He spent years at a consulting firm dragging boxes around slides at midnight. Then he built a machine to never do it again.
Most people who hate their job complain about it. Daniel Li built a company to delete his least favorite part of it. The result is Plus AI, the Seattle startup whose software sits inside Google Slides and PowerPoint and turns a single prompt into a finished, designed presentation. Type a sentence. Get a deck. The thing that used to eat half a consultant's week now takes seconds.
Li is the cofounder and CEO. Before that he was a venture capitalist who backed companies most founders only dream of being in the same sentence as - Snowflake, Rec Room, Common Room. And before that, he was the guy at Boston Consulting Group staying late to nudge text boxes into alignment.
That last detail is the one that matters. Plenty of founders chase markets. Li chased a grudge. He had lived the specific, grinding tedium of the corporate slide, and he knew exactly how many smart hours it quietly devours. Plus AI is the revenge.
I built Plus AI because when I was a consultant at BCG, I realized that half of my time was spent doing crappy, mindless work - like formatting slides.
When Li left Madrona in 2021, the pitch wasn't AI presentations at all. Plus was going to be an easy way to pull live data out of any tool and drop it wherever you needed it. He called it the meeting point of two themes he'd hunted as an investor: no-code, and what he liked to call "multiplayer" productivity - software where people actually work together inside the same surface.
Then the company did the thing good companies do. It followed the pain. Customers kept circling back to the same swamp: the deck. The status update. The board slide nobody wanted to format. So Plus pivoted, wired in the new generation of AI models, and pointed all of it at the blank slide. Plus AI was born - an AI copilot that designs, generates and edits presentations, living right where people already work.
It's a very Li move. He spent years telling founders to apply conventional wisdom first and innovate only where it counts. Then he followed his own advice: start where the pain is loudest, not where the idea is sexiest.
AI can make your slides prettier. But it can't do the thinking for you.On the limits of his own product
Half of my time was spent doing crappy, mindless work - like formatting slides.On why Plus AI exists
It's been incredible to work with Madrona both as an investor and as a founder.On sitting on both sides of the table
Apply conventional wisdom first - then selectively innovate where it counts.His operating philosophy, paraphrased
Li is hard to file under one tab. He's the VC who picked Snowflake before the world's biggest software IPO - and the same guy who runs a label called DSCO Labs where he builds weekend things like a mobile game called 2048 Blast.
He writes "the DL," a newsletter on Pacific Northwest tech, sharing the same plainspoken handle - danielxli - that he uses on LinkedIn, X, Instagram and Medium. He's a science-fiction reader, a cyclist, a restaurant enthusiast, and the founder of the Pacific Science Center's Associate Board. The through-line isn't a sector. It's a temperament: keep building, keep shipping, keep cutting the boring parts.