00:05:35 · Annanay Kapila
He left his job at Citadel, which is one of the top hedge funds in the world. Job was going pretty well, and you had a lot of money saved up. I wouldn't be under any financial pressure. Once that side of the equation was solved for and I had some decent money in the bank, then I thought, okay. It's it's time to do something that, you know, I wanna make my life's work. I left my job in February 2025. You know, I was really getting to the point where I was thinking, hey. You know, can can anything really go wrong if I spend, you know, two, three, four, five years of my life, let's say, and and and things that don't don't really work out. You know, we applied for funding from Y Combinator. We applied. You know, Josh calls me, and I'm, like, in Austria watching some opera show. He's like, oh, we want an interview. We want an interview. We have to come. I flew the same day back to London. They ask questions that really test whether you've got into the details of understanding where the problem lies and what the why now moment is. Like, why is now the right time to build this idea? PG explained this to us. They didn't think about things like what's the probability of this idea succeeding. They just wanna know the probability is bigger than zero. Even if it's 1%, but it's a huge idea and you're a good team, they'll fund you. I'm aware that the company we're doing right now, right, it's either gonna make me like $50,000,000 or zero. Because like exchange is like... It's not like a 10,000,000 ARR business. Like, it'll never be a 10,000,000 ARR business. It's either zero or huge. And they said, is this a huge idea? And are these guys the right people to do it? The next day, we got the offer, and then we're like, okay. And now that we have funding, we can probably build it. But building in fintech is always tough because you can't launch something if it breaks to say sorry to your customers. Right? That's like a real breach of trust. The hardest day... It was during YC, actually. We'd actually launched the exchange internally, just YC. We were kind of forced by our partners to launch early because they were like, you used to do this, otherwise, you'll never get user feedback. Just just do it right right now. I like... I'm very jet lagged. So I worked with three m. My cofounder's there, he's like, oh, man. The exchange has blown up. We looked at everyone's result.
00:07:29 · Annanay Kapila, S1, S2
Like, somebody was plus $1,000,000. Somebody was minus $1,000,000. He was like, oh, man. We only gave them, a $100 to play with. Like, how has this happened? So we had to basically spend all day reconstructing what had happened, figuring out how much money everyone owed and how much they didn't owe, reimbursing some people. That was the first time we took a loss as a company where we had to say, oh, we're sorry. It says that you're minus $100, but we don't think this is right. We'll just give you a $100. Luckily, it was still small scale. It wasn't like a big loss for us. The issue was it really hit home how difficult it is to build a Ad[00:08:00] S1: Your website can do a lot more than you think. With Base 44, describe what you want in your own words and build a website that looks your way and works your way. Let people book with you or buy from you with hosting already included. Then help more people discover your site with built in search tools, social content, and Google Ads. Built the website you've got in your head on base40four. Go to base44.com. That's base44.com. Ad[00:08:30] S2: Honey, that flu keeping you up? Yeah. I don't got this. You need Nyquil intense flu. Undo your flu symptoms with Nyquil intense flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever, best sleep with the flu medicine. You do got this. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.
00:08:44 · Annanay Kapila
[00:08:44] S0: Twenty four seven, perfect, fully available system that keeps track of... You if run something twenty four seven, like, anything can go wrong, anytime. Right? Lightning bolt can happen, fire in the data center, whatever. We didn't sleep properly for days after that because we were like, we don't want this to happen in life. Right? Because if we do, it's game over for us in exchange. I think the reason the partners made us do it is to make... Basically make us grow up and realize the gravity of the situation we were in. That was a really tough time. Both the best days of our life and the worst days of our life, we were working all the time, like, hundred hours a week, very focused, very frenetic. You know, there's some misconceptions maybe about how fundraising happens in Silicon Valley. It's very quick. If the check size is less than 500 k, typically, a thirty minute meeting and you get the decision, like, on the call or just after. If it's kind of a bigger check, then... Yeah. We had a first meeting and a second meeting in person, which was, you know, both of thirty minutes, let's say, roughly. And day one, we had a bunch of angels. We got some money. And then we stopped taking angel money. Yeah. Then it was about the bigger funds. So, you know, we had two major funds. One was General Catalyst. One was Nexus Venture Partners. Was around close to 95,000,000 valuation. We weren't making any revenues. We were pre revenue. The only point in raising venture money is if you can be massive. When you have to be at, like, a huge scale, then a VC will find it very hard to say no. And I think, you you guys are based in San Francisco. What was very interesting to me kind of being in London for a while, now we're in New York. In London, New York, people are very concerned with how much money someone has, how much money they make, how much money they have in their bank account, how much money they're gonna make in the future. Everything's about money. San Francisco, people really, I think, don't talk about that as much or don't think about it as much. They're much more concerned with, you know, impacts, that kind of thing. And it was really useful to live in San Francisco for, like, four months. HFT strategies don't lose money. Right? Like, you can't even lose money doing HFT.
00:10:20 · Annanay Kapila
If you lose money on a particular day, you get, like, an email from your boss, like, what what the hell happened? Silicon Valley approach is, like, you know, let's try and make something that's gonna make, like, a billion dollars in five years' time, but don't even think about the money. Right? It's, like, not even on the scale, which is, like, a new way of thinking. That was a nice part of being in San Francisco. You know, what we wanted to do is make sure everyone trades on the same equal playing field level terms. If wanna buy Tesla, Tesla trades on Nasdaq exchange, but the interface is through Robinhood. And there's another intermediary, is called a clearinghouse, which basically does the risk management and settlement. Right? It's that intermediation, three separate companies involved in doing one trade that should really just be done by one company that's as most efficient as possible. That's really what we're offering. On QFEX, our pricing is completely transparent. Right? So we don't make money from this, like, profit share agreement. We just make money from fees. Our fees are as low as possible. We actually give a lot of our fees back to users if you kinda refer your friends or whatever. It's similar to Stripe, if you want, like, a direct comparison. Stripe really released the frictions when it comes to doing payments. We're reducing the frictions when it comes to trading. And so much money trades through financial markets in ways in ways that people don't even understand that even if you make small improvements, they have massive downstream impact. I think the best founders always have that, you know, that the company they're working on is their life's work. Right? Like, they want it to be their legacy. It's more than just money for them, and I was ready to reach that stage where I I was no longer just thinking about the money. You know, there's an element of me that's, you know, doing the current company for the money, but it... There's also an element of, you know, we wanna go out there and be the change in the world that we wanna see, and here's a very obvious change that I see now that I think not a lot of other people can work on. Is this what you wanna tell your kids that you spent your life doing? Do you think this job will still be around in five, seven years' time?
00:11:57 · Annanay Kapila
If you're still a young person, you should be optimizing for learning and optimizing for growth, not optimizing for how much money you're making right now.