By Xochitl Rojas-Rocha
Brina Lee (MA ’13) has learned a thing or two about overcoming fear. It’s been a necessity for someone who has blazed a career path that includes being Instagram’s first female engineer and co-founding a company. As she works toward growing her startup, Hamul, the UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) graduate can summarize the most important lesson she’s learned in one short phrase.
“Don’t let you hold yourself back,” she says. “It’s as simple as that.”
“If you tell me I can’t do it, I’m one hundred percent committed to proving you wrong.”
Ahead of the curve
Lee grew up in Orange County, California, and graduated from UC San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2008. Just as the Great Recession hit, she snagged a marketing position at a tiny startup, where she was handed a book on HTML and asked to build a website from scratch.
To her surprise, Lee found herself staying up late to pursue this newfound form of creative freedom. Typing in a line of code and watching the website change as a result seemed inexplicable and surprising, “literally like magic,” she says. And she wanted to see where it could take her.
In the 2000s, however, switching from a nontechnical field like communications to computer science was almost unheard of. Websites like Coursera did not yet exist, and as a college graduate, Lee couldn’t return to university for a new bachelor’s degree.
Undeterred, she visited UC San Diego Extension to meet with Rick Ord, a CSE lecturer leading an introductory course in computer science. She still remembers his bewildered reaction. He had just given a test that had weeded out students in mathematics and engineering. What was a communications student doing on his doorstep?
Lee placed within the ninety-ninth percentile in Ord’s class and went on to tutor other students. Her work began turning heads, even as she burned through her savings paying for classes and access to laboratory resources.
With persistence, time, and the support of mentors like Ord, Lee was accepted into a master’s program in computer science at UC San Diego. She found a community that encouraged teamwork instead of competition, and saw doors opening for her at companies like Facebook and Google. In the workplace, students from other universities expressed admiration for the tight bond between her and her UC San Diego classmates.
“UC San Diego is very team-based,” says Lee. “It brings up the entire class of people, versus everyone competing against each other.”
Shortly after Lee graduated with her master’s, she made news as Instagram’s first female engineer. It was there that she worked on initiatives to improve user experience and met the two graduates who would someday become her cofounders.
Audio as the next social frontier
Lee met Joshua Li and Hendri (no surname) while the three worked as software engineers at Instagram during the social media giant’s early years. Together, they worked hard to connect people and capture meaningful moments in their lives, an effort they’re continuing at their new business, Hamul.
Hamul curates a collection of audio clips, or voice lines, from popular culture to create social tools for gamers. The team’s goal is to allow gamers to customize their online presence and contribute to a more positive gaming environment through audio.
“Through Hamul, we hope that people have more ways to express themselves and connect to like-minded gamers,” says Lee. “We want to blaze the way for positive community spaces and improve the quality of relationships made online. If we can do this in the gaming industry, I would be very happy and excited.”
With team-based online gaming on the rise, Lee and her cofounders also see an opportunity to provide a healthy example of social networking. Lee says this will be especially important for younger generations, who might try their hand at online, team-based games before they enter the world of social media. Hamul hopes to contribute to the gaming community, first through audio clips, then through other means in the future. The team is striving to publish their first product in the coming weeks.
Hamul isn’t the end point for Lee. Now that she’s had a taste of the entrepreneur’s journey, she sees herself starting “over and over again.” In interviews with students interested in launching their own companies, she warns that the most difficult part of their undertaking will not be logistical, but personal. They’ll have to push past their own doubts to truly invest themselves in their business and product.
Luckily, Lee has had a strong role model to look to. Her father — a NASA engineer who specialized in shuttle launches and missile defense — showed her the lengths one could go with hard work and perseverance. His example taught her that nothing is truly impossible.
“It’s the biggest driving force in what makes me, me,” says Lee.