JL

Jessica Li

GTM and AI Product at Beacons

San Francisco, California

Overview 

Jessica Li is an accomplished professional who was the first employee at Beacons (YC S19), where she excelled in various roles including GTM and AI product, growth, brand marketing, and content. Her career highlights include serving as Director of Content at Harvard in Tech and Head of Content at Elpha, showcasing her expertise in content strategy and leadership in the tech industry.

Work Experience 

  • Product and ML / Data Ops Lead

    2025 - Current

    Cartesia is a Series A company backed by Kleiner and Index that is building state space models for higher quality and more efficient foundation models

  • Director of Growth and AI Lead

    2019

    write a newsletter (distribution to 10K+ people) featuring Harvard alums in tech; interviews include Co-founders of Quora, Cloudflare, and Whoop CMO at BCG, Fidelity, Carta, and Axon CPO at Figma AI leaders at Anthropic, Ginkgo Bioworks, and YC Also lead the AI vertical

  • Head of Operations and GTM

    2024 - 2025

    Series A AI native patent intelligence platform trusted by companies including Google, Tencent, Siemens, and Xerox

  • Certified Pilates Instructor

    2023 - 2025

    megaformer pilates, certified instructor (attended over 400 classes)

  • Growth and Technical Product

    2022 - 2025

    executive team at Beacons (raised $30 million, over 6 million users, 9 figure valuation) - managed our head of marketing and CEO office and worked on our AI semantic search marketplace in a technical PM role Beacons is an AI powered vertical SaaS platform for creators, creator managers, brands, and marketing agencies. Creator customers include Green Day, Sia, and Jeremy Lin; agency customers include UTA; brand customers include Perplexity, AG1, and Penguin Random House

  • Employee #1 and Chief of Staff

    2021 - 2022

    joined as our first employee and built out recruiting (hired our founding eng/design/product hires - we're now at 40 full time!), ops, customer success, and finance

Beacons offers a platform for content creators to monetize their audience through different tools and services.

Raised $29,150,000.00 from Davidovs Venture Collective.

  • Deep Tech Contributor

    2021 - 2022

    covered deep tech

  • Founding Head of Content

    2019 - 2021

    YC backed community that grew to 100K+ members was the founding head of content and led featured posts, office hours, and social media published 150+ featured posts. interviewed: Founders of Glossier, Evite, Scale AI, Taskabbit, and Cowboy VC Senior execs at Brex, Glossier, Equinox, and Amazon

Where women in tech talk candidly online

Raised $1,250,000.00 from Y Combinator, Friále, January Ventures, Maveron, Moxxie Ventures, Jessica Livingston, Holly Liu, Tracy Chou, Geoff Ralston and Michael Seibel.

  • Growth Lead

    2020 - 2021

    joined as the 2nd growth hire Zageno is a General Catalyst backed Series C company and the world's largest eCommerce marketplace for life sciences

ZAGENO is an enterprise marketplace solution that connects e-commerce to life science.

Raised $121,000,000.00 from HighSage Ventures, OakRidge Management Group, Capnamic Ventures, Grazia Equity and General Catalyst.

  • Founding Head of Content

    2020 - 2021

EVCA is a non-profit association that supports the next generation of venture capital investors.

  • Partner, Enterprise Software

    2019 - 2020

    Was the 1st employee - Soma Capital is a $1 bn AUM fund that invests across consumer, enterprise, fintech, hardware, and healthcare. Soma has invested in 23 unicorns. worked on investments (primarily in enterprise software) in companies including Ramp, Coda, and Rippling + founded Soma Fellows

Soma Capital is venture capital fund that focuses on investing in software to automate the world across all sectors and geographies.

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