Before Sun Lee accepted the chief marketing officer job at Laurel, she listened. Not to a polished keynote or a founder’s pitch, but to Gong calls: customers describing revenue recovered, hours returned, decisions they could finally make with confidence. Her verdict came in a three-part test she uses for a new chapter: “a leader worth following, a pain worth solving, and a moat worth defending.” Laurel checked all three. Loudly, she wrote.
The language is brisk, but the assignment is philosophical. Laurel’s software observes digital work, reconstructs time and connects activity to business outcomes. Its first customers are professional-services firms, where six-minute increments can acquire the solemnity of statute. Lee joined in June 2026 to market something that begins with automated timesheets and reaches toward a more contentious idea: that better time data might reveal the value of human judgment.
For a marketer, “time” is a splendid noun and a treacherous product category. Everybody owns some. Nobody keeps it. Clocks measure it precisely while saying nothing about whether it mattered. Lee’s proposed distinction is between hours recorded and impact made. “Work should be measured by the impact only you can make,” she has said. Her job is to make that proposition credible without turning a person into a row in a utilization report.
First, she had to learn the language
Lee came to the United States alone at 15 and learned English after she arrived. She has since described being a nonnative speaker as one of her marketing superpowers. The reason is not sentimental. A second language made her simplify. It taught her to inspect words as objects, to ask whether a phrase carried its weight, and to look for the plain structure underneath fluent noise.
She then studied the language that needs no translation until it does: design. Lee earned a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design and began on the agency side as a brand and digital designer during the internet’s early commercial rush. Roles in art direction and creative direction followed, including work at Silverlign Group and Citrix. She later added an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, completed between 2009 and 2012.
That combination explains the pleasant tension in her career. She can care about type, color and the emotional temperature of an image, then move directly to acquisition, pipeline and sales alignment. Many businesses treat those as separate temperaments, as if the person who notices kerning must be kept safely away from the revenue forecast. Lee kept widening the job until both belonged in it.
The monkey, the color, the question
At SurveyMonkey, Lee rose from creative leadership into the vice president of marketing role. In 2017, she led the company’s global rebrand around a single quality: curiosity. The work replaced the old lime-green familiarity with a vivid palette, a custom-feeling typographic system, energetic infographics and photographs of real people. The verbal idea was “Power the Curious.”
The clever part was restraint. Lee argued that a rebrand should not replace a company’s nature; it should make that nature visible. SurveyMonkey had always been built around asking. Curiosity was already in the machinery. Her team’s task was to pull it forward and make a survey platform feel less like a form and more like an invitation.
The team included people from 11 countries. Lee later remembered the compressed timetable, sleepless nights and last-minute sprints, but lingered on trust. Their differences, she wrote, became strengths that let the work travel across devices, languages and cultures. The identity went live in July 2017. A year later, SurveyMonkey entered the public market, with Lee involved in the brand work surrounding the offering.
She has now hired one of those collaborators again. In August 2026, Lee announced that Lara Belonogoff, a colleague from the rebrand and IPO activations, would join Laurel as senior director of brand. Lee said she had chased Belonogoff for years and praised a quality that doubles as her own editorial ideal: the ability to say more in five words than most manage in fifty.
There is life after the funnel
Lee’s preferred picture of marketing is not the familiar funnel. It is a spiral. A customer discovers, considers, buys, uses, talks, doubts, returns and influences someone else. The path loops and expands. Conversion is an event inside the relationship, not its funeral.
A funnel ends. A spiral remembers the next conversation, the next use, and the next person brought into the orbit.
The metaphor changes how a marketing budget behaves. Lee has argued for going deep on a few meaningful events rather than appearing thinly at many. She values face-to-face contact and the useful intelligence found on a show floor, over dinner, or while waiting for coffee. The official stage may deliver the message. The unplanned conversation tells you whether the message survived contact with another mind.
This is also why she pushes marketing and sales toward the same account of reality. Brand cannot remain the charming upstairs tenant while revenue works in the shop below. Lee’s executive career has been spent joining the floors: at Pure Storage, where she led global campaign, partner and digital marketing; at Sisu Data, where she built the marketing team and reworked brand, messaging and pricing; then at BigPanda, where she marketed AIOps against larger incumbents.
Agency art direction and creative direction
Curiosity-led global rebrand and IPO-era brand work
Global campaigns, partners and digital marketing
Two CMO briefs in decision intelligence and AIOps
Trust, privacy and AI-governance marketing
From automated time to work intelligence
Making invisible systems visible
There is a pattern to the products Lee chooses. Storage is hidden until it fails. Decision intelligence is abstract until it finds the reason a number moved. AIOps lives behind the digital services people notice only when they stop. Data governance concerns flows most customers never see. Timekeeping, meanwhile, is everywhere and still reconstructed from memory. These are not glamorous objects. They are systems underneath systems.
Lee’s particular craft is to give invisible infrastructure a human consequence. At Relyance AI, which she joined as CMO in October 2024, that meant turning privacy, security and AI governance into a story about trust. She wrote about shadow AI, live data movement and consumers’ demand to understand where their information goes. The technical product watched data journeys. The public story asked whether institutions deserved confidence.
At Laurel, she is working with another journey made of small, easily ignored traces: a document revised, a call joined, a message answered, a matter advanced. The platform collects those traces and proposes a record of work. For lawyers, accountants and consultants, a more accurate record can mean fewer lost billable minutes and less Friday-afternoon archaeology through inboxes and calendars.
Yet efficiency is only the opening argument. Laurel raised $100 million in 2025 to expand its AI time platform and the larger “time intelligence” thesis behind it. Lee arrived a year later, when the company needed to explain how that dataset might support staffing, pricing, capacity planning, AI-return measurement and new ways to understand profitability. A category, in her phrasing, is a tech stack. A movement is a shift people believe must happen.
The clock has no taste
The awkward question follows: if software can see the work, who controls the gaze? Time systems can return agency or become surveillance with unusually tidy charts. A marketer cannot resolve that tension with a brighter palette. The story has to stay attached to product choices about consent, control, security and what the data is allowed to mean.
Lee’s language points toward a careful answer. She does not argue that every minute deserves optimization. She argues that time and impact are different measures. Machines are good at collecting the former. Humans still decide the latter. Laurel’s promise, as she frames it, is not to make the clock the judge, but to remove clerical fog so people can exercise judgment with a clearer view.
It is a fitting brief for someone who has spent her career between measurement and meaning. The 15-year-old learning which English words were essential became the designer deciding which visual marks were essential, then the executive deciding which customer signals were essential. Now the object under examination is the working day itself.
There is wit in the progression. Marketing is often accused of wasting time, and timesheets are rarely accused of possessing a soul. Lee has chosen to put the two in conversation. If she succeeds, Laurel’s story will not be that an algorithm can count more accurately. It will be that people can recover enough attention to do work that deserves them. The clock can keep the minutes. The rest is still ours.