Derrick Li
Talks about Angel investing, Investment strategies and Technology startups
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Derrick Li
Principal at Afore
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Derrick Li is currently serving as a Principal at Afore Capital in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he specializes in investing in various companies at different stages, including seed and pre-seed. With a background in entrepreneurship and market research, Derrick has made significant investments in companies like Atom Finance and Retool, showcasing his expertise in identifying and supporting promising startups.
Derrick's career highlights include co-founding Macro, being a Chief of Staff at Altimeter Capital, and investing in a diverse portfolio of companies such as Collective Retreats and TravelJoy, demonstrating his prowess in business planning, sales operations, and market analysis.
Work Experience
Principal
2023 - Current
Develop Health, Datacurve, CoverFlow, Accordance, Golpo, Felicity, Oxbow, [stealth], [stealth]
Afore Capital is a venture fund that focuses on pre-seed stage exclusively and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Angel
2016 - 2023
Retool, Ollama, LangChain, Pulley, Nuvo, TravelJoy, Extend, Rundoo, Subframe Wisely (acq. $OLO), Reflect (acq. SmartBear), Hyper (acq. Tradeshift), xCheck (acq. FLYR), CommandBar (acq. $AMPL), Causal (acq. Lucanet) and more -> derrickli.com/#investing
Cofounder
2019 - 2022
Automatable checklists for any human-in-the-loop process - like customer onboarding, employee onboarding, etc. https://www.producthunt.com/products/macro-3 Backed by South Park Commons, Index, SV Angel, Conversion Capital, and amazing angels.
Macro is a new approach for creating operational processes.
Member
2019 - 2020
South Park Commons is a fund and community of technologists dedicated to helping each other explore, learn, and go from -1 to 0.
Traveling / warehouses / yoga
2018 - 2019
Quit my job at Altimeter because I was antsy and wanted to travel the world. Didn't end up traveling the world but saw a big chunk of Asia. Came back to San Francisco in late 2018 and needed a place to stay. Found a warehouse on Craigslist and became friends with the owner (Matt) - ended up investing in his cannabis startup in Puerto Rico and helped him and his partner (Carlos) rollup a bunch of warehouses in Puerto Rico. Learned 2 important lessons from Matt and Carlos: 1. “Every deal will get to a point where your back is to the mat and if you don’t figure out how to flip over, the deal is dead. You gotta figure out how to flip over, how to win” 2. “You have to be sympathetic to the person on the other side of the deal so you can think like them, figure out what they want” Also did plenty of yoga and worked on v1 of Macro and other projects.
Analyst / Chief of Staff to Brad Gerstner
2014 - 2018
Reached out to Brad via a cold email, convinced him to let me intern at Altimeter Boston as a 21-year-old that knew next to nothing about investing. Next thing I knew, I was driving across the country to join Brad as he opened the Menlo office. Was a ride of a lifetime. Forever thankful to Brad, Kevin, John, Ram, Hab, and the rest of the team for taking a chance on me and teaching me so many life lessons (in addition to what good investing looks like). Intern -> front desk -> chief of staff -> associate -> analyst
Altimeter is a technology-focused investment firm managing a public equity fund and growth-stage private equity funds.
Global Marketing Intern - Alzheimer's (Solanezumab)
2013 - 2013
Eli Lilly engages in the discovery, development, manufacture, and sale of pharmaceutical products.
Raised $6,500,000.00.
Education
Investments
Latest Articles
Derrick Li
Talks about Angel investing, Startup investments and Investment principles
Derrick Li
Talks about Angel investments, Investing principles and Jet Insight