Receiving government benefits gave Qi’s Chinese American family the stability she needed as a child to eventually make it to MIT. While in college, a bad Wall Street internship experience inspired her to start her own hedge fund out of her dorm room. Learn more about how Qi paved her own path in an industry that’s often inhospitable to women of color.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: This is JobMakers and I’m your host, Denzil Mohammed.
[music playing]
Denzil Mohammed: Immigrants and refugees are a net economic benefit to the United States. Research has consistently shown that they create jobs, fill key gaps in the labor market and add an important dynamism to our economy. This is the case even when there’s initial investment on behalf of the state through education, English classes or welfare. Immigrants pay more into the system when they get out. For Christina Qi, who started a hedge fund at just 22, the welfare she was on in her early years in Utah after moving from China helped stabilize her youth and paved the way for her to attend MIT. She went on to co-found Domeyard, a quantitative trading firm, in 2013, which is among the longest running high frequency trading hedge funds in the world and she was trading up to seven billion dollars a day. In 2019, she founded Databento, an on-demand data platform for asset managers and quantitative analysts. Being an immigrant, Asian and a woman in the cutthroat world of Wall Street didn’t deter her, nor did she forget those who helped get her where she is today. As you’ll soon learn in this week’s JobMakers podcast.
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Denzil Mohammed: Alright! Welcome, Christina. Tell us a little bit about your company.
Christina Qi: I started my first company when I was still a student in college, about almost nine or 10 years ago now and I was in my dorm room. I worked on Wall Street and decided I might as well start a hedge fund ’cause I didn’t get a return offer actually. So I didn’t know what to do, I started trading on my own and eventually realized that this could be my own thing. Then we grew this fund and maybe eight or nine years later, we were trading seven billion dollars a day. We were in a controversial industry that was high frequency trading, which has been in the news again a lot recently, but we never did payment for already controversial things you know described in that book. Mainly the only thing we did was just use technology to do trades. But you know what happened? We started a second company, mainly because at the first company, I spent a lot of my time dealing with data vendors and data-related problems in general and realized that instead of manually dealing with these data things, which takes us sometimes 10 months to a year to get the datasets we need, we might as well try to streamline the entire data licensing process and make data more accessible, more available to everyone out there and to folks like us who were just starting up and we desperately needed datasets but we didn’t have the budget to pay for all the expensive bulk services out there, and so decided to start a more friendly and more bottom up data related service. So, it’s called Databento, it’s my second company. We literally just started it, like one or one and a half years ago now. And yeah, I guess it’s still technically pre-launched, but we did just raise the series C round last week, so I’m really excited to be moving on to something a little bit more meaningful than the high frequency trading firm. And hopefully will help to give people more access to market data and alternative data as well.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s excellent and we’re definitely going to dive into this much more, but I want to learn more about you. And so, perhaps tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what that experience was like. I imagine you don’t have a lot of memories of China since you moved at age three, but growing up with your family in Utah, that must have been such a culture shock, such a change, yeah?
Christina Qi: I barely remember anything about China, but I do remember feeling the shock of moving to America. I grew up in northern Utah, in Logan, actually, which is where my parents were going to school at the time. They were in grad school. But I do remember suddenly just not knowing the language and being shocked because I didn’t know what it meant to move to another country. When you’re three years old you don’t really know that there’s other countries or anything like that. So I think the biggest thing for me is just losing a sense of identity from the very beginning. And suddenly everything is different. I do remember those Asian lunchbox moments, which a lot of my friends talk about as well. My parents would make dumplings and really awesome stir fry and pack it for lunch for preschool, but then all the students would be like, “Gross! That smells so bad. Icky.” And then going home I would dump it in the trash and then go home and demand my mom make me chicken nuggets and French fries. I’ve had core memories like that, unfortunately. Growing up, I was one of the few Asians in my hometown at the time and I think it’s a familiar story for people who grow up in smaller towns or towns when there’s not a lot of minorities or people who look like you. So you do get a lot of questions and people might look at you a little funny sometimes. But I think the biggest thing I wanted to do when I was a kid was try to be American. When I became a teenager, the first thing I did, I dyed my hair. I had a overall good childhood. I’ve learned to appreciate my identity as well as my parents’, who barely speak English.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s actually what I wanted to get into. What was the move like for your parents?
Christina Qi: Oh, for them it was the American dream. The most amazing thing that’s ever happened to them was coming to the United States. I’m just being honest with you guys. Like, when I came over, for me it was traumatizing, it was an identity crisis, it was like “I want to fit in ’cause I’m a rebellious teenager.” But for my parents, they’ve had it so much worse and when they were growing up, they’ve seen things. Even just with the One Child Policy in China, not to get political or anything, they’ve always wanted me to have a sibling and when they came to America finally, they’re like, “Oh, we can finally give you a sibling!” Just having that freedom for them was just incredible. And seeing how friendly people were welcoming to them. So I think they viewed it a lot more differently than how I viewed it. They’re just grateful to be alive and to be in a country where they can pursue a higher education and where they can get an amazing job so easily outside of college. Well, at least back then. Nowadays it’s a little different, during COVID. Back in the day, it, for them, felt so incredible to see this. And also the fact that we were on welfare for some time, but the fact that the government could subsidize my education in their public school, which is amazing, and also pay for my dentist appointments, my doctor’s appointments. I didn’t even know that this was all free or subsidized by the government, but my parents, to be able to have that support and assistance with the government, that was also a dream come true. I wish I could say I was just inspired by an experience, inspired by someone or something, but to be honest, the real answer is just dumb. I started my company out of a series of failures in my life, a series of rejection and failures and bad experiences, to be honest. And in college in America you get internships every summer. At least at MIT, there’s so much pressure that everything just feels like the pressure of getting into an internship even if you don’t qualify. So, I got an internship. We added three internships in finance and the final internship I did was my junior summer where I was a bad intern and I realized I just wasn’t a good fit for the culture and the team and the company that I was in at the time. Being a terrible intern, I didn’t get a return offer, came back and felt very dejected and didn’t know what I wanted to do because you’d have to find full time jobs. The easiest route is you get an internship, you get a full time offer, right? And then you’re all set, but I didn’t get one, and so I came back to campus, didn’t know what to do and started, as a hobby, trading a little bit on my own here and there and this was before the time when Robin Hood came around and made it easy for everyone to start trading. So, we were just trading here and there with other brokers. And I realized, this is really fun! And then just started doing that. And what happened was someone who became my co-founder eventually, his roommate, came from a wealthy family in Europe and they gave us, I think, $100,000, which isn’t a lot of money, but they just pretty much gave us about 100,000 to trade at the time. I think by the end of the semesters, we had made, maybe around $40,000 from that. And I was like, “Holy crap!” I was $40,000 in debt at the time, college loans and everything. If I can pay off my college loans with this, this is a sign that I can do this on my own! So it’s just really empowering to realize. And it wasn’t like we could make a lot of money or anything, but just more like, hey, I could maybe just make a living doing this on my own if I’m not a good fit for the culture of Wall Street at the time, with that company. At least I can do my own company. So yeah, that’s how we started, with just a string of rejections and failures that led into this.
Denzil Mohammed: Women in your field, that’s not entirely common, especially when you started. And so, you really stand out in that regard. Talk about being a minority, being a woman in your field.
Christina Qi: Oh man, I always start with telling this story. I was about to give the keynote talk on stage at a conference, I think it was at the Schwarzman Library in New York. There’s all these data tables, there’s dinner, big gala and everyone was sitting around and we had fun. I was walking up to the stage and a guy there was like, “Excuse me, can you clear our plates? We’re done with our dinner.” And I turn around and he was clearly looking at me and earnestly motioning to his table and the plates and I froze and I was like, “Oh my god, he’s talking to me.” And so I just said something like, “I’ll take your plates as soon as I give my keynote speech up on stage, okay? So just give me 30 minutes. I’ll be back down to take your plates back to the kitchen.” And the whole table, they actually sold it. They laughed and were like, “I can’t believe you just did that.” And afterwards he came up to me and he was like, “I’m so sorry that was not my intention at all. Totally my mistake, mistaking you as a waitress.” And I was like, “Yo, it’s okay, right? It happens.” And he was like, “I promise I’ll never do that again, is there anything I can do, treat you to dinner or whatever you want?” And I was like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just next time, if someone in your company wants to speak, try to promote a woman or have a woman up on stage.” Because it’s pattern recognition, right? If we don’t see any woman up on stage in this industry, then the first time you do, something feels wrong. And so I think that’s what it is, just pattern recognition of making sure the more you give people opportunities, women, POC, minority, people who don’t look like you, to go up on stage and to speak and have their voice be heard, not only is it inspiring to the younger generation, but also, it becomes normal for you and and you stop mistaking them as waitresses when they’re walking up on stage and stuff like that. So anyway, I just told him, “Be helpful to the women on your team and this is stuff that they go through all the time, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah!” And I ended up becoming friends with him. And that’s the thing I realized. It’s a lesson for me because I learned that I could have yelled at him. I could have been rude to him. I could have totally been offended. I was a little bit, but still, right? I used a little bit of humor to reply to that first and then he realized his mistake by himself. People realize their own mistakes, right? And people don’t have bad intentions, right? No one wants to be called a racist. No one wants to say that. People want to improve. And so he realized that he really wanted to improve and I used it as an opportunity to learn for both of us. And I think that was something that was really important. So yeah, that’s in a nutshell what it’s like to be, you know. In the hedge fund space there’s not a lot of women. But also in high-frequency trading there’s not a lot of women who are at the top of this industry as well, and so for me, I did feel lonely at times and there were times when I wish I could have reached out to another woman for help with certain things here and there, but I have a good group of friends and usually what I do when I desperately need help … sometimes people send me very verbally abusive messages or all my emails for instance, or call me different names that only women can get called. And so I’ll just send it over to friends and I’ll be like, “What do you recommend? What should I say?” I have a bunch of friends who are amazing and they’ll come in and be like, “Oh, you should just ignore it,” or “report it,” or whatever it is, but yeah, I think I’m still very lucky to have a support network, to have a group of people who I can rely on whenever I feel down.
Denzil Mohammed: Databento is not your first venture. Your first venture was Domeyard. So, talk us through the process of starting that business and what that was like and give us maybe some of the nuts and bolts so we can learn how to do it ourselves.
Christina Qi: I don’t know how to begin. We started it from a dorm room. We obviously didn’t have any connections or money or much to begin with. And by all statistics, by all textbook means, we should have failed, right? Like if you look at stats on hedge fund success rate, it’s already pretty small amongst established veterans who are starting funds. But then for college-age kids, it’s almost nonexistent. There’s not a lot of college-age students who successfully started a fund or managed to run it for so many number of years before leaving and maybe doing something else, whatever it is. I’ll start with a couple of things. I think the first thing is, there’s a book called Principles by Ray Dalio and it’s a famous book within our industry and also outside of our industry these days. But he writes about all the principles at Bridgewater. He’s this billionaire guy who started one of the most well-known hedge funds in the world called Bridgewater, and so he writes about all the principles that they have and how well it worked for them and how amazing these principles are. And so, when I started my hedge fund, I was a naïve, brash millennial. We wrote a set of principles like that we wanted for our hedge fund. And so, I’ll just give you a list of examples, like we wanted a flat structure, for instance, because we wanted the culture to look more like a Google when you walk into the office. With the free food and I don’t know what else Google has, but we just imagine it would be like yoga mats and ping pong tables and more Silicon Valley style rather than the cold Wall Street cubicles and that culture. And a flatter structure, meaning we hire people maybe three times my age and so just wanted to make sure that there was a culture where people felt welcomed and so we made everyone partner in the company. That was the title of everybody. Anyway, long story short, almost all the principles that we created turned out to be 100 percent wrong in the end. That’s why I’m writing a book about it. It’s because the principles that we thought, like, “Flat structure sounds cool!” and “Who doesn’t want unlimited vacation? Who doesn’t want ping pong tables and foosball and yoga mats and soccer games and book clubs?” All the cool stuff, right? That sounds great, but then we quickly realize like people don’t stay at companies because of the perks like the free food and stuff. People don’t stay because of the yoga mats and the puppies. I would stay because of puppies, but most of my colleagues wouldn’t stay because of puppies. And so then I realized that people stay at companies because their voice is being heard. Because their contributions are being valued. Because they find meaning in their job and they love working with their team and they’re making progress on their learning. And so people stay because of the work itself, ultimately. Not because of the free food and all the perks and things like that. And so we learned that the hard way because people were leaving us in droves! That was part of our origin story.
Denzil Mohammed: You’ve worked at high frequency trading, which some people consider controversial. It’s supposed to make the climate better for amateurs, for retail, but critics say it favors large institutions that have access to big data at the expense of smaller institutions and individuals. And at the same time, you are really passionate about increasing financial literacy among the masses and giving back to underprivileged people. Walk me through this.
Christina Qi: There is sort of a cognitive dissonance. I felt that everything’s callous to be honest. Like even going one step back. In college, my professors, my peers, even my parents were like, “Go out there and do good for this world. Make a difference out there. You’re privileged going to MIT. Go out there and do something better for society.” And then you look at the stats out of MIT. Nearly half the people out of MIT go into consulting and finance and Wall Street or even working for companies like Facebook or Google. One of my co-founders interned at one of these Wall Street firms and was in charge of taking user data and creating ads based on that data. Even that kind of stuff, right? Are you doing good for society, yes or no? Or, is finance doing good for society, yes or no? There’s a lot of gray areas. A lot of cognitive dissonance, I think a lot of students face. And the other thing is that as soon as my friends got a job at McKinsey or BP or Nestle or Apple, Google or Goldman Sachs. Whatever it was, we would celebrate with them. We would bake them cakes and celebrate and of course, everyone would feel that cognitive dissonance of “Oh, my whole life, I wanted to go into nonprofit or make a difference out there on the field somewhere, but I ended up getting an internship at Goldman Sachs or somewhere. So, how do I deal with that?” I think this is some of the justifications I put myself in at the time and I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but to help people understand what millennials go through and what younger people go through in college today, what I told myself was, “It’s a competitive job environment, right?” I was already at one of the easiest majors at MIT and I struggled to get a job. Actually, I got rejected from dozens of internships and finally I got one … and it was, by total coincidence by the way, with Goldman Sachs. And of course I’m going to accept it because it’s a high paying internship, I’m $40,000 in debt. I really need to pay off my loans and so there’s a competitive job environment. I’m just going to get whatever I can do and then the goal is, a lot of millennials will say, “Okay, I’ll work there for a few years and then go off and make it.” And that is true. That happens a lot where people do work for a few years, maybe make enough money or open enough doors that they can go off and work in a more interesting startup or a non profit or something else. That is a pattern I’ve seen a lot more.
Denzil Mohammed: And I wanted to ask about talent. I feel as though you’re so uniquely positioned. Have you had a lot of issues finding talent in terms of your staff in the past?
Christina Qi: Every every startup has trouble finding staff and at the very beginning because no one knows who you are. Surprisingly, it got easier for the most random reason and this is always a shock to people. When Flash Boys came out, Michael Lewis’ famous book, the famous author behind Moneyball and The Big Short, a bunch of movies that have come out were inspired by his books. But anyway, he wrote a book called Flash Boys about high-frequency trading and it pretty much is disparaging the industry and revealing a lot of the sketchy practices like order flow and stuff like that. Thankfully things that we don’t do, but anyway, it did destroy the reputation of the entire industry. And so what happened was, I was at conferences right after Flash Boys came out and I just remember there was someone in the audience from Bank of America and he raised his hand and he was like, “I hate everything you’re doing, you’re evil.” Stuff like, “You should be in jail, you’re front runners.” And he called me a bunch of things and I was like “Whoa,” and then had to learn how to deal with PR and handle crazy going on, that’s all fine, I get it. It happens to every company. But I relay into this story because then what happened was every high-frequency trading firm pretty much got rid of “high-frequency trading” like that terminology, on their websites. They started calling it “electronic market making” or “quantitative trading” or they just got rid of their website altogether because they didn’t want to be part of the PR crisis that was going on in our industry at that time. And so, I decided, “You know what? Let’s just face this head on.” And so, on our website, in big, bold letters, it says “high-frequency trading.” Like 10 times on the website all over the place it said “high-frequency trading.” So what ended up happening was we ended up getting 30,000 job applications in a year all of a sudden because it’s like the, what do you call that effect? Streisand? I don’t know. There’s an effect where people who read this book become interested in high-frequency trading, even though that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to read it and hate our industry, right? But people would read the book and then they were fascinated by this topic. And they’re like, “Wow! I want to learn more. I’m going to work in this space.” I don’t know why, but people got interested in it and so when they Googled high-frequency trading, we were number one on Google search for some time. We won the SEO games because all the other companies eliminated from their websites. That’s how we ended up getting really lucky and ended up getting a lot of applicants, had a huge pool of candidates to choose from. And another thing that helped by the way, another one of the principles we got right in our company, was treating your competitors well. We never disparage another company, right? That’s just cruel. That’s not how I want to live my life. Crapping on another industry, whether it’s high-frequency trading or hedge fund or whatever, I don’t do that. But anyway, we treated other companies very well, including other high-frequency trading funds. We’ve had instances where other funds have shut their doors for whatever reason, right? Liquidated, for whatever reason, and so whenever that happens, candidates will be like, “Where do I want to apply?” You apply to companies that treated us well, right? To people who fairly treated us, back when we were enemies. And so yeah, we get a lot of applicants from other companies’ space as well, which is quite nice. And of course, we’re not for everybody, and that’s great. We don’t expect everyone to apply or anything like that, never implying that, but just saying that. It did help us a lot to just be nice and to have that philosophy in mind that why spend your time hating on everybody else when you can just live your life and do what’s best for you, and do things you love.
Denzil Mohammed: So with your own adaptability, with your own striving for equity and fairness, what are your visions for the future? You’re not even 30 yet. You have your whole life ahead of you. There’s so much impact that you can still have.
Christina Qi: I want to do more. I want to make a bigger impact. I think even today, what we’re doing now, it’s awesome. I love it. I love that it’s closely related to my industry and helping to solve a problem that’s within the financial industry, which is great and giving people access to financial data, but I think in the future I want to do more than that. Maybe that means going out and doing more nonprofit work or helping my community in one way or another. Maybe building a school one day? I always wanted to build a school and to help the education system in various countries ’cause it sucks that people don’t have access to education and things like that, but these are spaces that I don’t have a lot of experience in and so I need to continue reading, learning, listening to people and really trying my best to see if there’s other ways to give back. I think that’s what means a lot to me. And it also took me a lot of years to realize that, but for me, what makes me happy is seeing other people happy and seeing like that I’ve done something to inspire someone or even just getting an email or getting a message saying, “Hey, you’ve been inspirational to me in my career path,” or “You’ve inspired me to go into finance.” That to me is awesome and I’m really happy that I’ve been able to hopefully inspire more women or more minorities to go into the space and to pursue whatever they want to or start a new company and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that’s all. I just want to do better for this world somehow. It’s hard though, because there’s a lot of things that could go wrong, but it’s just something that I hope I can do more of one day.
Denzil Mohammed: And finally, if you had to give one bit of advice to budding entrepreneurs out there, given your unique experiences, what do you think that would be?
Christina Qi: That would be to normalize rejection. As an entrepreneur, on a daily basis, I continue to be rejected, whether it’s by investors, by potential business partners, by potential candidates we want to hire, rejections happen to everybody. And the sooner you can normalize that in your career, meaning like, “Look, it happens. Yes, it still hurts me every time, but I put it on a mountain of rejection called Mountain of Rejections. I just pile it onto this Mountain of Rejections and I move on to the next candidate, the next opportunity, the next investor.” And the sooner you can learn to do that, the more you can learn to move on and to continue efficiently with your job and with your work.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh my goodness, Christina, thank you so much. This was such a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you and I hope that people are inspired by your story and we look forward to so many more things from you.
Christina Qi: Thanks Denzil, thank you for this fantastic opportunity and thank you everyone for listening.
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Denzil Mohammed: Know an outstanding immigrant entrepreneur or have suggestions for future programs? Please, let me know at
Denzil Mohammed: This is JobMakers and I’m your host, Denzil Mohammed.
[music playing]
Denzil Mohammed: Immigrants and refugees are a net economic benefit to the United States. Research has consistently shown that they create jobs, fill key gaps in the labor market and add an important dynamism to our economy. This is the case even when there’s initial investment on behalf of the state through education, English classes or welfare. Immigrants pay more into the system when they get out. For Christina Qi, who started a hedge fund at just 22, the welfare she was on in her early years in Utah after moving from China helped stabilize her youth and paved the way for her to attend MIT. She went on to co-found Domeyard, a quantitative trading firm, in 2013, which is among the longest running high frequency trading hedge funds in the world and she was trading up to seven billion dollars a day. In 2019, she founded Databento, an on-demand data platform for asset managers and quantitative analysts. Being an immigrant, Asian and a woman in the cutthroat world of Wall Street didn’t deter her, nor did she forget those who helped get her where she is today. As you’ll soon learn in this week’s JobMakers podcast.
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Denzil Mohammed: Alright! Welcome, Christina. Tell us a little bit about your company.
Christina Qi: I started my first company when I was still a student in college, about almost nine or 10 years ago now and I was in my dorm room. I worked on Wall Street and decided I might as well start a hedge fund ’cause I didn’t get a return offer actually. So I didn’t know what to do, I started trading on my own and eventually realized that this could be my own thing. Then we grew this fund and maybe eight or nine years later, we were trading seven billion dollars a day. We were in a controversial industry that was high frequency trading, which has been in the news again a lot recently, but we never did payment for already controversial things you know described in that book. Mainly the only thing we did was just use technology to do trades. But you know what happened? We started a second company, mainly because at the first company, I spent a lot of my time dealing with data vendors and data-related problems in general and realized that instead of manually dealing with these data things, which takes us sometimes 10 months to a year to get the datasets we need, we might as well try to streamline the entire data licensing process and make data more accessible, more available to everyone out there and to folks like us who were just starting up and we desperately needed datasets but we didn’t have the budget to pay for all the expensive bulk services out there, and so decided to start a more friendly and more bottom up data related service. So, it’s called Databento, it’s my second company. We literally just started it, like one or one and a half years ago now. And yeah, I guess it’s still technically pre-launched, but we did just raise the series C round last week, so I’m really excited to be moving on to something a little bit more meaningful than the high frequency trading firm. And hopefully will help to give people more access to market data and alternative data as well.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s excellent and we’re definitely going to dive into this much more, but I want to learn more about you. And so, perhaps tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what that experience was like. I imagine you don’t have a lot of memories of China since you moved at age three, but growing up with your family in Utah, that must have been such a culture shock, such a change, yeah?
Christina Qi: I barely remember anything about China, but I do remember feeling the shock of moving to America. I grew up in northern Utah, in Logan, actually, which is where my parents were going to school at the time. They were in grad school. But I do remember suddenly just not knowing the language and being shocked because I didn’t know what it meant to move to another country. When you’re three years old you don’t really know that there’s other countries or anything like that. So I think the biggest thing for me is just losing a sense of identity from the very beginning. And suddenly everything is different. I do remember those Asian lunchbox moments, which a lot of my friends talk about as well. My parents would make dumplings and really awesome stir fry and pack it for lunch for preschool, but then all the students would be like, “Gross! That smells so bad. Icky.” And then going home I would dump it in the trash and then go home and demand my mom make me chicken nuggets and French fries. I’ve had core memories like that, unfortunately. Growing up, I was one of the few Asians in my hometown at the time and I think it’s a familiar story for people who grow up in smaller towns or towns when there’s not a lot of minorities or people who look like you. So you do get a lot of questions and people might look at you a little funny sometimes. But I think the biggest thing I wanted to do when I was a kid was try to be American. When I became a teenager, the first thing I did, I dyed my hair. I had a overall good childhood. I’ve learned to appreciate my identity as well as my parents’, who barely speak English.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s actually what I wanted to get into. What was the move like for your parents?
Christina Qi: Oh, for them it was the American dream. The most amazing thing that’s ever happened to them was coming to the United States. I’m just being honest with you guys. Like, when I came over, for me it was traumatizing, it was an identity crisis, it was like “I want to fit in ’cause I’m a rebellious teenager.” But for my parents, they’ve had it so much worse and when they were growing up, they’ve seen things. Even just with the One Child Policy in China, not to get political or anything, they’ve always wanted me to have a sibling and when they came to America finally, they’re like, “Oh, we can finally give you a sibling!” Just having that freedom for them was just incredible. And seeing how friendly people were welcoming to them. So I think they viewed it a lot more differently than how I viewed it. They’re just grateful to be alive and to be in a country where they can pursue a higher education and where they can get an amazing job so easily outside of college. Well, at least back then. Nowadays it’s a little different, during COVID. Back in the day, it, for them, felt so incredible to see this. And also the fact that we were on welfare for some time, but the fact that the government could subsidize my education in their public school, which is amazing, and also pay for my dentist appointments, my doctor’s appointments. I didn’t even know that this was all free or subsidized by the government, but my parents, to be able to have that support and assistance with the government, that was also a dream come true. I wish I could say I was just inspired by an experience, inspired by someone or something, but to be honest, the real answer is just dumb. I started my company out of a series of failures in my life, a series of rejection and failures and bad experiences, to be honest. And in college in America you get internships every summer. At least at MIT, there’s so much pressure that everything just feels like the pressure of getting into an internship even if you don’t qualify. So, I got an internship. We added three internships in finance and the final internship I did was my junior summer where I was a bad intern and I realized I just wasn’t a good fit for the culture and the team and the company that I was in at the time. Being a terrible intern, I didn’t get a return offer, came back and felt very dejected and didn’t know what I wanted to do because you’d have to find full time jobs. The easiest route is you get an internship, you get a full time offer, right? And then you’re all set, but I didn’t get one, and so I came back to campus, didn’t know what to do and started, as a hobby, trading a little bit on my own here and there and this was before the time when Robin Hood came around and made it easy for everyone to start trading. So, we were just trading here and there with other brokers. And I realized, this is really fun! And then just started doing that. And what happened was someone who became my co-founder eventually, his roommate, came from a wealthy family in Europe and they gave us, I think, $100,000, which isn’t a lot of money, but they just pretty much gave us about 100,000 to trade at the time. I think by the end of the semesters, we had made, maybe around $40,000 from that. And I was like, “Holy crap!” I was $40,000 in debt at the time, college loans and everything. If I can pay off my college loans with this, this is a sign that I can do this on my own! So it’s just really empowering to realize. And it wasn’t like we could make a lot of money or anything, but just more like, hey, I could maybe just make a living doing this on my own if I’m not a good fit for the culture of Wall Street at the time, with that company. At least I can do my own company. So yeah, that’s how we started, with just a string of rejections and failures that led into this.
Denzil Mohammed: Women in your field, that’s not entirely common, especially when you started. And so, you really stand out in that regard. Talk about being a minority, being a woman in your field.
Christina Qi: Oh man, I always start with telling this story. I was about to give the keynote talk on stage at a conference, I think it was at the Schwarzman Library in New York. There’s all these data tables, there’s dinner, big gala and everyone was sitting around and we had fun. I was walking up to the stage and a guy there was like, “Excuse me, can you clear our plates? We’re done with our dinner.” And I turn around and he was clearly looking at me and earnestly motioning to his table and the plates and I froze and I was like, “Oh my god, he’s talking to me.” And so I just said something like, “I’ll take your plates as soon as I give my keynote speech up on stage, okay? So just give me 30 minutes. I’ll be back down to take your plates back to the kitchen.” And the whole table, they actually sold it. They laughed and were like, “I can’t believe you just did that.” And afterwards he came up to me and he was like, “I’m so sorry that was not my intention at all. Totally my mistake, mistaking you as a waitress.” And I was like, “Yo, it’s okay, right? It happens.” And he was like, “I promise I’ll never do that again, is there anything I can do, treat you to dinner or whatever you want?” And I was like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just next time, if someone in your company wants to speak, try to promote a woman or have a woman up on stage.” Because it’s pattern recognition, right? If we don’t see any woman up on stage in this industry, then the first time you do, something feels wrong. And so I think that’s what it is, just pattern recognition of making sure the more you give people opportunities, women, POC, minority, people who don’t look like you, to go up on stage and to speak and have their voice be heard, not only is it inspiring to the younger generation, but also, it becomes normal for you and and you stop mistaking them as waitresses when they’re walking up on stage and stuff like that. So anyway, I just told him, “Be helpful to the women on your team and this is stuff that they go through all the time, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah!” And I ended up becoming friends with him. And that’s the thing I realized. It’s a lesson for me because I learned that I could have yelled at him. I could have been rude to him. I could have totally been offended. I was a little bit, but still, right? I used a little bit of humor to reply to that first and then he realized his mistake by himself. People realize their own mistakes, right? And people don’t have bad intentions, right? No one wants to be called a racist. No one wants to say that. People want to improve. And so he realized that he really wanted to improve and I used it as an opportunity to learn for both of us. And I think that was something that was really important. So yeah, that’s in a nutshell what it’s like to be, you know. In the hedge fund space there’s not a lot of women. But also in high-frequency trading there’s not a lot of women who are at the top of this industry as well, and so for me, I did feel lonely at times and there were times when I wish I could have reached out to another woman for help with certain things here and there, but I have a good group of friends and usually what I do when I desperately need help … sometimes people send me very verbally abusive messages or all my emails for instance, or call me different names that only women can get called. And so I’ll just send it over to friends and I’ll be like, “What do you recommend? What should I say?” I have a bunch of friends who are amazing and they’ll come in and be like, “Oh, you should just ignore it,” or “report it,” or whatever it is, but yeah, I think I’m still very lucky to have a support network, to have a group of people who I can rely on whenever I feel down.
Denzil Mohammed: Databento is not your first venture. Your first venture was Domeyard. So, talk us through the process of starting that business and what that was like and give us maybe some of the nuts and bolts so we can learn how to do it ourselves.
Christina Qi: I don’t know how to begin. We started it from a dorm room. We obviously didn’t have any connections or money or much to begin with. And by all statistics, by all textbook means, we should have failed, right? Like if you look at stats on hedge fund success rate, it’s already pretty small amongst established veterans who are starting funds. But then for college-age kids, it’s almost nonexistent. There’s not a lot of college-age students who successfully started a fund or managed to run it for so many number of years before leaving and maybe doing something else, whatever it is. I’ll start with a couple of things. I think the first thing is, there’s a book called Principles by Ray Dalio and it’s a famous book within our industry and also outside of our industry these days. But he writes about all the principles at Bridgewater. He’s this billionaire guy who started one of the most well-known hedge funds in the world called Bridgewater, and so he writes about all the principles that they have and how well it worked for them and how amazing these principles are. And so, when I started my hedge fund, I was a naïve, brash millennial. We wrote a set of principles like that we wanted for our hedge fund. And so, I’ll just give you a list of examples, like we wanted a flat structure, for instance, because we wanted the culture to look more like a Google when you walk into the office. With the free food and I don’t know what else Google has, but we just imagine it would be like yoga mats and ping pong tables and more Silicon Valley style rather than the cold Wall Street cubicles and that culture. And a flatter structure, meaning we hire people maybe three times my age and so just wanted to make sure that there was a culture where people felt welcomed and so we made everyone partner in the company. That was the title of everybody. Anyway, long story short, almost all the principles that we created turned out to be 100 percent wrong in the end. That’s why I’m writing a book about it. It’s because the principles that we thought, like, “Flat structure sounds cool!” and “Who doesn’t want unlimited vacation? Who doesn’t want ping pong tables and foosball and yoga mats and soccer games and book clubs?” All the cool stuff, right? That sounds great, but then we quickly realize like people don’t stay at companies because of the perks like the free food and stuff. People don’t stay because of the yoga mats and the puppies. I would stay because of puppies, but most of my colleagues wouldn’t stay because of puppies. And so then I realized that people stay at companies because their voice is being heard. Because their contributions are being valued. Because they find meaning in their job and they love working with their team and they’re making progress on their learning. And so people stay because of the work itself, ultimately. Not because of the free food and all the perks and things like that. And so we learned that the hard way because people were leaving us in droves! That was part of our origin story.
Denzil Mohammed: You’ve worked at high frequency trading, which some people consider controversial. It’s supposed to make the climate better for amateurs, for retail, but critics say it favors large institutions that have access to big data at the expense of smaller institutions and individuals. And at the same time, you are really passionate about increasing financial literacy among the masses and giving back to underprivileged people. Walk me through this.
Christina Qi: There is sort of a cognitive dissonance. I felt that everything’s callous to be honest. Like even going one step back. In college, my professors, my peers, even my parents were like, “Go out there and do good for this world. Make a difference out there. You’re privileged going to MIT. Go out there and do something better for society.” And then you look at the stats out of MIT. Nearly half the people out of MIT go into consulting and finance and Wall Street or even working for companies like Facebook or Google. One of my co-founders interned at one of these Wall Street firms and was in charge of taking user data and creating ads based on that data. Even that kind of stuff, right? Are you doing good for society, yes or no? Or, is finance doing good for society, yes or no? There’s a lot of gray areas. A lot of cognitive dissonance, I think a lot of students face. And the other thing is that as soon as my friends got a job at McKinsey or BP or Nestle or Apple, Google or Goldman Sachs. Whatever it was, we would celebrate with them. We would bake them cakes and celebrate and of course, everyone would feel that cognitive dissonance of “Oh, my whole life, I wanted to go into nonprofit or make a difference out there on the field somewhere, but I ended up getting an internship at Goldman Sachs or somewhere. So, how do I deal with that?” I think this is some of the justifications I put myself in at the time and I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but to help people understand what millennials go through and what younger people go through in college today, what I told myself was, “It’s a competitive job environment, right?” I was already at one of the easiest majors at MIT and I struggled to get a job. Actually, I got rejected from dozens of internships and finally I got one … and it was, by total coincidence by the way, with Goldman Sachs. And of course I’m going to accept it because it’s a high paying internship, I’m $40,000 in debt. I really need to pay off my loans and so there’s a competitive job environment. I’m just going to get whatever I can do and then the goal is, a lot of millennials will say, “Okay, I’ll work there for a few years and then go off and make it.” And that is true. That happens a lot where people do work for a few years, maybe make enough money or open enough doors that they can go off and work in a more interesting startup or a non profit or something else. That is a pattern I’ve seen a lot more.
Denzil Mohammed: And I wanted to ask about talent. I feel as though you’re so uniquely positioned. Have you had a lot of issues finding talent in terms of your staff in the past?
Christina Qi: Every every startup has trouble finding staff and at the very beginning because no one knows who you are. Surprisingly, it got easier for the most random reason and this is always a shock to people. When Flash Boys came out, Michael Lewis’ famous book, the famous author behind Moneyball and The Big Short, a bunch of movies that have come out were inspired by his books. But anyway, he wrote a book called Flash Boys about high-frequency trading and it pretty much is disparaging the industry and revealing a lot of the sketchy practices like order flow and stuff like that. Thankfully things that we don’t do, but anyway, it did destroy the reputation of the entire industry. And so what happened was, I was at conferences right after Flash Boys came out and I just remember there was someone in the audience from Bank of America and he raised his hand and he was like, “I hate everything you’re doing, you’re evil.” Stuff like, “You should be in jail, you’re front runners.” And he called me a bunch of things and I was like “Whoa,” and then had to learn how to deal with PR and handle crazy going on, that’s all fine, I get it. It happens to every company. But I relay into this story because then what happened was every high-frequency trading firm pretty much got rid of “high-frequency trading” like that terminology, on their websites. They started calling it “electronic market making” or “quantitative trading” or they just got rid of their website altogether because they didn’t want to be part of the PR crisis that was going on in our industry at that time. And so, I decided, “You know what? Let’s just face this head on.” And so, on our website, in big, bold letters, it says “high-frequency trading.” Like 10 times on the website all over the place it said “high-frequency trading.” So what ended up happening was we ended up getting 30,000 job applications in a year all of a sudden because it’s like the, what do you call that effect? Streisand? I don’t know. There’s an effect where people who read this book become interested in high-frequency trading, even though that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to read it and hate our industry, right? But people would read the book and then they were fascinated by this topic. And they’re like, “Wow! I want to learn more. I’m going to work in this space.” I don’t know why, but people got interested in it and so when they Googled high-frequency trading, we were number one on Google search for some time. We won the SEO games because all the other companies eliminated from their websites. That’s how we ended up getting really lucky and ended up getting a lot of applicants, had a huge pool of candidates to choose from. And another thing that helped by the way, another one of the principles we got right in our company, was treating your competitors well. We never disparage another company, right? That’s just cruel. That’s not how I want to live my life. Crapping on another industry, whether it’s high-frequency trading or hedge fund or whatever, I don’t do that. But anyway, we treated other companies very well, including other high-frequency trading funds. We’ve had instances where other funds have shut their doors for whatever reason, right? Liquidated, for whatever reason, and so whenever that happens, candidates will be like, “Where do I want to apply?” You apply to companies that treated us well, right? To people who fairly treated us, back when we were enemies. And so yeah, we get a lot of applicants from other companies’ space as well, which is quite nice. And of course, we’re not for everybody, and that’s great. We don’t expect everyone to apply or anything like that, never implying that, but just saying that. It did help us a lot to just be nice and to have that philosophy in mind that why spend your time hating on everybody else when you can just live your life and do what’s best for you, and do things you love.
Denzil Mohammed: So with your own adaptability, with your own striving for equity and fairness, what are your visions for the future? You’re not even 30 yet. You have your whole life ahead of you. There’s so much impact that you can still have.
Christina Qi: I want to do more. I want to make a bigger impact. I think even today, what we’re doing now, it’s awesome. I love it. I love that it’s closely related to my industry and helping to solve a problem that’s within the financial industry, which is great and giving people access to financial data, but I think in the future I want to do more than that. Maybe that means going out and doing more nonprofit work or helping my community in one way or another. Maybe building a school one day? I always wanted to build a school and to help the education system in various countries ’cause it sucks that people don’t have access to education and things like that, but these are spaces that I don’t have a lot of experience in and so I need to continue reading, learning, listening to people and really trying my best to see if there’s other ways to give back. I think that’s what means a lot to me. And it also took me a lot of years to realize that, but for me, what makes me happy is seeing other people happy and seeing like that I’ve done something to inspire someone or even just getting an email or getting a message saying, “Hey, you’ve been inspirational to me in my career path,” or “You’ve inspired me to go into finance.” That to me is awesome and I’m really happy that I’ve been able to hopefully inspire more women or more minorities to go into the space and to pursue whatever they want to or start a new company and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that’s all. I just want to do better for this world somehow. It’s hard though, because there’s a lot of things that could go wrong, but it’s just something that I hope I can do more of one day.
Denzil Mohammed: And finally, if you had to give one bit of advice to budding entrepreneurs out there, given your unique experiences, what do you think that would be?
Christina Qi: That would be to normalize rejection. As an entrepreneur, on a daily basis, I continue to be rejected, whether it’s by investors, by potential business partners, by potential candidates we want to hire, rejections happen to everybody. And the sooner you can normalize that in your career, meaning like, “Look, it happens. Yes, it still hurts me every time, but I put it on a mountain of rejection called Mountain of Rejections. I just pile it onto this Mountain of Rejections and I move on to the next candidate, the next opportunity, the next investor.” And the sooner you can learn to do that, the more you can learn to move on and to continue efficiently with your job and with your work.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh my goodness, Christina, thank you so much. This was such a lovely conversation. I really enjoyed talking with you and I hope that people are inspired by your story and we look forward to so many more things from you.
Christina Qi: Thanks Denzil, thank you for this fantastic opportunity and thank you everyone for listening.
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Denzil Mohammed: Know an outstanding immigrant entrepreneur or have suggestions for future programs? Please, let me know at denzil@jobmakerspodcast.org. That’s D-E-N-Z-I-L. So happy that you joined us for this week’s inspiring story of another immigrant entrepreneur. Join us again next Thursday at noon. I am Denzil Mohammed and thank you for listening to JobMakers.
. That’s D-E-N-Z-I-L. So happy that you joined us for this week’s inspiring story of another immigrant entrepreneur. Join us again next Thursday at noon. I am Denzil Mohammed and thank you for listening to JobMakers.