Buck Gee has spent much of his life being the only one. The only Chinese family left in his Northern California hometown after the small Chinese grocery and the town’s Chinese laundry closed. The one Chinese student in his high school class, where he was elected student body president. And in 2004, when Cisco acquired the startup he ran, he was the one East Asian VP of more than 100 vice presidents in product development.
Gee’s path in technology started with a computer programming class he took as a Stanford freshman. “It changed my life,” he has said. “I challenged myself to learn about computers and get a job to design one.” Eight years later, Hewlett-Packard shipped a minicomputer built around a microprocessor he had co-designed.
But watching his general manager make key system design decisions, he realized, “If he’s the one who decides these issues, then I want that job,” Gee recalled. Consequently, he went to Harvard to get an MBA, then spent decades in Silicon Valley high-tech startups (not all successful). But one was acquired by Cisco in 1993, and another reached an IPO in 1998. As CEO of his last startup, Andiamo Systems, he became the VP/GM of the resulting business unit when Andiamo was acquired by Cisco in 2004.
At Cisco, Gee soon realized that he was the only East Asian VP/GM and found a problem hiding in plain sight: roughly a third of Cisco’s employees and managers were Asian American, but almost none were in executive leadership. “The Asian leadership question was ignored because we appear to be so many,” he says. Gee volunteered to be executive sponsor of Cisco’s Asian American Employee Resource Group and immediately raised the question to Cisco’s CEO, COO, CDO, and CHRO. With full C-suite support, an internal program was created to develop executive leadership skills for high-potential East Asian senior managers.
After retiring from Cisco in 2008, and finding out that the Asian leadership question was not unique to Cisco, Gee convinced the Stanford Graduate School of Business to create a unique executive education program to teach corporate executive leadership skills for Asian American senior managers. In addition, he has co-authored groundbreaking studies on the “bamboo ceiling,” including “Hidden in Plain Sight” (2015) and “The Illusion of Asian Success” (2017), and written op-eds on the question for the Harvard Business Review and the New York Times, among other publications, analyzing EEOC data that show Asian Americans the least likely to be promoted to become executives.
Gee has been a Committee of 100 member since 2015 and now serves on its board of directors as Northern California regional chair. “I was humbly honored when invited to join. I decided to accept membership because I wanted to help the Committee in its mission to make a difference for our community.”
His instinct to improve the lives of other Chinese Americans carries over to other nonprofits too. He serves on the boards of the Chinatown Media and Art Collective, the Asia Society/Northern California, and APIAVote. His work in the community has garnered honors: a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation in 2026, the Business Leadership Award from the International Leadership Foundation in 2026, the Distinguished Leader award from the Chinese Historical & Cultural Project in 2022; the Distinguished Community Leadership Award from Ascend in 2019, the Executive Excellence Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans in 2015; and the Civic Entrepreneurship Award from the Asian Pacific Islander Leadership Institute in 2012.
From classrooms to boardrooms, and beyond, Gee has spent years working so another Asian American executive won’t have to be the only one.
