Hahnbee Lee

Hahnbee Lee is co-founder of Mintlify, a platform that developer companies use to write, host and maintain their documentation. She started it with Han Wang, her collaborator since college.

Finding Software After Medicine

Lee grew up with a strong drive to help others, which she credits to a religious upbringing, Bain Capital Ventures wrote. As a teenager she thought she would become a doctor, but volunteering at a hospital showed her that path was not right. In college she discovered how software could bring joy and opportunity, including later at Duolingo, where she worked as a software engineer.

Building With Han Wang at Cornell

She studied computer science at Cornell, where she met Wang in the Cornell Design & Tech Initiative. Together they built a course planning app that is still used by about half of Cornell's undergraduates each semester. The two then launched Pe•ple, a community management platform that was acquired by Bettermode, according to TechCrunch. As graduation approached, they kept running into problems that slowed them down as developers and decided to solve those problems for others.

Leaving Duolingo for Y Combinator

When Mintlify got into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, the last fully virtual one, Lee had a full-time offer to return to Duolingo. "If it weren't for starting my own startup and all the opportunities YC provided me with, I would not have left Duolingo for anything else," she wrote on Mintlify's blog. She says the program changed how she works: "before YC I was purely technical, but after YC I learned how to think about building a business." She still remembers an early office hours lesson that "a product is only a means to provide value to your customer."

Pivoting Eight Times at Mintlify

Mintlify's first products were hard to sell, and Lee and Wang suspected friends signed up only to be nice. The company went through eight pivots, and a two-day prototype landed its first customer, the founders told a16z. They found traction with a platform for hosting documentation built for engineers first, written in markdown and kept in GitHub. "We're resonating with devs and engineers beyond the hard-won use and testing of our products because that's who Han and I are at our core," she told Bain Capital Ventures. "You simply can't fake that because in addition to coding and bug fixing, sniffing out inauthenticity is a top dev skill."

Rebuilding Mintlify for Coding Agents

Lee and Wang now argue that coding agents have changed what good documentation means, turning docs from a resource only people read into infrastructure for AI tools, support agents and internal knowledge. Inside the company they co-host "docs + donuts" sessions, where the team gathers around donuts or cake to review user requests and test Mintlify's products. Life as a founder has pushed her "tolerance for stress, hard work, and caffeine to new limits," she wrote. "Nowadays, I live and breathe iced Americanos."