Yon Lee, 1948–2023

Kim Kardashian Guest Lectures at HBS

BY SAGE S. LATTMAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Students were abuzz last Friday following a guest lecture from Kim Kardashian at Harvard Business School.

Kardashian, an entrepreneur and media personality who rose to fame after starring in the reality television show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” delivered a lecture to students in an HBS short intensive course “Moving Beyond Direct to Consumer.” Kardashian spoke about her clothing brand SKIMS for the course, which examines companies that sell directly to customers without a traditional retail middleman.

After an investor told HBS Professor Leonard A. Schlesinger — who teaches the class — that SKIMS would be “an amazing case” for students to study, he set up a meeting with SKIMS’s co-founder Jens Grede. Schlesinger said the meeting “reaffirmed, quite honestly, my own excitement about the learning opportunities for students.”

Part of what interested Schlesinger about SKIMS was its growth and revenue numbers, which he said are “at a pace that are virtually unheard of in the world. Though the company was started just three years ago, Schlesinger said it was recently valued at $3.2 billion. Last year, he added, 140 million users visited SKIMS’s website.

For Schlesinger, SKIMS’s meteoric rise gets at the core of his course’s message, which reiterates how businesses are able to acquire customers at a lower cost than their competitors through social media.

Palis Pisuttisarun ’24, an undergraduate technology innovation fellow at HBS, was thrilled to see Kardashian — one of his “top three role models” — in person.

“The morning of her visit, I was picking out my best look because I knew Kim Kardashian was going to see me, and I had to look my finest,” said Pisuttisarun.

Pisuttisarun said he admires Kardashian’s business acumen and persona.

“I think people have this notion of Kim being dumb or she doesn’t deserve the success that she has. I think that woman knows what she’s doing,” Pisuttisarun said. “She’s very strategic, and she definitely is an entrepreneur at heart.”

Izumi H. Vazquez ’25 waited for 45 minutes in the rain with a pack of HBS students to see the reality television star set foot on campus.

“It was a surreal moment,” Vazquez said. “I did not expect to wake up and see Kim Kardashian that day.” it right.’”

Zion, who said Lee is part of her “kung fu family,” will remember Lee as a “great martial artist.”

“The martial arts world is one short of a great one,” she said.

‘Ambassador’

An immigrant from China, Lee was dedicated to fostering cultural exchange between his birthplace and the United States.

“He wanted the Chinese culture and the Chinese people to be seen by us in the United States.

That was his passion,” said retired Adams House cook Edward B. Childs.

Born in Taishan City, China in 1948, Lee moved to Boston when he was 10. He graduated from Brandeis in 1973, where he studied physics and went abroad to the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lee later received a master’s degree in nuclear physics from Northeastern.

Part of Lee’s effort to foster connections between the U.S. and China included setting up a scholarship program to fund an exchange program for students in Harvard and China. The program, led by Lee, provided groups of Harvard students the opportunity to learn about Chinese culture as emissaries in Beijing or Dengfeng.

Sean Palfrey, who made two trips to China, credits Lee’s friendliness for the warm welcome the delegations from Harvards received from their hosts.

“He has, obviously, a lot of connections there, both friends and family and artists,” he said. “We were greeted everywhere. There were times that we literally would go into a small town and across the street at the entrance of the town, it said ‘Welcome, Yon Lee and Dr. Sean Palfrey from Harvard.’”

Lee also brought students, educators, and artists from China to Adams. On one occasion, he welcomed the abbot of the Shaolin Temple, a renowned monastery recognized as the birthplace of Chan Buddhism and Shaolin kung fu.

“He was a guy who made friends extremely easily and saw himself as really this ambassador, not just between Boston and Chinatown, but between this region and China,” Sean Palfrey said.

“He would say, ‘coming with a bunch of my friends.’ That might be anywhere between 20 and 100. You never knew who would come,” he added.

In Boston, Lee also served as Mayor’s Liaison to the Chinese Community under former mayor Raymond L. Flynn, who credited

Lee with progress in countering gang violence in the city’s Chinatown during the late ’80s and early ’90s.

LaVallee said Lee was “always looking for an opportunity to bring folks together from different places.”

“He wanted to make sure that the community at the University — the students — had an opportunity to experience this stuff from people from around the world, instead of just himself,” LaVallee said.

‘The Real Deal’

When the Palfreys began their tenure as Adams House faculty deans in 1999, they said they were impressed by the commitment that Lee brought to the house.

“We sort of thought there was a building and there were some students, and we had no idea that there actually were these wonderful people who were committed to being part of the community,” Judith Palfrey said.

“It was just a charming partnership with this man in every sort of setting,” Sean Palfrey added. Childs said he and the rest of the dining hall staff carried “tremendous” respect for Lee, who regularly invited them to his kung fu classes and house events.

Once, Lee trained the Adams dining staff to cook traditional Chinese food for a Lunar New Year celebration in the house, Childs said.

“We had traditional foods, all traditional recipes, from scallion pancakes to the gravies, the sauces, how to cut the Chinese broccoli — everything,” Childs said.

“The big thing was he trained us, and he did it with passion, and it was obviously excellent,” Childs added.

Judith Palfrey said Lee had a “knee-jerk” reaction to help others, citing his help in organizing a vigil for Adams affiliates after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“By noon that day, there were no candles anywhere in Cambridge and Boston, and Yon got wind of that,” Palfrey said.

“He went to every suburban little town and place himself,” she said. “He came back just in time with exactly the right number of candles.”

Green, one of Lee’s former kung fu students, called him “the real deal.” john.pena@thecrimson.com

Palis Pisuttisarun ’24 HBS Technology Innovation Fellow

Students weren’t the only ones thrilled to have Kardashian on campus. In a tweet thanking Schlesinger, Kardashian said her visit was a “#BucketListDream.”

After Kardashian’s lecture about SKIMS, the students chatted with Kardashian more freely.

“Folks loved her and how she was really kind of approachable,” Pisuttisarun said.

“She took a copious number of selfies with the folks in the class.” sage.lattman@thecrimson.com

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