Mie-Yun Lee, VP, New Business Development, RBI

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Directly after graduating from Yale, Mie-Yun Lee went to work at a corporate consulting business and learned that start-ups were being launched by people who didn't know how to set them up. New business owners were wasting money making poor choices on items like office furniture. Lee seized the opportunity to start a business consumer guide newsletter and a savvy business shopper column. By 1997, she launched BuyerZone.com in order to connect b2b buyers and sellers.

Lee was challenged by the shifting business model around 1999, when she had to straddle the two worlds of print and online. The future of the Internet was uncertain and BuyerZone was a significant investment, but once the Web site was solid she sold the print business.

Eventually, she sold BuyerZone to Reed Business Information, where she is now VP of new business development, and hopes to provide relevant online experience. Since Jan. 1, she has been working toward getting the RBI online group to coalesce by providing focus on SEO for Variety and RCD. Lee also put together a set of recommendations for worldwide SEO with RBInteractive.

Lee has learned some specific lessons about breaking beyond print into the wider digital world. "Make sure you are willing to stretch your identity as publisher," she advises. Ask yourself, "What is your mission and your audience? How can you serve them?" Let go of your print identity and broaden your horizons, she adds. Part of this malleability, according to Lee, is a ruthlessness and willingness to cannibalize your core business. "If you don't do it yourself, someone else will," she warns. She uses the analogy of building bridges to an island--publishers create more avenues of opportunity by hiring people who don't think or act like they do and not trying to mold them. "Don't always hire people who look like yourself," she says.

Lee lives in Newton, Mass., with her 8-year-old daughter, Cate. She travels between L.A. and Georgia for work and, in her downtime, enjoys reading historical fiction such as Atonement, soduku, skiing--she just returned from a trip to Aspen--and noodling on new businesses. "I will always be an entrepreneur," she says.

Her favorite magazines: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Variety and The Economist, but she says that 90% of her reading time is spent on blogs.

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