Noel Lee (executive)

Noel Lee is divorced with two children. His son Kevin Lee, sometimes referred to as "Little Monster", started working for the company and developed the M-Design product line of high-tech furniture. Lee's son later quit Monster and started his own audio company Sol Republic in 2010. Lee has a degenerative nerve disorder that prevents him from walking without a wheelchair or Segway, which he says was caused by exposure to toxic doses of radiation when he worked as a fusion engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In 2004, Lee bought the rights to the San Francisco 49ers football stadium, which was renamed to Monster Park. Citizens and local government protested that a public facility adopted a corporate name and a local ballot was passed to revert the stadium name after the four-year deal with Monster expired. The sponsorship was partially contentious due to a recent layoff of 120 local employees.

In connection with his background as a musician, Lee founded the record label Monster Music in 1999, signing Van Morrison's daughter Shana. Monster created numerous divisions as it diversified into other products, such as Monster Performance Car, Monster Game, Monster Photo and Monster Computer. By 2003, Monster produced more than 1,000 products, including power cords, gaming accessories and cooling products. According to a 2005 USA Today article, Lee and his company were developing furniture with high-end electronics built-in, wireless products to replace audio cords and a user interface to consolidate the consumer's control of their electronics. Lee and his son worked with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine to collaborate on the Beats brand of headphones, which was later acquired by Apple for $3 billion in 2014. According to Business Insider, Beats Electronics denies that Monster had a role in the design of the headphones. Lee said Beats had no engineers on staff and it spent millions in research and development to get the product started, but that their contract was poorly constructed, giving all the intellectual property to Beats when it wasn't renewed.

Within six years from when it was founded, Monster had $50 million in annual revenues and 400 employees. The company's growth was primarily due to Monster training sales staff at electronics stores to bundle the cables with other electronics purchases, an effort the company spent 15 percent of its revenues on by 1998. Lee kept the company private and grew the business, despite pressure to go public.

Lee spent $50,000 in personal savings to demonstrate the cables at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago in 1979, using a borrowed portion of someone else's exhibit area. Lee received a positive response at the event and founded Monster, Inc. (formerly known as Monster Cable Products) later that year. Lee received an order from a Canadian distributor for 30,000 cables. The distributor wouldn't pay until the products were shipped, so Lee took out a $250,000 bank loan to pay for the production of the cables. According to Lee, he started the company without business experience or a strategy.

Lee graduated from California Polytechnic State University with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and subsequently did work in laser fusion for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He quit his engineering job in 1974 to play drums for a country rock band. After the band separated, he founded Monster Cable Products in 1979, based on loudspeaker cables he invented and manufactured in his garage.

In 1974, Asian Wood was given an opportunity to go on a world tour. Lee quit his job as an engineer in order to be the band's drummer. Asian Wood's members moved to Hawaii to start their tour, but it was cancelled two weeks later. The promoter wanted a straight rock band without country influences. This left Lee and his family stranded in Hawaii until they could earn money for travel back home. The band reinvented itself, covering Top 40 popular songs in order to attract work. Asian Wood took on other gigs around Hawaii for 18 months before breaking up. Lee continued doing solo gigs for six months after that, before returning to the Bay Area for an engineering job with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also worked as an independent salesperson for several small speaker companies in San Francisco.

Lee took an interest in music as a child; he described himself as having a more diverse taste in music than other kids his age. Lee's senior project was an effort to improve the quality of audio from electronics. According to Lee, his high school experiences were "rough" due to the level of discrimination against Asian-Americans at the time. Lee attended San Francisco City College, then California Polytechnic State University, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1971.

In the late 1970s, Noel Lee wanted to improve the sound quality from his home audio equipment. He didn't have very much money, so Lee experimented with ways to create a better sound by improving inexpensive cabling. At first he worked out of his family's apartment and later in his in-laws' garage, which they rented from family after moving to the Richmond district in 1978. Lee experimented with different widths, winding methods, and qualities of copper and insulation in audio cables to find an alternative to the zip cord audio vendors gave out for free. He compared different wire constructs, while listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

Noel Lee (born December 25, 1948) is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Monster Inc.

Noel Lee was born in San Francisco, California on December 25, 1948 to Chein-San and Sarah Lee. His parents named him "Noel" because he was born on Christmas Day. His father worked for China's Central News Agency and Lee had four sisters. Lee's parents moved to San Francisco around the same time the Communist party took power.