I'm Harry Li.

I spent a decade building technology at scale—first as an engineer at Meta, then as a founding engineer at Summit Public Schools and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

In 2019, I became CTO at Braven, an education nonprofit. The role was supposed to be about product, data, and engineering. But I quickly learned that at a nonprofit, "CTO" means owning whatever technology problems exist—including IT operations that had no dedicated staff.

I needed to hire interns to help manage IT processes, but there was no budget for it. So I started digging through our vendor contracts and technology spending. I found the $20k. It was just sitting there—unused licenses, forgotten discounts, redundant tools. Money we were handing to Google, Asana, and Slack that could have been funding people.

That experience taught me something: this drain isn't just a Braven problem. It's an everywhere problem. No one's job is ongoing vendor stewardship. Contracts auto-renew. Discounts go unclaimed. Licenses accumulate. And every dollar that leaks to SaaS platforms is a dollar that doesn't reach students.

My firm gives education nonprofits the ongoing technology stewardship they rarely have headcount for — so every dollar in your tech budget actually serves your mission.

That stewardship shows up in three ways:

  • •Recover trapped capital already hiding in your existing SaaS spend — renegotiating vendors, right-sizing licenses, and clearing out what you're paying for but not using.
  • •Source new technology with clear eyes — clarifying real needs, surveying the market, and negotiating contracts that won't quietly become expensive later.
  • •Counsel you on the ongoing decisions in between — contracts to review, renewals to track, and questions that benefit from a second set of expert eyes.

I combine Big Tech technical depth with firsthand nonprofit operations experience—a combination that lets me see waste internal teams miss, design systems that actually fit how you work, and stay alongside you as a thought partner through implementation.

My clients are education nonprofits with $10M+ budgets who want their technology spend to reflect good stewardship, not quiet drift. Most start with Recover — which is performance-based: you pay nothing unless I deliver, and only after savings hit your account.

From there, many continue into Source or Counsel — using recovered dollars to fund smarter buying decisions and ongoing oversight, so the wins compound rather than quietly erode back over time.

I currently serve on the boards of Braven New Jersey and The Cooper School in Montclair. I've published in academic computer science journals, presented to nonprofit boards, and implemented technology changes that actually stick.

Curious what's hiding in your technology budget?