About

Brian ByungHyun Shin

I’ve been living in Seoul, South Korea since December 2024. I was in the San Francisco Bay Area for 8 years before that.

I was born in Seoul, moved to the States when I was six, and mostly grew up near Denver, Colorado, where I graduated high school. I played a lot of tennis and watched a lot of sageuk (Korean historical dramas), back when you had to download them to your iPod on iTunes :).

I studied electrical engineering at Harvard, then came to UC Berkeley for a masters in EECS focusing in robotics and embedded systems.

I moved to the Bay Area to work at LG Electronics as a software engineer on automotive and embedded software. After a couple years, I became a product manager, where I launched an open autonomous vehicle simulator, started a new robotics business initiative at LG, and led LG's involvement as a founding member of the ROS Technical Steering Committee.

After that, I was a product manager at Waymo, working on simulation and evaluation of self-driving cars for public road deployment. Specifically, I worked on simulation agents and how to make AI traffic agents act as realistic as possible so that the self-driving car behavior was validated before being tested on public roads and human traffic.

Most recently, I founded Silver Flight Group to build tools for content creators looking to reach global audiences.

Since April 2026, I also co-host Unlocalized, a show and podcast with Jay Lee about the founders and businesses in Korea that English-language media tends to overlook. We make both long-form episodes and short-form videos from Seoul, and the show doubles as a testbed for the creator tools I build: I make the livestream overlays and production tooling, and we clip the episodes for short-form with Dubcap. Jay interviewed me about my own path from LG and Waymo to founding a startup in episode 12.

I love to play golf and tennis, and have served as co-president of the Stanford Korean Graduate Student Tennis Association (open to the community).

Talks and appearances

  • Unlocalized, episode 12 (2026) - Jay interviews me about going from LG and Waymo to founding an AI startup.
  • ROSCon 2019, Macau - “ROS on OpenEmbedded: Simpler robotics development for embedded Linux.”
  • ROSCon 2018, Madrid - lightning talk, “ROS2 on webOS: Web-app enabled robots.”
  • AI Robotics KR, Seoul (2019) - “ROS2 on webOS,” to about 150 people.
  • Silicon Valley Autoware Meetup (2019) - “LGSVL Simulator: Advanced Sensor Rendering for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation.”
  • CES 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 - exhibiting LG’s automotive and simulation work.
  • Publications on Google Scholar.