# Leo Li

Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (Devin); ex-cofounder of Kondo and Beluga; ex-HeadsUp (acq. Hightouch); Storybook contributor  
Cognition  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Member of Technical Staff (Engineering)
- Joined: May 2026
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Co-Founder, Kondo
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Beluga; Kondo; HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch) (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli
- GitHub: https://github.com/leoyli
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- 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.' (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/waldenyan_its-not-easy-to-get-people-to-stop-building-activity-7477591586923634689-TeEt)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- Kondo was bootstrapped and, per Leo, 'hit $1M ARR after 15 months of bootstrapping'; Mitchell dates the $1M ARR milestone to April 2026. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- 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. (https://adamgtm.com/brand/kondo/)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mitchell-tan_ive-joined-cognition-to-build-devin-the-activity-7477413078918385664-fnq1)
- 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'. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaeltouchton_today-im-stepping-up-as-ceo-of-both-beluga-activity-7462235199326666753-b9MT?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCgV2oBUT2t_6Av1PZ_PpbmuodKyEMgpLA)
- 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. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaeltouchton_today-im-stepping-up-as-ceo-of-both-beluga-activity-7462235199326666753-b9MT?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCgV2oBUT2t_6Av1PZ_PpbmuodKyEMgpLA)
- 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. (https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/pulls?q=author%3Aleoyli)
- 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). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- Mitchell Tan wrote that he had worked with Michael Touchton 'over the past 5 years in 3 companies' (HeadsUp, Beluga, Kondo); Leo overlapped with both at HeadsUp, making this a long-running three-person founding team. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mitchell-tan_this-is-michael-who-is-taking-over-kondo-activity-7462898990716596224-zowq?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCgV2oBUT2t_6Av1PZ_PpbmuodKyEMgpLA)
- Other public repos include a linkedin-profile-scraper ('returning structured profile data in JSON', 2023), an early sign of the LinkedIn-tooling interest that became Kondo, plus a 2025 ParkingLotLottery repo. (https://github.com/leoyli)
- MSc (2016-2018) in physical and computational quantum chemistry at the University of Alberta in Wolfgang Jager's group; first-authored 'A spectroscopic and ab initio study of the hydrogen peroxide formic acid complex' (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2018, 20, 21345) with Nathan Seifert, Fan Xie, Matthias Heger and Yunjie Xu. (http://www.chem.ualberta.ca/~xu/pubmain.htm)
- Building Kondo — inbox management, snippets, labels, and CRM integrations for LinkedIn power users, expanding beyond LinkedIn into WhatsApp, iMessage, and more. Co-Founder at Beluga, helping top VC-backed startups build their engineering teams.

Before startups, I was a Technical Lead at HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch), shipped match-3 mobile games at Playtika, built a medical 3D imaging annotation toolchain, and contributed to Storybook as an open source developer.

MSc in Physical Chemistry (U; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- At Playtika (Oct 2019 - Sep 2021) worked as Senior Web Engineer on the World Series of Poker (WSOP) web team, then as Senior Mobile Engineer on 'Cat Force', a Unity match-3 social mobile game, mentoring new developers as a stand-in for the team lead. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- Maintains vue-create-context (22 GitHub stars, TypeScript), 'an abstracted util factory for creating scoped, declarative, and reactive' Vue contexts, published on npm with an example story in the official Storybook Vue. (https://github.com/leoyli)
- He calls himself quiet on social media ('mostly stay quiet because I've been busy understanding our customers and shipping features'); his LinkedIn post history is sparse and the Cognition announcement is his main public post. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C)
- Hightouch announced its acquisition of HeadsUp, the AI-for-product-led-sales startup, in November 2023 (TechCrunch, 2023-11-16). (https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/16/hightouch-acquires-headsup/)
- Wrote and MIT-licensed a Python 'frequency-loop-permutator' for microwave frequency-loop calculations during his chemistry research (2018); he describes reconciling theory with messy data as 'the same job in software'. (https://github.com/leoyli)
- Previous roles include Co-Founder at Kondo; Co-Founder at Beluga; Technical Lead at HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch); Staff Engineer at HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch); Senior Mobile Engineer at Playtika; Senior Web Engineer at Playtika; Open Source Developer at Storybook; Software Engineer at Imagia Canexia Health. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- Education history includes Master of Science, Physical and Computational Quantum Chemistry, University of Alberta; Bachelor's Degree, Chemistry, National Dong Hwa University (NDHU). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- Software Engineer at Imagia (Imagia Canexia Health) May 2018 - Oct 2019, building a React app for an NLP and 3D labeling toolchain for medical research and HIPAA/HITECH-compliant on-prem pipelines. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli)

## Experience
- Member of Technical Staff at Cognition (May 2026 - Present)
- Co-Founder at Kondo (Jun 2024 - May 2026): Building Superhuman for your DMs.
Move 2x faster and stop losing leads to inbox mess.
- Co-Founder at Beluga (Aug 2023 - Jul 2025): Trusted recruiting partner to ambitious founders.
Building teams backed by a16z, Sequoia, BCV, Greylock, YC, and others.
- Technical Lead at HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch) - Seed round (Jul 2022 - Aug 2023): 🌐 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.
- Staff Engineer at HeadsUp (acquired by Hightouch) (Sep 2021 - Aug 2023): ___

- 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.
- Senior Mobile Engineer at Playtika - NASDAK: PLTK (Mar 2020 - Sep 2021): 🎮 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.
- Senior Web Engineer at Playtika - Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Oct 2019 - Mar 2020): 🎮 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.
- Open Source Developer at Storybook (Jan 2019 - Dec 2019): ___

- 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.
- Software Engineer at Imagia Canexia Health - Montreal, Quebec, Canada (May 2018 - Oct 2019): ___

- Built an React app for a NLP and 3D vortex labeling toolchain to support medical research.
- Engineered on-premise pipelines for medical records, ensuring strict HIPAA/HITECH compliance.
- Developed a multilingual (English/French), accessible React-based micro-frontend application.
- Drove business value through a scalable UI designed using the atomic design methodology.
- Introduced TypeScript and Storybook to improve collaboration and product coherence.

- Increased social media exposure contributed to a 150% YOY sales growth.
- Revamped the Taiwanese and Japanese websites using WordPress and PHP.
- Collaborated with cross-timezone, geo-distributed teams located in Canada, Taiwan, and Japan.
- Contributed to building marketing campaigns, optimizing SEO/SEM, graphic design, and copywriting.

## Education
- University of Alberta - Master of Science, Physical and Computational Quantum Chemistry - (Jan 2016 - Jan 2018): ___

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).
- National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) - Bachelor's Degree, Chemistry - (Jan 2009 - Jan 2013): ___

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).

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/leoyli
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leoyli_hey-friends-ive-joined-cognition-with-my-activity-7477630015061336064-tY6C
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/waldenyan_its-not-easy-to-get-people-to-stop-building-activity-7477591586923634689-TeEt
- http://www.chem.ualberta.ca/~xu/pubmain.htm
- https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=author:leoyli+repo:storybookjs/storybook&per_page=30
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mitchell-tan_ive-joined-cognition-to-build-devin-the-activity-7477413078918385664-fnq1
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeltouchton?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAAAS2QsYBrYPzrOYoCbYDAepM2AKkbPVvFrY
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchell-tan?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAABDj5EcBwKiS94Mkyb9vx3d7s3fKTNmAIqg
- https://adamgtm.com/brand/kondo/
- https://api.github.com/users/leoyli/repos?per_page=100&sort=pushed
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/16/hightouch-acquires-headsup/
- https://hightouch.com/blog/hightouch-acquires-headsup
- https://github.com/leoyli
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michaeltouchton_today-im-stepping-up-as-ceo-of-both-beluga-activity-7462235199326666753-b9MT?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCgV2oBUT2t_6Av1PZ_PpbmuodKyEMgpLA
- https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/pulls?q=author%3Aleoyli
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mitchell-tan_this-is-michael-who-is-taking-over-kondo-activity-7462898990716596224-zowq?utm_source=social_share_send&utm_medium=member_desktop_web&rcm=ACoAAHCgV2oBUT2t_6Av1PZ_PpbmuodKyEMgpLA
- https://github.com/leoyli-cognition


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/leo-li · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people