On the Record with Christina Qi, CEO of Databento
Founder: Christina Qi, Founder of DataBento
Hometown: Salt Lake City, Utah
Hobby: Skiing
Three words to describe Christina: Creative, transparent, scrappy.
What piqued your interest in the STEM space?
When I was a kid, one of my homework projects was to build a Rube Goldberg machine. I remember being drawn to the idea of building something from scratch, testing a contraption over and over again, so that each piece falls into place. Since then, I've enjoyed solving problems at the source, by building solutions from the ground-up. When I saw that market, data is sold manually in 10-month long cycles, I created Databento to streamline the data acquisition process into 10 minutes.
What are some characteristics you developed growing up that you still carry with you today?
I’m stingy. It has shaped the way we do business at Databento. It can be a good or a bad quality, occasionally leading to decision paralysis. I’ve learned how to address that natural tendency and put myself in check to make sure we’re doing things efficiently.
Where does your “stinginess” come from?
My family was poor growing up. My parents borrowed $400 and immigrated from China to Utah when I was three, so they were in debt. They waited tables at different Chinese restaurants earning the minimum wage. After school, I would spend my afternoons at these restaurants and play with sugar packets, etc. The budget was always tight. I learned a lot during that period of time and have taken these lessons with me throughout my life.
You started your own hedge fund while in undergrad. How did that happen?
It was only in college when I became interested in trading. I ended up majoring in management science at MIT. I interned on Wall Street and went from there.
When it came to raising capital, I signed up for every pitch event possible. To this day, I have never won a single competition… But, I kept showing up to them week after week. The pitch event that changed my trajectory was hosted by Microsoft. Thirty startups were invited and there were twenty-five prizes and sponsors. Our “startup” was in the bottom five. I was bummed, but I went to thank the organizer, and she suggested I meet an attendee in the hedge fund industry.
As it turns out, that attendee runs one of the largest hedge funds in town. We spoke for four or five hours. I opened up to him about our passion for starting a fund and our anxieties that keep us up at night. He took out his checkbook and asked how much money I needed. Naturally, I was freaking out. He wrote me a $100,000 check. At the time, I didn’t even know a bank could hold that much money. I was that naïve about the startup ecosystem.
Working at a startup is like a rollercoaster. In one moment, you lost a pitch competition. The next moment, you received a $100k investment.
The lesson from me here is a bit cliché, but it’s to put yourself out there. Normalize rejection. Just show up. You’ll eventually meet the right person; it just takes time.
What led you to starting Databento:
I started Databento after running a $7.1B DV quant fund and spending a decade dealing with dozens of data vendors. Data is overpriced, with a slow, manual sales process, and information hidden behind paywalls. Databento is the first "data-as-a-service" platform for market data, streamlining the data acquisition process from 10 months to 10 minutes.
What are you most excited about and looking forward to during 2021?
We are gearing up to publicly launch Databento in the next few months. Stay tuned!
Christina Qi is the CEO of Databento, an on-demand data platform for asset managers and quants. She is also a Founding Partner of Domeyard LP, among the longest running HFT hedge funds in the world. Christina started Domeyard 8 years ago from her dorm room with $1000 in savings. Domeyard trades up to $7.1 billion USD per day. Her company’s story has been featured on the front page of Forbes and Nikkei, and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, and the Financial Times. Christina is a contributor to the World Economic Forum’s research on AI in finance. She is a visiting lecturer at MIT, including Nobel Laureate Robert Merton’s “Retirement Finance” class since 2014, and alongside President Emerita Susan Hockfield and Dean David Schmittlein in 2019. Christina teaches Domeyard’s case study at Harvard Business School and other universities.
Christina was elected as a Member of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s Board of Trustees. She was elected Co-Chair of the Board of Invest in Girls in 2019. Christina also sits on the Board of Directors of The Financial Executives Alliance (FEA) Hedge Fund Group, drives entrepreneurship efforts at the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association (MIT SBAA), and served on the U.S. Non-Profit Boards Committee of 100 Women in Finance for five years. Her work in finance earned her a spot on various "X Under X" lists, including Forbes 30 Under 30, where she is now a board member. Christina holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Science from MIT and is a CAIA Charterholder.
Christina is publishing a book in 2021, titled The Finance Snake: A Memoir About My Billion Dollar Hedge Fund.
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