Vietnamese family, Mexican-American border town, English at school — bicultural before bilingual, before international. Breakfast tacos and big sky for life.

/ 02

Trained in big tech.

UT Austin → Microsoft → Google → X → Waymo. Data & product across ads, search, and self-driving.

/ 03

Now: founder.

HBS MBA, then YC W22. Today building Reforged Labs — between San Francisco and Saigon.

HOW I THINK — FOUR RULES, TRUE FOR A LONG TIME

R.1

I write the app for my own life.

Fitness, travel, family, games — I keep building my own. The corpus is mine, which is the whole point.

R.2

Games are my thesis, not my hobby.

Reforged Labs is the company-scale version of a 20-year obsession. The shelf is upstream of the company.

R.3

Diaspora work is institutional.

Hyphen, Xoogler Vietnam, Overseas Vietnamese, a 250-person family tree — one practice on a 10+ year arc.

R.4

Boundary-crossing started in Laredo.

Three study abroads, two work abroads, then Saigon. The comfort compounded, not the credential.

CHAPTER 02

THE ENGINE

02 / 08

Where I've worked.

SEVEN STOPS. THE DATES ARE PRECISE; THE REST IS ON LINKEDIN.

2011

MSFT

FIRST ROLE

2013

GOOGLE

ADS & DATA

2015

MOONSHOTS

2017

WAYMO

DATA & PRODUCT

2019

HBS

MBA

2021

NOOK

CO-FOUNDER · YC

2023 →

REFORGED LABS ★

FOUNDER & CEO · YC

ENGINE — BUILT 2011–2026, STILL COMPOUNDING

DOWNSTREAM OF 20 YEARS OF BOARD GAMES → SEE CHAPTER 06

Built alongside — communities, not jobs.

INSTITUTIONAL WORK ON A 10+ YEAR ARC

2024 →

Overseas Vietnamese

Community Lead. Diaspora connective tissue beyond tech.

LEAD

2022 →

Xoogler Vietnam ↗

Founder. Vietnam community for ex-Googlers, SF ⇄ Saigon.

BUILT

2019—20

Hyphen @ Alphabet

Founder. AAPI ERG spanning X, Waymo, Verily, DeepMind, Wing.

BUILT

2017—20

Google g2g SQL

Instructor. Three years teaching internal Googlers.

TAUGHT

CHAPTER 03

BUILT FOR MYSELF

03 / 08

The app for my own life.

A PRIVATE PRACTICE — SIX BUILDS IN ROTATION, NONE OF THEM PUBLIC.

Most people use off-the-shelf apps. I keep building my own — a private stack of tools, each one indexed on a corpus only I have. What they are stays off the internet; the pattern doesn't.

FITNESS

An adaptive coach built on my own training history.

CORPUS — EVERY SESSION I'VE LOGGED

TRAVEL

A flight brain trained on a decade in the air.

CORPUS — ~500 FLIGHTS OF MY OWN

FAMILY

Generations of lineage, documented and honored.

CORPUS — MY FAMILY, ACROSS THE DIASPORA

GAMES

Design research upstream of Reforged Labs.

CORPUS — TWENTY YEARS AT THE TABLE

CHAPTER 04

ROOTS — THE BOARD

04 / 08

Places tied to my story.

HOME

STUDY

WORK

NOW

Laredo

BORN & RAISED

Austin

UT AUSTIN

Seattle

MICROSOFT

SF Bay

GOOGLE · X · WAYMO

Boston

HBS

Saigon

CO-FOUNDED NOOK

Saigon ⇄ SF

SPLIT HOME BASE — NOW

CHAPTER 05

ON STAGE

05 / 08

Spoken, hosted,
and written about.

APPEARANCES

EVENTS HOSTED

PRESS ARTICLES

SPOKEN — 29 APPEARANCES

2026

The AI Creative Decision Engine: How Top Teams Systematically Win UA

POCKET GAMER CONNECTS · LONDON

KEYNOTE

2025

Stop Guessing, Start Winning: AI Driven Insights

MAU VEGAS

KEYNOTE

+ 25 MORE ACROSS LONDON, VEGAS, TOKYO, ISTANBUL, SINGAPORE & SAIGON

HOSTED — 23 EVENTS, SF TO SAIGON TO HELSINKI

2025 · HCMC

Founder Dinner @ Robert's ↗

MAX 8 · PHONES-DOWN FORMAT

2025 · TOKYO

TGS S-Rank Insiders ↗

TOKYO GAME SHOW SIDE EVENT · SHIBUYA

2026 · HELSINKI

OV Helsinki: Tết Gathering ↗

LUNAR NEW YEAR · OVERSEAS VIETNAMESE

+ MONTHLY XOOGLER MEETUPS IN SAIGON · DINNERS IN HANOI, LONDON, VEGAS, BANGKOK & DA NANG

IN PRESS — 25 ARTICLES · ENGLISH & VIETNAMESE

TECH IN ASIA

GAMESBEAT

VIETCETERA

POCKETGAMER

PRODUCT HUNT

Y COMBINATOR

DÂN TRÍ

CAFEF

CHAPTER 06

COLLECTED — THE SHELF

06 / 08

The Collection.

Why this matters: Reforged Labs is the company-scale version of this obsession. The shelf came first.

156 OWNED

TOP RATING 8.35★

SPANS 1935—2024

Blood on the Clocktower

★ 8.3 · 2022

Spirit Island

★ 8.3 · 2017

Sky Team

★ 8.1 · 2023

Scythe

★ 8.1 · 2016

Mage Knight Board Game

★ 8.1 · 2011

7 Wonders Duel

★ 8.1 · 2015

Food Chain Magnate

★ 8.0 · 2015

Terra Mystica

★ 8.0 · 2012

Dominion: Seaside

★ 8.0 · 2009

Dominion: Guilds & Cornucopia

★ 8.0 · 2015

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

★ 8.0 · 2022

Ticket to Ride: USA 1910

★ 8.0 · 2006

Dominion: Dark Ages

★ 8.0 · 2012

Dominion: Big Box

★ 8.0 · 2010

Puerto Rico

★ 7.9 · 2002

Splendor Duel

★ 7.9 · 2022

THE OTHER COLLECTION — AWARD CHURNING

The second shelf lives at 36,000 ft.

Booked on points, logged in Flighty, seat maps studied like rulebooks.

~500

FLIGHTS LIFETIME

AIRLINES

AWARD REDEMPTIONS

CHAPTER 07

LIFE — OFF THE KEYBOARD

07 / 08

The non-screen hours.

CLIMBING, WEDDINGS, CAVES, MUAY THAI, THE OCCASIONAL ZIPLINE.

CLIMBING

BHUTAN

SEAT 1A

CAVES

WEDDING SEASON

MUAY THAI

ZIPLINE

MASTER LEAGUE

MUSEUMS

ESCAPE ROOMS

CHAPTER 08 — YOUR MOVE

Draw a card,
start a game.

COLD EMAILS WELCOME · COFFEE IN SF PREFERRED · BREAKFAST TACOS ALWAYS

hello@huynhrobert.com LinkedIn ↗ Reforged Labs ↗

RobertHuynh

I started by asking data what it meant. Then I started building things with the answer.

From Laredo.