parking on-demand segment. Lee was listed in the Silicon Valley 100 list and was also awarded NPA's 40 under 40 award in 2015.
Lee recently made public in a blog post that he is a staunchly against Executive Order 1379—the "Immigration Ban" even going as far as creating a "vocalization shift" allowing Luxe employees to take a day off from work to protest. After which, Lee was accused of paying his employees to protest against President Donald Trump.