a16z
- Jennifer Li is a partner on a16z's infrastructure investing team.
- She originally majored in business before going to grad school for software engineering.
- She says that her computer science background has been crucial in evaluating AI software bets.
Jennifer Li didn't know from the get-go that she was interested in computer science and software engineering.
But developing those skills has played a crucial role in her career trajectory, where she has moved from product management roles at multiple startups to the storied investing firm Andreessen Horowitz, where she invests in AI infrastructure startups and made partner earlier this year.
"Although it looks really connected looking back, I didn't have the foresight to plan out becoming a VC one day and joining startups," she told Business Insider. "I wanted to be on the building side while also marry the technical and business side of things. The left and right brain of my pasts are put together."
Investments in AI have reached an all-time high as VCs and founders double down on new tech innovating in nearly every industry and vertical. Competition is fierce, but firms like a16z are poised to win the AI investing wars thanks to a deep bench of technical expertise that extends to the top: firm founder Marc Andreessen majored in computer science and co-authored the popular 1990s web browser Mosaic, while his co-founder, Ben Horowitz, started his tech career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics.
For Li, her experience studying business and computer science combines with her operating experience and gives her a leg up when evaluating startups' tech and business models, an ethos shared by her team members at a16z.
"Our team has the terminology to express ideas and get as deeply technical as we want but also jump back to the business level, which is quite rare compared to my peers," she said. She added that some deeply technical people might put too many limitations on the currently available technology and are unable to dream about what future tech could look like — whether it's transforming the way an industry does business or inventing a new way to write software.
At a16z, meanwhile, Li said she's found a group of coworkers who can discuss both.
"That elasticity of thinking helps us not get so bogged down by technical details," she said.
In school, Li made the unusual jump from business to computer science.
Born and raised in northwest China, Li attended the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, where she majored in international business, before moving to the US for graduate school.
She studied technology commercialization and management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a well-known science and engineering school in upstate New York, and later earned another master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University in computer science.
Both of her parents are engineers, and Li said that she began exploring the world of computer science and engineering to satisfy a curiosity of how things are created.
"I was interested in getting under the hood and learning how things work, really digging into how things are built," she said. "Because my parents are engineers, that mindset is not foreign to me."
Li said learning various coding languages was a learning curve, and the time she spent studying software engineering was crucial as she moved into her first jobs out of college. After completing her graduate degrees, she moved to San Francisco to become a product manager at AppDynamics, an application and business monitoring startup that was acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion.
Next, she moved to Solvvy, an AI customer support program that was later acquired by Zoom.
"I didn't even know there was a 'PM' role, but it hit both of the cores of my strengths and backgrounds," Li said. She added that while working at Solvvy back in 2017 and 2018, she had an early front-row seat to AI and machine learning at the startup level, which would end up serving her future role as an investor.
"This was an early startup in the chatbot space and an early sign of how AI and language models are going to change the world," she said.
Li joined a16z's infrastructure team and loves to invest in products and tools that help builders build.
Li's earliest exposure to the investing world came during a fellowship at Kleiner Perkins from 2016 to 2017. After getting to know a handful of successful VCs, including Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid, former partner Andy Chen, and Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock, she said she started mapping out potential career trajectories and thought she might be interested in moving to a VC firm during the back half of her career after gaining experience as an operator and potentially founding a startup herself.
She chatted casually with a few firms during her years working at startups, but it wasn't until she met with investors at a16z while leading product at Solvvy that she decided to make an earlier-than-expected move, she said.
Li officially joined a16z in 2018 and has since been a key player in building out the firm's infrastructure team. The team focuses on products and tools that help software engineers build. While the team occasionally invests in chips and other hardware, its bread and butter is "everything below the API level," she said, with a special focus on developer tools, foundation models, security, and cloud startups.
In the more than six years she's been at the firm, Li says her role increasingly focuses on AI tools, which are transforming every stage of software development.
"LLMs and generative AI changed the paradigm, and what that means for the entire software stack — from testing, the software development life cycle, and analytics — is that everything changes along the way," she said.
Li's notable investments in the space include ElevenLabs, which develops synthetic text-to-speech and became a unicorn after a16z co-led its $80 million Series B round in early 2024; and MotherDuck, which provides serverless AI data analytics and raised $47.5 million across its Seed and Series A rounds, the latter of which was led by a16z.
By drawing on her software engineering background, Li said she's a better investor — even though she's no longer regularly writing lines of code.
"As VCs, we're not as technical in terms of day-to-day writing code, but that's still a very important foundation for me," she said. "But what are the building blocks, systems, architecture, and pieces? Computer science helped with that system of thinking."