A platform by Shuli Li, CPA.
Exploring the intersection of capital strategy, systems architecture, and the frontier of AI-driven hardware — through the lens of someone who has built forecast frameworks from the ground up and lived in the operational complexity of both US and China financial systems.
Real problems, real frameworks. Each project here applies financial and systems thinking to questions that matter — from robotics supply chains to cross-border capital flows. No theoretical fluff.
Traditional forecasting treats error as noise to be minimized. Control systems treat error as signal to be fed back. This project maps the feedback loop logic of servo control onto rolling forecast methodology — and asks: what is the financial equivalent of a PID controller?
When Tesla's BOM fell, the market repriced everything. What does a finance professional see that an investor misses? A deep-dive into how Bill of Materials curves, vertical integration decisions, and capital allocation efficiency interact — with a CPA's eye on the numbers underneath.
Everyone deserves a financial advisor in their pocket. This tool lets you model your full 2025 tax picture — ordinary income, capital gains, Backdoor Roth, NIIT — and find the optimal Roth conversion amount before year-end. Built by a CPA who believes strategic tax planning shouldn't require a $400/hr consultation.
Built this entire platform — design, copy, deployment — through a single Claude conversation, without writing a single line of code. The process itself was the experiment: learning that the bottleneck in AI-native building isn't technical, it's clarity of vision. Every decision that made this site distinctive came from asking the right questions: What is this not? Who is it for? What story does only I get to tell?
From blank canvas to shulili.com live: one session. Tools used: Claude, GitHub, Vercel, Namecheap.
Finance sees what strategy misses. These pieces apply CPA-level rigor to questions about AI hardware, frontier technology, and the companies betting everything on them.
The humanoid robot isn't just an engineering bet — it's a capital allocation thesis. Reading Elon's moves through ROIC, depreciation curves, and vertical integration logic.
Coming SoonMost AI hardware companies burn through runway not on R&D but on forecast failure. What does financial discipline look like when your BOM is a moving target and your production timeline is a guess?
Coming SoonWhen a Chinese company acquires or launches a US entity, the accounting difference is not just technical — it reflects fundamentally different assumptions about what a company owes its stakeholders.
Coming SoonThe data center boom rhymes with the fiber build-out of the 2010s. CAPEX modeling lessons from infrastructure finance that every AI company CFO should read before they hire their next financial analyst.
Coming SoonWhat does it mean to lead with Strategic Thinking in a function that rewards analytical precision? A personal exploration of how Ideation, Futuristic, and Strategic show up — and when they backfire.
The rarest professionals are not specialists or generalists — they are integrators. A mind shaped by high-altitude mountains, cross-cultural systems, and a relentless appetite for how things actually work.
Cloud Rest, July 5th — first time walking that far, that high. Didn't know how hard it would be. Walked until my soul left my body. But I kept going. Then came Half Dome. I used to be severely acrophobic. The cables, the exposure, the 900-foot drop on both sides — Half Dome is where I stopped being afraid of heights. Not because the fear disappeared. Because I climbed anyway, and discovered that fear doesn't have to be the last word. That same lesson shows up every time I take on something that looks impossible from the bottom.
"原来跨越恐惧的瞬间，就是自信诞生的时刻。"
"The moment you cross fear is the moment confidence is born."
A lens trains you to see what others overlook — the light condition that changes everything, the composition that only exists for 3 seconds. The same skill that makes a great photograph makes a great forecast: noticing what's actually there, not what you expected to find.
Light · Composition · Timing · Restraint
5 of top 10 themes in Strategic Thinking domain — rare configuration for a finance professional.
Operating at the intersection of US and China financial systems isn't just technical — it requires understanding how culture shapes assumptions about reporting, risk, and what "transparency" actually means.
ARK Invest reports. Gartner curves. Feynman lectures. Nassim Taleb. The common thread: how complex systems behave under stress. Finance is just one domain that asks this question.
Seven years ago I was settling securities trades in a highly regulated bank environment, learning that precision and process are not constraints on creativity — they are the foundation for it.
Since then: building FP&A functions from scratch, owning $30M+ capital programs, navigating cross-border accounting in clinical biotech, and asking the question that drives everything I do — what does the financial model reveal about how this system actually works?
I'm drawn to companies where the finance function is still being invented. AI hardware. Robotics. Infrastructure at scale. Places where the numbers are hard and the stakes are real.