Ben Lee is a co-founder of Rootstrap, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Beverly Hills, California, that grew out of Neon Roots, the Los Angeles app agency he co-founded in 2011. He is known for the productized Roadmapping workshop that became Rootstrap and for a large following on LinkedIn. He stepped down as chief executive in 2019, exited the company in 2020 and now coaches founders and runs a retreat center in Costa Rica.
A Battery Store, a Nightclub and a Bar Exam Product
He got his start helping his father take a battery store online, building an e-commerce platform that shipped thousands of orders around the world, he told Voyage LA in 2018. He bussed tables at 16, worked his way up to club manager at a nightclub by 18 and started hospitality projects, including Kitchen24. In college he founded AttackSheets, which he said became the most-downloaded digital product on the internet for law students. His own site says he left Loyola Marymount University in 2008 to raise money for a 24-hour diner in Hollywood.
A Ferry Ride to Montevideo and the Start of Neon Roots
He then joined a digital development agency that tried to make him a software engineer. “My head was just more for business; not pure coding,” he told Voyage LA. Laid off with other US project managers just before a company retreat in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he went anyway, spent his days taking the ferry to Montevideo, Uruguay, and found a tech scene there. He met future partners on that trip and founded Neon Roots, which put him on Inc.’s 2016 30 Under 30 list.
Turning Unpaid Estimates into the Roadmapping Workshop
An underestimated bid on an RFP nearly put the agency out of business. The team decided unpaid estimation was the problem and asked, in his words, “what if we could turn estimation into a service offering?” The answer was Roadmapping, a paid pre-development workshop that tests an app idea against the market, produces a clickable prototype and turns it into a prioritized backlog. It grew big enough to become its own company, Rootstrap, and Neon Roots later merged under the Rootstrap name.
Leaving the Agency for Coaching in Costa Rica
He stepped down as CEO in 2019 to focus on sales and marketing. The pandemic pushed him out entirely. “When shelter in place and COVID news breaks, that’s when I decide that I have to get out of the biz and move on from the agency hustle,” he told HackerNoon in 2020, after explaining the move in a Medium essay titled “Why I Left the Agency I Founded.” He later served as the first chief marketing officer of Formula.Monks and in 2024 opened re:center, a retreat for founders in Costa Rica.