Li Jin

Li is the founder of Atelier, an early-stage firm investing in the passion economy.

She also writes a newsletter about passion economy platforms and consumer startups. Prior to Atelier, Li was an investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

On her morning routine.

I usually wake up anywhere between 10 and 11. 

I’ve still been keeping west coast hours despite leaving my Menlo Park apartment in May and moving back in with my parents in Pennsylvania.

Once I’m up, I grab a cup of coffee and jump straight into a blur of endless Zoom meetings for the rest of the day. I’ve never been in the habit of eating breakfast, though I love breakfast foods at other times. 

On feeling claustrophobic.

Living alone in a 700 sq. foot one-bedroom in Menlo Park was not ideal for quarantine. The only interaction I had with other people was over Zoom.

I started to feel very depersonalized.

All I ever did was hop between virtual meetings, and everything was on a screen. It sounds odd, but after a while, I started to question my own existence. 

In gender theory, there’s this notion of the male gaze, which women are constantly under as they go through the world.

When I lost the feeling of others’ gazes, from both men and women, I started wondering if I was real. I felt like I was just a brain in a vat. 

On living with her family.

My mom is absolutely adorable! She doesn’t realize that when I’m in a video meeting, people can still see and hear her if she’s in front of the computer. She’ll just go on doing things behind me during Zooms. It’s amazing.

Of course, I haven’t been able to keep up 100% of my work boundaries with my parents around. That being said, they’ve acknowledged the fact that I am super busy and accordingly try to give me breathing room. 

Apart from family meals and going out for an evening walk, they’ve been great about giving me a lot of room to do my own thing. 

On launching her own VC firm.

The act itself of starting something is to make a statement that we are not, and should not be, content with the way that things are in the world. 

Someone must always be challenging the status quo for progress to occur.

Founders express this by starting their own company. 

Investors express this by funding those companies. I have this vision of the world where people should be able to do what they love for a living and earn an income by leveraging their unique skills, education, and creativity— rather than be forced to perform commoditized work. 

My model of accelerating that vision is to back those very companies.

On her support system.

I turn to the support of friends and family on a daily basis.

I love calling my friends randomly instead of texting. As I launch a new firm, they’ve been absolute rocks. My friends are always there to immediately lend alternative perspectives and to reframe situations constructively.

More specifically, I have a close circle of old friends and colleagues which has been instrumental for me. I will be forever grateful and indebted to them. 

On the source of her ambition.

I can trace it back to the dissonance derived from growing up between two countries. I was born in Beijing and lived there for the first six years of my life.

My first language was Chinese.

It never crossed anyone's mind that I was going to become an American. When I was six, we moved to the States, and my whole life changed. 

There's this notion of defying fate, opposing the direction of the current of your life, and doing things that are the opposite of what is natural or easy.

My parents defied the life that was set out for them in China.

My father grew up in a peasant family without electricity or running water. He was the first in his family and the entire village to go to high school, college, and grad school - twice! The entire arc of his life is literally one in a billion. My mother’s family was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. 

Their decision to start an entirely new life in the States required so much energy and ambition to overcome the inertia of fate itself. My whole life itself is just so improbable that I feel like I should just pursue whatever it is I want to do. 

It’s in line with the multi-generational defiance of fate.

On protecting personal time.

I’m very protective of my weekends and evenings. 

During quarantine, it’s been tough to delineate between a weekday and a weekend, but I’ve done my best to be cognizant and block out time for myself. 

More specifically, my weekends are dedicated to deep thinking, writing, and doing things for myself. 

On weekday evenings, I’ll take a couple of hours off to have dinner with my family — usually made with vegetables from our garden, go on long walks around our neighborhood, and catch the sunset if we can. 

My mom’s an artist, so on the weekend we’ll paint together in her studio, oftentimes approaching the same subject with very different styles. Painting requires deep focus and attention, so it’s hard to think about anything else. 

It gives me time to distract myself and take a break from the hustle of my world.

On her evening routine.

Every night, I quickly shower and run through my skincare routine, before diving into a few more hours of work: catching up on emails, reading, and working on blog posts and other projects.

If I’m writing a long-form piece, I need to be lying down in bed.

It sounds weird, but it’s a habit I’ve had ever since I was little, writing in my diary each night in bed. It’s how I wrote all my college papers, too.

I’ll work until I fall asleep around 2 AM. 

Put simply, I love making things. I’ve been writing every day since I was 6 years old and painting since I was 5. I’m a creator at heart and love the process and feeling of creating something from nothing.