# Jerry Li

> Jerry Li is the San Francisco-based co-founder and CEO of Gradual and founder of the Engineering Leadership Community (ELC). After engineering and management roles at Amazon and payments engineering leadership at Groupon, he founded ELC in 2016. The internal tools created to support that community became the foundation for Gradual, a platform connecting events, content, and member interaction.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Gradual
- **Organizations:** Gradual, Engineering Leadership Community (ELC), Groupon, Amazon
- **Education:** University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- **Known for:** Founded ELC, which had grown to over 10,000 members globally by its March 2024 CMX speaker biography., Co-founded Gradual from tools developed to support ELC., Gradual enabled a 23,000-person virtual conference for Scale, according to customer Marcel Santilli’s testimonial.

## Career timeline

- **—** — Worked as an engineer and later an engineering manager at Amazon.
- **—** — Served as a director of engineering at Groupon, overseeing payments engineering with distributed teams.
- **2016** — Founded the San Francisco Engineering Leadership Community, now known as ELC.
- **2021** — Founded Gradual, building on internal tools developed for ELC.
- **2024** — Discussed AI and community building on Around the Prompt.
- **2025** — Appeared on the Revenue Room podcast to discuss the origins of ELC and Gradual.
- **2026** — Participated in a Context First customer engagement fireside chat with OpenAI and Contentsquare leaders.

## Achievements

- Founded ELC, which had grown to over 10,000 members globally by its March 2024 CMX speaker biography.
- Co-founded Gradual from tools developed to support ELC.
- Gradual enabled a 23,000-person virtual conference for Scale, according to customer Marcel Santilli’s testimonial.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Joined the August 5 Context First fireside chat at Gradual in San Francisco, with Kenna Valdez of OpenAI, Ursula Llabres of Contentsquare, and moderator Omid Razavi of SuccessLab.
- **2025-08** — Featured in Revenue Room’s From Startup to Scale interview, published August 29.
- **2024-05** — Appeared on Around the Prompt to discuss AI community superintelligence.

## Links

- Website: https://www.gradual.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-qi-li

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/jerry-li
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-14