- My legal name is Seoho Ahn and I was born in Seoul, South Korea on March 11th, 2004
- I go by Sean, some people call me Sean Pixel, sometimes “Pixel” for short.
- I moved to Surrey, England at the age of 9 with zero English skills.
- I attended Milbourne Lodge School, a private English primary school
- I played Rugby, Cricket, Football (soccer), and various other sports.
- Rugby stuck with me and I continued playing until college
- I moved from England to Portugal at the age of 12
- By the time I moved from England, I was fluent in English (with an accent)
- In Portugal, I attended Carlucci American International School of Lisbon (CAISL)
- I think this is when I started enjoying the good things in life: people, music, ideas, nature
- Growth moment - here is when I started to become acquainted with American culture, and especially social media
- I also fell in love with learning to code, I solved problems with Project Euler and self-taught coding
- I created my first business here. I sold pizzas by slices on campus. Short-lasted but proud.
- I fell in love with music, especially the “Soundcloud” rap that was popular at the time
- As middle schoolers did at the time, my friends and I created diss tracks against each other
- I realized that I had a passion for this, and started making music under stage name Asean! (i know, haha)
- At age 15, I moved from Portugal, back to South Korea
- I attended Korea International School (KIS), a competitive environment which was challenging (mostly socially) at first
- I was sad, missed Portugal, and needed something to fulfill me again
- Canon event - I became a die hard Gary Vaynerchuk consumer. This video changed my life. I no longer follow him as I used to do, but I would still credit him as my entry point to startups
- 15 year old me wanted to do something. I begged my parents for a Paypal account and went out onto social media to try and make money
- I started flipping Instagram meme page promos (it was novel at the time, saturated now; i like to think i paved the way)
- This became a social media marketing agency, and I limited my niche to music (rap) marketing, based on my interests and what was working
- I had a great business going, I gave up-coming artists millions of impressions per campaign and started working with bigger and bigger clients
- during this time I got even more into songwriting & recording
- I rebranded as Sean Pixel because of an album called Pixel Bath (which I loved)
- Soon, Music and Marketing merged. I started marketing my own music and started to get noticed
- I also started taking coding more seriously, I started to realize that I love to create in general.
- My social media accounts grew as I promoted myself, but this came with stress
- I started to crave fame & likes, I slowly saw myself having to choose between artistic expression and views / plays
- Reference Point - We’re now at senior year of high school
- College admissions: Stanford (rejected) Wharton (accepted) USC (accepted)
- I chose USC for many reasons (which I am happy about) and joined the class of ‘26 majoring in Computer Science and Business Administration
- I graduated KIS and left with many good friends
- Summer: lots of degenerate activities + worked on my first real album: Bubble Boy
- 18 now, I moved to LA into my USC dorm room in Birnkrant Residential College
- I released Bubble Boy; it was a success. Many people that I’ve never seen before in college came up to me telling me they loved it.
- I joined an Asian fraternity and met the friends that I live with now
- By this time, I had stopped marketing & creating music but I was more and more interested in startups and developing
- A past client reached out to me with a startup idea: AI-assisted image idea generation
- This became DSNR, my first “real” tech startup
- We grew it to around 20k users
- This took over my freshman year. I became tired of running it and saw immense competition, so I eventually sold it
- Back to hacking on projects, creating a variety of things (e.g. this website, TeenageAGI)
- During this time, I self-learned more novel AI topics (Transformers, Diffusion, RAG, Agents)
- Reference Point - We are at the Summer in between Freshman and Sophomore year
- I got a job as the first developer hire at an early startup. My job was to create realistic AI NPCs with long-term memory and multiplayer capabilities
- We hired more people, I gained experience managing developers but was again burdened by school and increasing responsibilities.
- I left the company with immense learnings, both technical and operational. Looking back, I knew nothing about startups before this experience.
- With the extra time I gained, I started reading more both on paper and on the internet. Some good reads include: The courage to be disliked, thinking fast and slow, Elon Musk biography, Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!, Paulg website
- Second semester of my Sophomore year, I felt a disconnect between my online life as an entrepreneur/creator and my personal life as a
degeneratesocial person - I joined Sigma Eta Pi to find a likeminded community.
- I found a sense of alignment and passion which motivated me to start building again
- That’s about up until now! If you ever stumble upon this page, please let me know to update.
Inspiration
Recently, I’ve been working on a technical onboarding tool for startups.
As a company onboarding a developer, you want them to fully understand the codebase and company culture in minimal time.
Now replace company with “me” and developer with “you”.
That inspired this tweet:
While this doesn’t replace actually talking to me and getting to know me, I hope it will allow for a better conversation.