To illustrate the scope of what Johnny Lee is doing at AlixPartners, he talks about how he has worked at companies at different stages of maturity, and more importantly, how he has taken companies through different stages of maturity.
Hired in 2024 into the new role of Global Head of Technology Innovation and Platforms, Johnny was charged with building a startup within the firm empowered to disrupt the business, that can also address the various needs of a diverse client base and support the strategic priorities of a global consulting company.
It’s a dynamic challenge that will require Johnny to pull from experiences at all the stops he has made along his 25-year tech journey, from startups to Silicon Valley giants to top-tier consulting firms.
Johnny began his career as an engineer at Cisco during the tail end of the dot-com boom. He then transitioned into the business world, earning an MBA and working as an internal consultant at Siemens. In 2008, Johnny's career took a pivotal turn when he left Siemens to dive into the world of startups. "I just wanted to build something on my own and assume full responsibility of the outcomes" Johnny recalls.
He experimented with several ideas before co-founding Spotsetter, a personal search and recommendation engine for places to go, with a friend from Google in 2011. They moved to San Francisco’s thriving startup scene, sharing a co-working desk, spending every waking hour discussing business and technology, navigating the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Their hard work paid off. In 2014, Apple acquired Spotsetter, and Johnny along with it. Johnny says that his experience at Apple taught him that taking a product to the next level required a laser focus on detail and innovation.
Johnny was then recruited to Tala, a fintech company aimed at improving people’s accessibility to credit in emerging markets. Joining as its first Chief Technology Officer, Johnny relished the challenge of working at an early-stage, mission-driven company, scaling the startup with operational and technical focus.
In his nearly three years with Tala, he grew the team and expanded the business—cementing his reputation as a tech leader with the ability to scale early-stage companies.
Johnny then made a move that might seem counterintuitive. He returned to the world of business consulting, first at Bain & Company, and then to AlixPartners. He saw that consulting clients were on the backfoot for tech and knew that the skills he had in architecting technology and establishing build teams would be essential to creating value in every industry imbued with technology. He would essentially create and scale a startup within the company, to in turn, drive the firm’s work with clients.
“When I talked to AlixPartners and they explained their entrepreneurial growth story, I knew it was the right fit. It would give me the chance to work closely with clients, solve complex problems, and build my own teams again.”
Johnny believes a deep investment in technology and the people who know how to create value from it will be a catalyst for the firm’s future success.
His pitch for recruits is that joining his team is for anyone who wants the innovation experience of a startup and the opportunity shape the culture of the team, while benefitting from the resources of a global consulting powerhouse.
That means stability, yes, but also the chance to work on a lot of different projects, across industries, in a short amount of time, which differs from the normal techie experience spending years tinkering on a single product or problem.
For example, only seven months on the job, Johnny already has a long list of core service offerings, like supply chain optimization and enterprise-wide transformations, that could be enhanced with new technologies, including the latest innovations in AI.
And Johnny and his team’s familiarity with the product development lifecycle will ensure that these ideas for new tools will be client-focused and commercially viable, and result in a leading-edge technology toolkit to equip our experienced consultants.
“A client team coming up with an idea, throwing it over the fence, and then asking the engineers to figure it out is not going to work. It’s important to bring in that cross-functional product team.”
Regardless of the product or the team he’s working with, Johnny says that the firm’s mission remains the same—deliver value to clients—but faster, better, and with more innovation.
“We want to disrupt our own business,” Johnny explains. “And I’ve heard a lot of different organizations make that claim so I understand the skepticism around that. Most organizations pay lip service to the concept but don’t follow through. Here at AlixPartners we’re committed to this from our newest team members, all the way up to our founder.”