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Co-founder of Cedar, the AI-Native workspace to improve B2B sales teams. Used by AE's…
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Jesse Li shared thisI watched the sales calls of an AE who earned 7-figures in commission. Guess how much time he spent on small talk? He spent 10 (out of 30!) minutes small-talking. And not even good small talk. Precious minutes defining pain or quantifying business outcomes were spent grasping at straws, like "your daughter does ballet? My 3rd cousin's dog also does ballet!" As I started building better rapport, I noticed how much easier it was when people had something in view to talk about - a cool shirt, a picture of their family, their books. So we're hosting an event with Meow this Wednesday so you have something your prospects can point out! Come laser-engrave your logo onto a glass plaque and join a room of 20+ exclusively seed-series A founders :)
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Jesse Li shared thisMost people assume I’m American. But I grew up in the Czech Republic, a country small enough that 1/3 of the time, people don’t even know where it is (I will say, geography is not America’s strong suit). Something about the air in Europe gives you an irresistible urge to make fun of America. It’s not like there’s a lack of material. I miss the days my taste buds didn’t know about fried butter. But there is a reason I am here, in America. Despite its many imperfections, it also possesses qualities deeply singular and special. America is the only place in the world where, if you say you want to put a dent in the universe, people will give you $3 million and tell you to buy the biggest hammer you can. I came to America with no background, connections or money that would give an unfair advantage. But it believed in me. A little late on Linkedin, but belated Happy Birthday! I’m glad you exist. Yee haw 🤠🦅🇺🇸 (my first id in America)
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Jesse Li reposted thisBest lesson I can share to the next generation of founders: be relentlessly helpful. All of us started with nothing more than fears and doubts. If you're successful, you did not make it here alone. When a new founder crosses your path: take the call, try the demo, and buy the product. Pay it forward, always.Jesse Li reposted thisIncreasingly, SF founders only help founders who are already winning. Not enough founders trust in founders a year, two years, or three years earlier in their journey than they are. March 2025 - we pivoted 2 weeks before demo day. We signed Gumloop as a customer 48 hours later. We found the 1 in a million - Luis Manrique, who took a chance on two founders with no product but a lot of energy to solve a burning pain. Two days after that, we had moved into their office and were working out of there 5 days a week. Luis just left Gumloop and started his own thing (they just got into YC!!). Two days later later, he signed us as a first customer, and is solving one of our most burning pains. Since, I've come to love being a design partner for startups - it's easy to prove in the first week we work together if it's worth my time, and Luis and Aamir P. already have. [quick plug - if anyone is getting cooked by Anthropic bills, I know a guy ;)]
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Jesse Li reposted thisJesse Li reposted thisCedar has raised $3M to build the AI-native workspace for Account Executives. Used by AE’s at top companies like Cursor, Warp, and Listen Labs, today they're launching it to the public. Cedar connects to all your sales data and maps out your customized playbook - what research to run before a meeting, the content of a valuable follow-up, and the multi-threading strategy for your ICP. Cedar then creates agents that proactively help your reps adhere to the winning playbook. AE's using Cedar respond 2x faster, cut follow-up times from 14 to 5 days, follow up with custom collateral, and create custom agents to improve conversion rates. See how Cedar helps top GTM teams, and book a demo now at mail.cedarcopilot.com. Congrats on the round, Jesse Li and Isabelle Ilyia! https://lnkd.in/ga3YJpY4
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Jesse Li shared thisYesterday, I hopped on a call as a prospect for a data-enrichment API product. The AE started asking me when my company was founded, what we do, and what I wanted credits for. Really? You are a data-enrichment product… We make GTM software to help AE’s close more deals. You are an AE… It wouldn’t take a very sophisticated research agent to realise even the most basic use cases (meeting prep & multi-threading) regularly cost us $thousands. Easiest upsell of her life, missed. This product has an MCP. She probably could’ve prompted Claude, just one singular text before our meeting. But she didn’t. Not because she’s an inherently bad AE, I’m sure hooking this up is somewhere on her to-do list. But because for every mad Claude scientist, there are 10,000 average Joes, with a mortgage and an overly rebellious kid, for whom optimising their agent stack roughly is next to cleaning the back of the couch on the to-do list. There's a lot more to build for the rest of the world.
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Jesse Li shared thisLowkey the flagship talks during the batch YC (Brian Chesky, Sam Altman) were the least impactful. The most valuable talks were from founders your friends probably haven’t heard of. The founder just a few steps ahead, drilling a single specific topic in detail: scaling LinkedIn outbound, tightening their sales process. The truth is, whenever I see a GTM event with >3 huge names in a panel, I know I'm getting some PR approved questions and no sauce. So we’re hosting an event about something very specific: scaling enterprise sales Luis Manrique was employee #2 at Gumloop, handling everything enterprise sales - closed Instacard, Shopify, & Doordash. We’ll go through: 1. Why enterprise sales is about selling promotions 2. Pricing Strategy 3. Finding and developing champions The event is already at 75% capacity, exclusively with high-growth (seed → series B). P.S. If you're scaling and have egregious anthropic/openAI bills, we have a surprise for you 😉
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Jesse Li reposted thisJesse Li reposted this🚨 Calling all sales managers & leaders in SF - one of our top portcos, working with companies like Cursor, Greptile, and Warp are hosting an invite-only dinner series in June to discuss some of the most popular topics in GTM circles right now. We'll be hosting two private dinners on June 3rd & 17th - Some topics we’ll focus on: 1. Increasing manager leverage and output using AI 2. Uniformity & rep adherence to playbooks using Agents DM me if you or anyone in your network is interested - sales managers and directors only (to keep the discussion relevant!)
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Jesse Li shared thisI fear not the team who has built 10,000 features, but I fear the team that has built one feature 10,000 times. In the age of AI, it’s so easy to start building a million features. I fall for it too - a whimsical idea here, an offhand customer feedback there that feels good to ship but doesn’t actually get used. But there is this space that LLMs still haven’t been able to reach. It is the iterative, evolutionary process of converging on the right product. It is empathy. It is understanding the broader context of your user’s day, what they’re used to, and what they need help with. It is watching session replays and intuiting, behind the pause of the mouse, what is confusing. It is the depth of evolution - a fish doesn’t have wings, or ears, or any of the otherwise useful features. Just fins, optimised over eras. Building is easy. Iterating, maintaining, and perfecting is hard.
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Jesse Li shared thisIn product, some ways of being wrong are better than others. Our north star metric for drafting is word-count similarity (if we compare the agent draft to what the user ends up sending, how similar is it?). We found that we needed to get to >90% word-count-similarity for it to be consistently useful for our users. But here's the secret: we intentionally lower Cedar's word-count-similarity rate compared to what it could be. Let me explain. When Cedar drafts incorrectly, it almost always ends up drafting too many words. Often by ~2 sentences. Now, we could probably get a better word-count similarity if we made our agent less verbose. But if we did that, the draft would be missing details more often. The user would have to figure out what’s missing, find the context, and then write the sentences. We realised it was infinitely better for users to delete 2 sentences than to write even half a sentence themselves. Fast enough to start shaving away in the 5 minutes between meetings. Easy enough to make a real behavioural difference. And on average, users who use AI to draft still respond 200% faster after using Cedar. This is only possible because we’re wrong in the right way.
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Jesse Li liked thisJesse Li liked thisAnd now for the good news: Aamir P. and I have been accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer Cohort. We’re going to build Understudy Labs (YC S26) with the backing of one of the most storied organizations in Silicon Valley. We’re bringing relief to the AI-native companies hitting the cost wall, and we’re bringing ownership to the enterprises moving from experiments into production.
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Jesse Li liked thisJesse Li liked this447 days ago, I joined Campfire as our Founding AE and Employee #9. Today, I'm excited to announce my promotion to Sales Manager- West. 🏕️🔥 If you're curious about a path at a fast-growth start-up, I wrote my journey below: ⚡ 266 days from Founding AE --> Founding AE + Team Lead ⚡ 181 days to Founding AE + Team Lead --> Sales Manager ⚡ 447 days total — and I'd do every single one again The numbers along the way: 💰 $2,219,950 in ARR closed as an IC 🚀 $1,300,000 more from my team of 4 that started in January 🏢 Saw Campfire go from: $800K in ARR → $XX,000,000 in ARR. That's not a typo. 👥 9 employees → 120 👶 My son went from a newborn to a full-blown 2-year-old. (The wildest growth curve of them all.) This journey was by no means an easy one. It happened on calls that ran long, in Slack threads at midnight, in the "we're evaluating three vendors" conversations that turned into signed contracts. And it 1000% did not happen alone. The Campfire team brings a culture of winners - and I am so glad to be a part of this team and our continued success. 🏆 Now it's time to get back to work and scale Campfire to $100 Million+ in ARR. 📈 If you're an AE who wants to sell something that's actually changing how finance teams work, I want to talk to you. 👀 As John Glasgow always says, it's still day zero here at Campfire. 🔥
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Jesse Li liked thisJesse Li liked this🔔 We rang the bell! Today we listed Bending Spoons on Nasdaq under $BSP. Honored to have shared this room with the dear friends who’ve climbed with me so far!
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Jesse Li liked thisJesse Li liked thisHappy to share that I'll be entering the Mid-Market AE role here at Greptile. Since joining as Founding AE, it has been both fun & challenging to build out the fundamental blocks of the GTM function here at Greptile. So much more to do. I'm forever grateful for all our users, and happy to serve more as I step into my next role :) Thanks, Daksh Gupta, for the support in my growth. 1st day pic ⬇️
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Jesse Li liked thisYesterday, I hopped on a call as a prospect for a data-enrichment API product. The AE started asking me when my company was founded, what we do, and what I wanted credits for. Really? You are a data-enrichment product… We make GTM software to help AE’s close more deals. You are an AE… It wouldn’t take a very sophisticated research agent to realise even the most basic use cases (meeting prep & multi-threading) regularly cost us $thousands. Easiest upsell of her life, missed. This product has an MCP. She probably could’ve prompted Claude, just one singular text before our meeting. But she didn’t. Not because she’s an inherently bad AE, I’m sure hooking this up is somewhere on her to-do list. But because for every mad Claude scientist, there are 10,000 average Joes, with a mortgage and an overly rebellious kid, for whom optimising their agent stack roughly is next to cleaning the back of the couch on the to-do list. There's a lot more to build for the rest of the world.
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Education
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Georgia Institute of Technology
3.93 GPA
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With a great desire for impact and freedom to pursue and analyze problems holistically, I decided to pursue a Computer Science degree with a specialization in People and Intelligence.
Computer Science allows me to create solutions without the same level of capital or labour leverage that I may otherwise need, while being scalable to reach millions of people. Software that reaches millions of people also has to interact with all of them, so learning the intricacies of Human-Computer…With a great desire for impact and freedom to pursue and analyze problems holistically, I decided to pursue a Computer Science degree with a specialization in People and Intelligence.
Computer Science allows me to create solutions without the same level of capital or labour leverage that I may otherwise need, while being scalable to reach millions of people. Software that reaches millions of people also has to interact with all of them, so learning the intricacies of Human-Computer Interaction is of utmost importance. On the other hand, the power of AI can lead to incredible results through a different type of scale - how much information it can process. -
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Jason Calacanis
Using Claude Pro credits no longer works on OpenClaw! Many heavy OpenClaw users were signing up for Claude Code subscriptions and then using their OAuth tokens to power the virtual assistant. But what was once a gray area is now an explicit violation of Anthropic policy. Users can no longer use their tokens in a third party tool as a work-around for not having to pay per use! What happens now? Will everyone start shifting to the cheaper Chinese models like Kimi?
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John Zeratsky
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Stayko D. Staykov
Deep and philosophical insight be David Haber about the evolution of vSaaS and Andreessen Horowitz . Vertical SaaS is a complex undertaking that blends domain knowledge, outsider perspective and industry credibility. David Haber os absolutely on point that technology-first is the shift and priority since it provides a more objective canvas for solution mapping. The process of layering in context thorough subject matter expertise and achieving industry trust, is what then allows for vSaaS to mature, scale and be profitable. In our studio thesis, this would involve engaging an industry veteran at the helm of the portfolio only after prototyping the foundational framework of the software but before mapping workflows. It also at time includes bringing an operator/user as a partner in the asset in order to reiterate with real-time feedback and thus create an industry buy-in.
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Gurpreet Gill
One pattern I see repeatedly when founders move from 0–1 to scaling is subtle but costly: Misjudging Readiness. At 0–1, the temptation is operational preemption. Adding layers of process, expanding headcount, and structuring for scale before product-market fit is proven. It looks like progress. But without validated demand and consistent revenue, those investments become overhead instead of leverage. Once you scale, the challenge shifts. Founders overestimate the durability of success cycles and underestimate the precision required for capital raises. The principle is simple: prove demand. Stabilise cash flow. Raise capital with intention. Scale executionally, not aspirationally. Growth is about sequencing, timing, and measured execution. These are the attributes that distinguish serial entrepreneurs, resilient founders from those who burn cash on the runway chasing optimism. Happy building! You got this!💪
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Ehsan Mirdamadi
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Karan Bhatia
Firecrawl Raised Series A and Shipped /V2. Firecrawl, a web data api for AI, led by Caleb Peffer, Eric Ciarla, and Nicolas Silberstein Camara, has raised $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners and saw participation from Y Combinator, Zapier, Tobias Lütke, Abhinav Asthana(CEO of Postman), and Matthew McClure(Founder of Mux). Read More At: https://lnkd.in/gXGDYYQQ Source: https://lnkd.in/gJx2VJsz
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