Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.

In 1986, he and Sanjoy Mahajan developed Bill,[15] a Bayesian learning-based system for playing the board game Othello that won the US national tournament of computer players in 1989.

Lee was still allowed to recruit employees for Google in China and to talk to government officials about licensing, but was prohibited from working on technologies such as search or speech recognition.

[25] Before the case could go to trial, on December 22, 2005, Google and Microsoft announced that they had reached a settlement whose terms are confidential, ending a five-month dispute between the two companies.

Alan Eustace, senior Google vice-president for engineering, credited him with "helping dramatically to improve the quality and range of services that we offer in China, and ensuring that we continue to innovate on the Web for the benefit of users and advertisers".

[28] Several months after Lee's departure, Google announced that it would stop censorship and move its mainland China servers to Hong Kong.

[29] Lee is also an active investor, corralling large amounts of venture capital for the financing, incubation, gestation, and establishment of new high-technology startup companies around the world.

On September 7, 2009,[30] he announced details of a $115 million venture capital fund called "Innovation Works" (later changed to "Sinovation Ventures") offering seed money for the incubation and spearheading new early-stage high-technology start-up companies[31] that aims to create five successful Chinese start-ups a year in internet and mobile internet businesses or in vast hosting services known as cloud computing.

The Innovation Works fund has attracted several investors, including Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube; Foxconn, the electronics contract manufacturer; Legend Holdings, the parent of PC maker Lenovo; and WI Harper Group.

[34] In September 2016, the company announced its corporate name change from Innovation Works to "Sinovation Ventures," closing US$674 million (4.5 billion Chinese yuan) capital injection.

To date, Sinovation Ventures' total asset under management with its dual currency reaches US$2 billion and has invested over 300 portfolios primarily in China.

[36] In March 2023, Lee founded 01.AI, an artificial intelligence startup focused on building large language models (LLMs) for the Chinese market.

A February 16, 2013, post summarized a Wall Street Journal article about how slow speeds and instability deter overseas businesses from locating critical functions in China.