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Harry Qi

Co-Founder & CEO at Motion - we are hiring!

Harry Qi - Angel Investor & Co-Founder of Motion

Harry Qi is a prominent angel investor and the co-founder and CEO of Motion, a startup accelerated by Y Combinator in 2020. Some key facts about Harry Qi:

Experience

  • Co-Founder & CEO at Motion (July 2019 - Present)
    • Motion raised $13 million in Series A funding from investors like SignalFire, Michael Seibel, Sam Altman, and 468 Capital.1
  • LP & Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund (November 2020 - Present)
  • Angel Investor in various startups (November 2020 - Present)
    • Some of his angel investments include Aviron, Anakin, Bloom, Canopy, Fluent, Prune, Simplify, Varos, and Verse Medical.1
  • Quantitative Trader at Optiver (July 2017 - July 2019)

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics from Dartmouth College (2013 - 2017)
  • Attended Y Combinator in 20201

Awards & Honors

  • Valedictorian of 520 graduates at Rancho Bernardo High School (2013)
  • National AP Scholar (2013)
  • Putnam Top 200 (2013)
  • Third Place Overall at MIT Trading Competition (2015) and UChicago Algorithmic Trading Competition (2016)
  • Winner of Jane Street Electronic Trading Challenge at Harvard (2017)1

As an angel investor, Harry Qi has made over 150 investments in startups across various industries.2 He is known for investing in novel business concepts, backing founders with a global mindset, and helping companies expand internationally.2

Motion, the startup Harry co-founded, is building software to help brands and creators build AI-powered virtual assistants. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch and has raised a total of $13 million in funding to date.13

Highlights

Sep 26 · linkedin

We are launching on Product Hunt today! By automating team project management and resource planning with A.I., Motion's vision is to double the world's productivity.

Sep 19 · linkedin

We are excited to announce our $13m series A led by Jonathan Lim at SignalFire, with participation from Philipp Seifert at 468 Capital. Other amazing investors in Motion include Sam Altman, Michael Seibel, Julian Weisser, Tyler Willis, Sander Daniels, Cyrus Mistry, Alex Bass & Andra Vomir, Victor Wang, Liz Willits, Tarik Sehovic, HOF Capital, Tuesday Capital, Y Combinator, and many other founders & operators of successful companies.

Knowledge workers still spend 58% of their day coordinating work instead of doing work. With Motion’s resource planning automation, every company can dramatically increase their productivity.

Motion automatically plans what each team member should work on every day based on their team’s projects and calendars. For each project or task, you can tell Motion how long it will take, its priority, the deadline, and other helpful information. Motion then automatically adjusts each team member’s calendar and task priorities into an optimal schedule. Whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendars so everything gets done.

We’ll use the money to continue investing in product & engineering. Our top priority is improving our task planning automation algorithm. We believe the prioritization algorithm (the way in which Motion plans your tasks) is the real differentiation that no one else has nailed yet. Solving scheduling is a difficult engineering problem. There are so many variables to account for when personalizing a schedule to each user, and this must be done while satisfying performance and efficiency constraints.

Solutions today like Monday and ClickUp ask users to do this manually. It’s easy for a team to dump all their tasks (which they’ll never finish) into an app. It’s difficult to figure out a great execution plan. Over time, Motion will automate more and more of our days. Motion will help manage and automate everything from top-level OKRs to individual projects and tasks, to daily planning, calendaring, meeting scheduling, and coordination.

We believe that fundamentally magnifying human output without increasing input (e.g. time) is a trillion-dollar market with billions of users.

We are grateful for all of our team members and users who've been part of this journey, and we’re more fired up than ever to double the world’s productivity.

We'd love for you to join us on this mission! We are hiring for many roles across the board. Come join a rocketship that's growing 5x y/y on a 7-figure ARR!

See links to our TechCrunch article, blog, and job posting in comments!

Related Questions

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Harry Qi
Harry Qi, photo 1
Harry Qi, photo 2
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Location

Houston, Texas, United States