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Albert Lie

Albert Lie

Co‑founder & CTO at Forward Labs — AI for freight

albertleeadrian
Seoul, South Korea
San Francisco, California
Toronto, Ontario
Joined December 2024
Favicon imagealbertleeadrian.super.site
Favicon imagegithub.com
Favicon imagealbertlieadrian.substack.com
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Network

16.6K connections
💳
Fintech & Payments Professionals
🏢
Xendit Employees & Founders
💻
Software Engineers & Managers
💡
Startup Founders & Investors
💰
Fintech Finance Professionals
🏗️
Engineering Leaders & Architects
🛂
Immig & HR

Summary

Builder of applied AI for freight: Albert is focused on shipping AI systems that solve real-world logistics problems — building agents and multimodal models to automate freight sales and operations. He emphasizes eval-driven development to move models from demo to production. super+2
Experienced hypergrowth engineering leader in Southeast Asia fintech: He served as a founding engineer and engineering lead at Xendit (helping scale from no product to a YC-backed unicorn) and was a young VP at Spenmo, indicating deep experience in building reliable payments/finance infrastructure and scaling engineering teams. super+2
Civic‑tech & impact background: Early in his career he co-founded a civic-technology NGO (Code for Bdg) and later contributed to government-facing and nonprofit projects (U.S. Digital Response), showing a pattern of mission-driven engineering and community engagement. super
Active writer, speaker, and community mentor: Maintains a Substack and HackerNoon presence, speaks at industry events (Comet/Convergence) and participates in fellowships/communities (South Park Commons), demonstrating strengths in communicating technical ideas and mentoring other builders. substack+2

Work

Education

Projects

Writing

HackerNoon: Meet the HackerNoon Top Writers – Writing Through the Noise of AI with Albert Lie

April 18, 2025

Interview / profile about writing, building, and the author's journey from civic tech and hypergrowth startups into AI and freight.

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Escaping AI Demo Hell: Why Eval‑Driven Development Is Your Path to Production

January 1, 2025

Explains why evaluation-driven development (structured model evaluation and monitoring) is necessary to move AI from demo to production, with practical guidance from experience shipping AI in freight/logistics.

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Why I “left” San Francisco

January 1, 2024

Personal essay on career, geography, and choices about where and how to build startups and life; published on the author's Substack.

Favicon imagealbertlieadrian.substack.com

Why Freight Tech?

Long-form writing on the opportunities and frictions in freight/logistics that motivated building AI for the sector.

Favicon imagealbertlieadrian.substack.com

Hobbies

Hiking, museum-surfing, remixing music, making food and AI art; writes long-form essays on Substack. super+1

Notes

JMJai Mansukhanisaid
ALAlbert L.
has made a significant, positive difference in technical execution and team culture at an enterprise B2B startup they've observed.

Aug 11, 2025