A quant who decided people were more interesting than markets
Most people spend their twenties trying to get the job Harry Qi already had. He gave it back.
By the time he was 23, Qi was a quantitative trader at Optiver pulling in around a million dollars a year - hedge-fund speak for the person who turns statistical models into stock-market bets. The math worked. The salary worked. What did not work, apparently, was the feeling that came with it. In 2019 he left, and the version of his future where he kept trading is one he can still estimate with a trader's precision: “I'd probably be making somewhere between 3 and 10 million a year right now.” He says it the way you'd read a number off a screen, then moves on.
Today he runs Motion, an AI productivity company that does not sell software so much as staff. The pitch is blunt: instead of buying another app, you hire a team of AI employees - an executive assistant that schedules your day and writes your email, a sales rep, a support agent, a marketing assistant - and they go to work inside your business. Motion calls it an “agentic work suite.” Qi calls it the start of something the size of Microsoft.
There's an opportunity here to build the next Microsoft. You basically have to build all the applications.
That is not a modest sentence, and Qi knows it. But the numbers underneath it have stopped being a joke. The B2B agent bundle that Motion launched in May 2025 went from zero to more than ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue in roughly four months. The company grew around 300% year over year. Net revenue retention sits north of 140%, gross margins above 90% - the kind of clean, compounding business a former quant would design if you handed him a spreadsheet and told him to build something beautiful. In September 2025, investors agreed: Motion raised a $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners, five times oversubscribed, at a $550M post-money valuation.
The part where nobody wanted it
Rewind five years and the story is far less tidy. Qi started Motion in 2019 with two friends - Omid Rooholfada, who he had known since high school, and Ethan Yu, a college friend who was also trading at a hedge fund. They built an AI calendaring and task app, applied to Y Combinator, got into the Winter 2020 batch, and quit their jobs to do it for real.
Then came the unglamorous middle. Before anything clicked, the team pivoted roughly a dozen times and shipped eight separate MVPs. Each one followed the same arc: build it, launch it, discover nobody needed it. At YC Demo Day - the moment startups are supposed to be anointed - about 150 investors looked at Motion and passed. For a person who had been paid to be right about probabilities, the early odds on his own company were brutal.
It's dangerous to start with a solution instead of a problem, because then you try to fit a problem into your solution.
The turn came from a piece of advice, delivered by YC partner Michael Seibel: focus on a single problem and dive deep into it. Qi took it literally. The team stopped chasing features and started chasing one specific pain - knowledge workers drowning in their calendars and inboxes. They ran manual onboarding by hand, refusing to automate the thing that taught them the most. They politely declined feature requests from customers who weren't the target. And they learned to read their two instruments differently: data tells you what isn't working, Qi says, but talking to users tells you why.
Decisions, priced like trades
You can take the trader off the desk, but the desk stays in the trader. Qi runs arguments inside his own company on a confidence threshold. If he reckons he is only about 55% likely to be right, he concedes and optimizes for speed - the cost of being wrong is low and the cost of delay is high. If his confidence climbs past 80%, he digs in and fights. It is the closest thing to a personal trading book applied to management: size your conviction, then bet accordingly.
He hires the same way he reasons - for speed of execution, raw logic, and a willingness to work on anything, including customer support, regardless of the title on the offer letter. The founding trio's edge, he says, is bluntness. “We can also move more quickly because we cut out the bullshit when we communicate.” Three friends who knew each other long before they were colleagues, arguing fast and forgiving faster.
Why he stays
The honest accounting is that Motion has, so far, cost Qi money relative to the finance career he abandoned. He talks about that openly, and then explains why it doesn't move him. “At some point you just want to make a much bigger impact on this world,” he says. And, more plainly: “What gets you out of bed is just knowing you actually built something useful.”
There is a quieter tell in how he describes the job. As CEO of a company valued north of half a billion dollars, he still talks about onboarding users by hand and answering support himself - not as nostalgia, but as strategy. The man who could be making eight figures trading volatility instead spends his days watching small businesses try to get an AI to book a meeting correctly. If that sounds like a downgrade, Qi would point you back to his confidence threshold. He is well past 80% on this one.
His read on growth is unsentimental too. “Growth is our biggest challenge right now,” he has said. “Startups aren't startups without a need to grow fast.” It is the rare founder line that sounds less like a motivational poster and more like a risk parameter. Which, coming from Harry Qi, is exactly the point.