Songbai Li

most people call me Francis.

I work at Imagine AI (YC F25) in San Francisco, where I joined as the first hire. The company builds an AI agent for B2B content; I spend my days across research, customers, and operations—the connective tissue that makes an early startup move fast.

I care about how things actually get adopted: not just whether a system works, but whether a real team will change how it operates because of it. The best work I have done sits at that boundary between the product and the people using it.

Now

Member of research staff at Imagine AI. Working directly with customers, running deployments end to end, and studying how frontier AI systems are prompted, steered, and evaluated.

TL;DR

studied Mathematics–Computer Science at UC San Diego
first hire at Imagine AI (YC F25); grew with the company across engineering, customer work, and operations
co-authored a paper on stablecoin reserve risk, forthcoming in the International Review of Economics and Finance
hosted founder events around San Francisco: a racing day for 1,500, a yacht party for 300, a skyline party for 200

Research

Stablecoin reserve risk under the GENIUS Act: Evidence from the Silicon Valley Bank shock International Review of Economics and Finance, forthcoming

I am interested in financial stability questions raised by digital assets—what happens when new instruments meet old-fashioned runs—and, more recently, in the empirical side of how large language models behave in production.

Say hi

I like meeting people who are building something. Find me on LinkedIn or write to francis.lix03@gmail.com.

Off hours, I plan overly detailed group trips and read about how frontier labs steer their models.