Haseeb Qureshi

Actually, when I left Airbnb, so I was working at Airbnb as a software engineer, I remember writing down on a piece of paper what, I knew that I wanted to build a company.

That was like my, just the thing in my mind is that I should- Or what company?

Yeah, what company?

What should I build in?

And there were two fields that I thought about going into.

The first one was crypto and the second one was AI.

Now, this was in 20- This was- This was 2016.

It was 2016.

Wow.

Now, at the time, AI was not like what it is today, right?

AI was basically you need a machine learning PhD in order to be a real meaningful contributor at the frontier of AI.

And so what I told myself is like, look, if I go into AI today, I'm playing from behind.

The people who are really contributing in this industry are machine learning PhDs who have been doing this for a long, long time.

And I'll always be from behind because I have this weird non-conventional background.

But if I go into crypto, in crypto, nobody knows anything.

There are no crypto PhDs.

Everybody just figured this out 10 minutes ago.

It's a brand new industry.

No rules.

Everybody is learning at the same time.