A day in the life of Convergence Ventures’ founder Adrian Li

Day in the Life is a series where personalities in the Asian tech community recount what they do on a typical day. Read more from the series here.

I’m currently the founder and managing partner of Convergence Ventures, an Indonesia focused early-stage venture fund that I started about four years ago.

I’ve been in tech close to 20 years, working on internet-based business ideas while at University in Cambridge. However, I started my first company, an online education business in 2005 while at Stanford.

Then, I later moved to China to build the business. I ran the company for five years before it was acquired. I then worked with Rocket Internet before helping co-found a Indonesian food directory called Qraved. I started Convergence Ventures with Donald Wihardja in late 2014.

Here’s a day in my life now.

Morning rituals

On a standard day, I’d wake up pretty early—generally somewhere between 5 am and 5:30 am.

My day starts with a very standard three-part ritual: When I wake up, I do about 10 minutes of mediation—breathing and composing myself for the day. This is also the best time of day for me to read, so after meditation, I spend 10 minutes reading. I generally read non-fiction and have several books which I read in parallel on my Kindle.

Currently, I’m reading Bitzscalling by Reid Hoffman.

I follow this with 10 minutes of writing in my journal about my prior day, any insights, wins, and what I’m grateful for. I’ve kept a journal now for almost three years, and it helps remind me about my journey.

These daily morning habits help me feel like I’ve gotten a great start every day.

I’m very big on staying fit and healthy, and my “drug” of choice is triathlon. I spend about five to six hours a week training. On a weekday, this would generally mean about 40 minutes of either swimming, running, or biking.

I try and get my exercise done before my kids are up (normally at about 7:30 am), so I can see them off to go to school.

After my exercise, I try and get through any emails that have come in from the night before. Once I’ve done this, I hit the day.

Internal meetings until “lunch”

External meetings

After work hours

On weekends