Jae-Yong Lee

Operations  ·  Strategy  ·  National Security

THESIS

Decisive advantage is built not on a superior product, but on superior processes. The organization is the product.

I build the operational and commercial infrastructure that turns a company into an institutional, acquirable platform. My focus is on the hard problems that determine whether a company commands a premium at exit or gets discounted in due diligence.


PROFILE

Transaction Readiness: I eliminate the valuation discount levers that surface in acquisitions. Before any commitment is made, I determine whether it is commercially viable, operationally executable, and legally clean. I build the supply chain screening architecture that catches hidden adversarial ownership exposure before it becomes a due diligence problem, and the compliance infrastructure that removes the remediation costs acquirers use to compress multiples.

Operations: My approach to resilience was forged in the infantry and codified through operations science and strategic finance. I build the institutional architecture that allows a technical team to scale: unit economics that survive investor scrutiny, governance frameworks that hold up in due diligence, and operations that scale without breaking and compress the time between commitment and revenue.

Geopolitics: My competence is built on living within societies, not just observing them. During the 2011 Arab Spring, I worked frontline security at a refugee center and assessed the human reality behind the headlines. Later, as a Diplomatic Attaché in Beijing, I bypassed the Embassy bubble to cultivate primary sources across social layers. I connect high-level strategy with ground truth.


TRACK RECORD

Current: VP Operations at Thor Dynamics, a directed energy C-UAS defense company.

Formerly: operations, B2B deal desk, and strategy at Rivian (incl. Amazon commercial fleet transaction); data science company co-founder; venture capital (robotics); diplomatic attaché; infantry.

Education: MIT Sloan MBA (Operations Science); London School of Economics MSc (Information Systems); Univ. St. Gallen BBA. Study abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Certification: CUSECO (Certified U.S. Export Compliance Officer).

Languages: Fluent in English, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin.


CONTACT

If you are building technology that matters, whether in defense, dual-use, or anywhere the operational problems are genuinely hard, I would like to hear from you.

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