Harry Qi, Motion CEO on Agentic Workflows & AI Productivity Tools
Episode description
Harry Qi is the co-founder and CEO of Motion, an AI-native productivity company building an “agentic work suite” that uses autonomous agents to manage calendars, tasks, and workflows for knowledge workers and SMBs. A former hedge fund analyst, he left a seven‑figure finance career in his early 20s to found Motion in 2019 with friends Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu, taking the company through Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch and scaling it to over 100,000 customers worldwide. Under his leadership, Motion has raised tens of millions in venture funding and is positioning itself as an AI-first alternative to traditional productivity suites by deeply integrating multiple specialized agents—like executive assistant, sales, and marketing agents—into one cohesive platform.Topics:
- Why the future of productivity is agent-first, not app-first
- How Motion reached 100k customers by solving “calendar chaos”
- Leaving hedge funds for YC: what Harry learned switching from finance to AI