People

Seung-yoon Lee

Seung-yoon Lee

CEO and Founder of Story Protocol

Biography

S.Y. (Seung Yoon) Lee is the CEO and Founder of Story Protocol. Story Protocol allows creatives to build narrative universes from the bottom up. Stories are the base layer of all forms of entertainment, and web3 principles will power the next generation of hit franchises with stories as their foundation. Story’s mission is to unleash an entirely new way to create, govern, and license IP on blockchain, ultimately forming an ecosystem of “story legos” that can be remixed and composed. A16z led the $30M round in the company with participation from Endeavor,  Roham (Founder of Dappers Labs), and others.

He was previously the CEO and Founder of mobile storytelling platform Radish, backed by Softbank, UTA, and Bertelsmann. The platform was acquired for $440M in 2021 by South Korean tech giant Kakao.

He subsequently served as Kakao’s Global Strategy Officer in charge of its investment and M & A activities globally. 

Lee also actively invests and advises web3 companies as a Venture Partner at Hashed, South Korea’s largest blockchain fund. The fund was the first check in many web3 metaverse companies like Axie Infinity and Sandbox and also advises Korean tech and entertainment giants like Kakao, Naver, HYBE, and others on their crypto strategies.

Lee is an Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leader and Trilateral Commission’s David Rockefeller Fellow. He was an inaugural member of Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2016 and was subsequently named as one of its All Star alumni.

Lee was elected as the first Asian President of the Oxford Union, world’s famous debating society whose former presidents include many heads of state. During his term, he hosted world-class speakers including fellow South Korea rapper PSY, Senator John McCain, and President Martii Ahtisaari. He also launched the Union’s own Youtube Channel that features its key debates and speaker events.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE