Kevin Li
marketer / founder / judoka
// Now
- Building jo — a personal AI assistant that's been doing its thing since before it was a race. Built from everything I've learned across two YC companies.
- Training for black belt in judo. Currently brown belt, next competition March 2027. My tokui-waza is tai otoshi.
- Living in Alameda, CA with my 10-year-old daughter Kery and family.
- Playing Wild Rift and Path of Exile 2 when I should be sleeping.
// Building
jo is my current focus — a personal AI assistant that understood context and took action before the current wave (Instinct, Town, OpenClaw) caught on. Now everyone's racing to build one — Muse, Meta AI, the whole field — and we're still at it.
I've spent years building products that people actually use. Now I'm building the assistant I wish I had: proactive, reliable, and genuinely helpful.
Also building AI agents and thinking a lot about how humans and AI should work together.
// Journey
I'm a two-time YC founder with 15+ years in growth marketing. It started at Kabam, where I joined as an intern in 2008 — back when the company was still called Watercooler — and stayed through its pivot into social gaming.
My first startup was Second Wave Games (2011) — it sold to World Golf Tour (later acquired by Topgolf), where I stayed on as Head of Mobile.
I later did product marketing at MessageMe (2014) — the mobile messaging app Yahoo acquired — where co-founder Arjun Sethi was instrumental in my startup journey. The lessons from that team shaped everything I built after.
At Yahoo I was a Product Manager for Growth & Emerging Products (2014–2016) — where I grew Yahoo Mail into a top-4 app overall through growth experimentation. That's where the growth playbook came from: test everything, keep what moves the needle, and never ship without an experiment behind it.
Then I co-founded Farmstead (YC S16) — an AI-powered "ghost grocer" delivering groceries in under 60 minutes from small-format micro-warehouse hubs.
We used machine learning for demand forecasting and kept food waste under 5% — supermarkets average around 35%. It started as a Nextdoor post in Mountain View offering weekly milk, eggs, yogurt, and bread. Two hundred replies in two days. Then COVID hit, orders went 10x, and we scaled to a $10M+ run rate across five markets before winding down in 2023.