Christina Qi, SB ’13, is the co-founder and CEO of Databento and the first undergraduate Sloanie to appear on this podcast. Her path runs from day-trading out of a Harvard dorm room, where her HFT firm Domeyard peaked at 25,000 trades a day, to founding Databento and nearly losing it: a bridge round raised with almost negative runway, investors who signed financing docs and never wired, and finally a $97M Series B that made it all look inevitable.

The heart of the conversation is what Databento actually does and why it wins: harmonizing market data across exchanges so that, in her phrase, "all the books are in one language." Qi is candid about the industry’s lack of competition, customers who leave over price come back, she says, because there’s nowhere else to go, and about what the product still lacks. She also takes aim at AI hype ("maybe this is why I hate AI": companies incorporated today claiming $100M ARR by November), and explains how AI data-center demand priced her disaster-recovery site out of Utah and into Portland.

Woven through is the Sloanie thread: serving with host Christopher Reichert on the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association board, getting a C-minus in Bob Merton’s class, and the parents who came from China and settled in northern Utah. It closes on her definition of success, the number of hours you can spend doing the thing you truly want, without consequences.

Key Topics: 

•⁠  ⁠Harmonizing market data across exchanges into one API

•⁠  ⁠Surviving near-zero runway to a $97M Series B

•⁠  ⁠Why market data has almost no real competition

•⁠  ⁠AI hype versus building something durable

•⁠  ⁠From dorm-room day trading to founding Databento

•⁠  ⁠How AI demand is reshaping data-center geography

•⁠  ⁠MIT Sloan, family, and defining success as time spent playing video game 

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