Lisha Li

About

Lisha joined Andreessen Horowitz as an investment partner after eight years as the founder of Rosebud AI, an AI coding platform for games. You can read her reflections on being a founder in generative AI since 2018 here. At a16z she spends most of her time on frontier AI models and the infra that supports them. She’s also interested in AI for science and AI for creative applications. Prior to a16z she was an active angel investor, with seed checks into fal, Periodic Labs, Exa, and others.

For founders building now, model progress is both the tailwind and the threat. It opens room to overtake incumbents, but it can also absorb a startup’s roadmap overnight. The founders who succeed have the imagination and grit to build in this fast moving world. She has a lot of respect for the people taking it on and is excited to back them.

Lisha came to the Bay Area in 2011 to pursue her PhD at UC Berkeley. She started in logic and the foundations of mathematics, then pivoted to deep learning around the time AlphaGo achieved superhuman performance in Go. The game has been revered as a cerebral and creative pursuit for millennia, so this was her first true “sparks of AGI” moment.

In defiance of American autocorrect, Lisha continues to spell colour and flavour the right way, though she has sadly lost her Canadian o accent. She occasionally makes TikToks about physics and looks forward to a day when AI can finally unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, solve the Millennium problems, and help us understand the structure of reality as we never could before.