Harry Qi's journey from a high-earning quant at a hedge fund to the founder of an AI startup called Motion offers a refreshing tale in today's AI boom: financial success isn't always the endgame. Instead, Qi found purpose in creating practical AI solutions that help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) streamline tasks traditionally bogged down by manual work.
What's intriguing here is the ambition—not just to offer a single AI tool, but to create a unified suite of assistant agents that function like a seamless office productivity suite. Think Microsoft Office for AI agents: integrated, interoperable, and essential. This approach solves a common problem in AI adoption—the fragmentation of point solutions that don’t 'talk' to each other. Motion's multi-agent system, ranging from executive assistants to sales and marketing bots, addresses real-world workflow complexities, making AI less of a shiny gadget and more of a practical teammate.
Qi's candid reflection on choosing purpose over paycheck punches nicely at a core tension many founders and technologists face—profit vs. impact. While he admits the startup path is financially less lucrative right now, the payoff lies in creating something genuinely useful that tangibly improves lives, productivity, and revenues for hundreds of SMBs.
For the rest of us watching from the sidelines, it’s a reminder that innovation isn’t just about flashy breakthroughs but also about pragmatic integration and solving everyday challenges. As AI tools multiply, the winners will be those who unify the ecosystem rather than fragment it further.
So next time you grumble about juggling multiple AI tools, think about how a Motion-like orchestration could turn that chaos into harmony. After all, AI shouldn't just be smart—it should play well with others. Source: Y Combinator-backed Motion raises fresh $38M to build the Microsoft Office of AI agents
