Lee’s path began in Kearney, Nebraska. As a young boy, he sought many opportunities to learn, earn and expand his experiences. With a group of friends, he bought four-wheelers, dirt bikes, and trucks, and after a few visits to a repair shop to fix them, he landed a job for his last two years of high school. The experience in the repair shop opened his eyes to the possibilities of engineering. 

"You are given a problem, which is a piece of equipment that is broken. You are given tools to debug it and you're timed for how fast you can fix that problem. The deeper you understand how it works, the faster you diagnose and the faster you fix, the more problems you get solved and the more reliable you solve future problems. More knowledge was directly translated into better work."

Lee’s dad, a salesman, had a well-appointed garage that allowed him, with his dad’s help, to build two go-karts and a sand rail car. Lee’s mom, on the other hand, showed him the value of approaching work and relationships with people with energy and openness. It is this guidance from his parents that led him to the University of Nebraska, where he explored a multitude of projects.
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While attending Stanford University in 2009, Lee obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, building on the knowledge and experiences he gained over the last few years at the University of Nebraska. And the idea for his company, Blue River Technology, was the result of attending Steve Bank’s class while at Stanford. These experiences led to internships, turns at NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. And then resulted in a National Science Foundation fellowship, which he paired with Stanford University - an opportunity that afforded him the freedom to essentially work on anything he wanted to. Lee then began his Ph.D pursuit and met Jorge, who later became the Co-Founder of Blue River Technology. When they founded the company, the pair set out to create autonomous lawnmowers but then adjusted their approach, and pivoted creating lettuce thinning technology. In 2012, Lee dropped out of the Ph.D program about six months after starting Blue River.

This step set off a mission to revolutionize the agriculture industry using intelligent machinery and run a company driven by a passion for improving global sustainability.

Alongside a highly-engaged team, Lee and Jorge were ready to demonstrate their new spraying system in the early summer of 2016. In 2017, they sold Blue River Technologies to John Deere and continued to lead the company.