- Joined
- May 2026
- How they joined
- Directly
- Before Cognition
- KondoCo-Founder
- Status
- Current
“This was a very tough decision for both Mitchell and myself. It was just another crazy move when an angel friend introduced this opportunity to us. … Time to go ship some serious magic with the Cognition team.”
- Joined Cognition (makers of Devin and Windsurf) as Member of Technical Staff in May 2026, alongside Kondo cofounder Mitchell Tan; announced publicly on LinkedIn on 2026-06-30 with the line 'Hey friends, I've joined Cognition with my cofounder Mitchell to build Devin.'Jun 30, 2026
- Cognition cofounder/CPO Walden Yan (IOI 2020 gold medalist) framed the move as hiring the Kondo team: 'I still meet Devin users who are impressed that we've managed to hire the Kondo team.' This was a team hire (acqui-hire style) rather than an announced acquisition of Kondo, which kept operating.Jun 30, 2026
- Leo's own account of trying Devin: 'we first tried Devin early last year in Osaka. My early feedback was too much babysitting to get jobs done. But hey, things changed, Devin is fucking good now.' The skeptic-turned-convert arc is the story he tells about why he joined.Jun 30, 2026
- Kondo was bootstrapped and, per Leo, 'hit $1M ARR after 15 months of bootstrapping'; Mitchell dates the $1M ARR milestone to April 2026.Jun 30, 2026
- Co-founded Kondo (Jun 2024 - May 2026), a desktop DM inbox for LinkedIn power users ('Superhuman for your DMs') with snippets, labels and CRM integrations, later expanding to WhatsApp and an MCP interface for AI agents; Leo was the technical cofounder ('Co-founder, Tech') with Mitchell Tan as CEO.
- Before joining, Leo had tried Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Codex and found himself 'needing to hack all these tools together with OpenClaw or Hermes'; he 'even wanted to go build my own solution into Kondo' because nothing good existed in the cloud.Jun 30, 2026
- HeadsUp was acquired by Hightouch in November 2023; Leo writes that Hightouch made him an offer ('Hightouch's offer was amazing') but Michael and Mitchell 'were trying to steal me from the Hightouch acquisition' and he chose to bootstrap instead.Jun 30, 2026
- Mitchell Tan confirms the two gave Devin Kondo's Linear tickets and 'Me and my cofounder Leo Li were unimpressed' at first, then about six months before mid-2026 'we were actually shipping 10x faster' as a three-person company.Jun 29, 2026
- Kondo continues under Michael Touchton as CEO of both Beluga and Kondo; Touchton called Mitchell Tan and Leo Li 'my cofounders and friends' when he took over on 2026-05-22. Leo named Michael Touchton, Anastasia Kucherova and Ashris Choudhury as the team carrying Kondo forward, and thanked 'Momo'.May 22, 2026
- Co-founded Beluga (Aug 2023 - Jul 2025), a recruiting firm for VC-backed startups (clients backed by a16z, Sequoia, BCV, Greylock, YC) with Mitchell Tan and Michael Touchton; Touchton notes Beluga 'had a full-time software engineering function from Day 1', which Leo staffed and which seeded Kondo's tooling.May 22, 2026
- Open-source: Storybook contributor in 2019. He authored storybook-addon-contexts and merged it into the Storybook monorepo (PR 'Merge addon-contexts into the monorepo', Apr 2019), then added Preact support, Vue integration, a URL query-param feature, and began the @storybook/ui TypeScript migration; 14 PRs by leoyli are on storybookjs/storybook.Apr 2019
- Was Technical Lead (Jul 2022 - Aug 2023) and Staff Engineer (from Sep 2021) at HeadsUp, an AI-enabled customer data platform for product-led sales; helped land paying customers including Contentful, Matillion, Dialpad, CHEQ and Netlify (~US$200K ARR).
Building Superhuman for your DMs. Move 2x faster and stop losing leads to inbox mess.
Trusted recruiting partner to ambitious founders. Building teams backed by a16z, Sequoia, BCV, Greylock, YC, and others.
🌐 HeadsUp, B2B SaaS Led a team in an AI-enabled customer data platform optimizing conversion rates of product-led sales. ___ Acquired by Hightouch. Backed by 645 Ventures, Wing, firstminute, Character, and execs at Miro, Drift, Algolia, etc. ___ - Led a team with 4 engineers and conducted 1:1 reviews to help them stay focused and productive. - Hosted cross-functional retrospectives with customer success, product, and engineering teams. - Negotiated with stakeholders to balance engineering complexity with speed to market. - Owned the product release process and the frontend tech stack. - Interviewed and evaluated engineering candidates. - Reviewed and documented technical decisions.
___ - Contributed to direct customer support efforts that resulted in acquiring 5 paid customers, including Contentful, Matillion, Dialpad, CHEQ, and Netlify, generating US$200K in annual recurring revenue (ARR). - Transitioned our technology stack from a proof of concept (POC) to a modern best practice, and established associated tools. For example, automatic code generation from GraphQL schema, mocking and testing with Playwright, error monitoring with GCP Logs Explorer and Sentry. These transitions not only ensured that we meet SOC 2 compliance, but also enhance visibility within the organization. - Segmented large and ambiguous project scopes into smaller, executable phases in software design documents (SDD). Also coordinated cross-functional resources to facilitate product development, focusing on iterating core features, such as reverse ETL, event aggregation builder, account ownership and sales playbooks. - Designed an event-driven Slack chatbot in a Node.js microservice which is based on RabbitMQ in conjunction with our Python and Scala services. This system empowers users to efficiently schedule automations, deliver notifications, and process interactive messages. - Developed client-side applications with NextJS and Prisma for both the web and Chrome extension to aggregate and visualize sales leads. These indicators helped customers improve their revenue and conversion rates guided by their product usage data.
🎮 Cat Force, iOS/Android Unity game Pivoted to develop the fast-growing match-3 social mobile game. ___ - Mentored and trained new developers, serving as a surrogate for the team lead. - Prototyped the minimum viable product of the PVP mode from the standalone version. - Implemented features like daily bonuses, profile links, Facebook social integration, and more. - Assisted in the development of web-based, in-house tools for quality assurance and customer support.
🎮 World Series of Poker (WSOP), Multi-platform game, Web team Developed in one of the top-ranked Texas hold'em game. ___ - Assisted in the transfer of development to Israeli and Romanian studios. - Implemented tournament circuit progressions and collectibles equipping features. - Collaborated closely with the BI/BA team to track and analyze product usage events. - Integrated and cropped mocked assets from Photoshop markups to ensure pixel-perfect results. - Became proficient in crafting animations using After Effects, CSS keyframes, PixiJS, and GreenSock.
___ - Contributed to bug fixes, conducted code reviews, and addressed community questions. - Participated in monthly meetings to influence design and future direction. - Refactored and transitioned the JavaScript codebase to TypeScript. - Authored `addon-contexts`, one of the most popular official plugins.
___ Reward - Recipient in the dean’s list of the Faculty of Science (2016 Fall). Research - Applied ab-initio calculations to simulate a quantum-chemical system. - Scripted in Python and R to analyze experimental datasets and to perform algorithmic fitting. - Researched with the cavity-based and chirp-pulsed Fourier-transform microwave (FTMW) spectrometers. Assistantship - Mentored in general and physical chemistry lab courses (~20 undergraduates per class). Publication - A spectroscopic and ab initio study of the hydrogen peroxide–formic acid complex: hindering the internal motion of H2O2, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2018,20, 21345-21351 (DOI: 10.1039/C8CP03342K).
___ Reward - Recipient in the dean's list for 4 consecutive terms (from 2011 Spring to 2012 Fall). Activity - Elected president of the Student Union (graduands) in 2012-2013. - Charter president in NDHU Toastmasters Club. - Host of the annual promenade in 2013. Publication - Specific interactions between the quaternary ammonium oligoether-based ionic liquid and water as a function of pressure, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2013,15, 12734-12741 (DOI: 10.1039/C3CP51396C).
