Andrew Lee (entrepreneur)

Andrew Lee was born in Indianapolis and raised in Carmel, a city in the Indianapolis metro area.^[9][10] He is the son of Jay Lee, a South Korean immigrant that was born in Jeonju.^[11][12] According to a soj.ooO comment Andrew Lee made, his parents "had nearly nothing when they came to the United States" and made sacrifices for him and his brother.^[13] He enrolled in Purdue University and transferred to the University at Buffalo, but later dropped out to start working.^[10]

In 2009, Lee founded London Trust Media (LTM), a private holdings company. In 2010, he founded Private Internet Access (PIA), a virtual private network service for anonymizing Internet traffic.^[14] He claimed to have started PIA because of his interest in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), whose users' IP addresses could be easily revealed, but only after the Freenode purchase.^[15] Lee and co-owner Steve DeProspero sold LTM (and its subsidiary PIA) to Israeli company Kape Technologies for US$95.5 million in November 2019.^[16][17] Lee co-founded Mt. Gox Live, a bitcoin price tracker that was later acquired by the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.^[18]

In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated and transferred ownership of Freenode Limited to Lee;^[19] Dahlskjaer and Lee said the company was solely for funding the network and running the Freenode #live conferences.^[20][21] According to staff, they were not informed of the contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations, as the company only managed the conference and nothing else.^[21][22] A dispute over changes Lee imposed in 2021 resulted in all of Freenode's 20 to 30 staff members resigning.^[20][21] This team went on to form a new network called Libera Chat.^[20]

In present day, Lee's holding company, Imperial Family Companies, continues to own freenode, Legacy Fighting Alliance,^[23][24] Chime TV^[25] and others.

According to Andrew Lee, Won Joon Lee, one of his distant relatives and grandson of a keeper of the House of Yi lineage, said that their clan was descended from Korean royalty; as the result, he was introduced to Yi Seok, a grandson of Emperor Gojong of Korea. Yi Seok is known as an active pretender to the former monarchy, but he has no male offspring, and he proposed adopting Andrew Lee as his heir, which Andrew was initially reluctant.^[26] Regarding Andrew Lee's ancestry, Yi Seok has only stated that he was a descendant of Yi Seong-gye,^[27] keeping said ancestry vague.^[c] In October 2018, Seok declared Andrew the crown prince of Korea at a ceremony in Los Angeles, attended by Bermuda premier David Burt, and city officials from Los Angeles and Jeonju.^[29][30][31] Andrew Lee later took over Yi Seok's status as the claimant to the Joseon throne in 2022. By March 2022, Lee announced the founding of a "non-territorial successor state to the Joseon Empire", a cloud-based, blockchain-backed kingdom with himself as its ruler.^[32]

In June 2023, the government of Antigua and Barbuda released a statement establishing diplomatic relations with the "Joseon Cybernation".^[26][33][7] As of July 2023, the son of Antiguan Prime Minister Gaston Browne served as Joseon's "Vice Minister of State".^[34] It has also been reported that cryptocurrency proponents Roger Ver and Mark Karpelès received the title of "duke".^[35]

On 27 July 2025, Andrew Lee launched a new VPN service called VP.net.^[36]