His grand strategy seems to be to make the word Monster synonymous with his wholly-owned company rather than with a publicly-traded company with six times as many employees and a $3.2 billion stock market capitalization. Given Monster.com's efforts at using colorful cartoons and branded merchandise to promote its claim to the name, the possibility of a marketing and legal head-on collision down the road seems more than remote. In fact, one can't help but wonder whether Lee's lavish expenditure to lay claim to the Monster name wasn't motivated at least in part to position his claim to the brand in anticipation of just such a future clash. If so, Lee isn't tipping his hand.
“If I were a public company, it would not be a good move because if you invest six, you expect to get seven back,” says Lee. He has no such expectation, insists Lee. But then again, he would tell you that he had no expectation of becoming such a big success when he started making stereo cables in the garage apartment he was renting from his in-laws.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
Monster Cable founder/CEO Noel Lee with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.
Noel Lee was “conceived in China and born in San Francisco” on December 25, 1948, inspiring his parents to name him after the occasion. His father was a reporter on assignment for China's Central News Agency. Four sisters followed in rapid succession.
“Most of my life I was out in the Avenues in the Richmond district,” says Lee. “When I was out there, there were hardly any Chinese. Now all you see are Chinese.”
Noel married at the age of eighteen to a girl introduced by friends of his parents. This was even before he started at San Francisco City College. Lee later transferred to Cal Poly and earned a degree in mechanical engineering.
His first job was at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. His most memorable work involved the laser-fusion experiments. At the time the government saw fusion as the solution to America's energy crisis. Lee was tasked to devise a way to precisely glue 15-micron glass beads to glass stems, then to suspend them precisely at the center of a foam jacket to serve as targets for highly concentrated blasts of laser energy. Lee was able to secure a patent for his positioning technique, but due to the work's obvious military applications, the patent was classified.
The work was enjoyable, but in 1972 Lee was lured away by a chance to tour with a rock band called Asian Wood.
“I was a real gearhead as a kid but I played music the whole time I was working at the lab,“ he recalls. “I played drums at that time. The band I was playing with had an offer to go on a world tour so I took a chance and packed up the wife and kid and leased out the house and went to follow my music passion.”
“It was a unique all-Asian band, played things like Crosby Stills, America,” Lee recalls. “It was an acoustic electric band, the harmonies were fantastic. It was unusual for an Asian band at the time to do that kind of music.”
When it arrived in Hawaii, the band received a rude surprise: there had been a misunderstanding about the kind of music it played.
“They wanted a rock and roll band and we were a country rock band,” recalls Lee. Within a week the band faced a crisis. “We were fired from our first job. Everybody had to go out and get electric guitars and we had to learn top-40 music.” The transformation was a success. Asian Wood was one of Hawaii's top pop cover bands. A year and a half later Asian Wood broke up. Lee stayed six more months playing on his own.
He returned to the Bay Area and found an engineering job at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
“They were terrible projects, so I got bored,” he recalls. After less than two unhappy years, Lee quit. His next project would grow out of his lifelong passion for music.
“I had a good technical background,” Lee explains. ”I was a hobbyist. I loved playing music but I also loved listening to music. So music reproduction was a big deal for me. I was an audiophile. I had all this audio gear amplifiers and things like that. And I was looking for ways to try to improve sound. I had always wanted to be in the audio business but nobody would hire me because I was overqualified.
PAGE 3
