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This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Kurt Workman, co-founder and CEO of Owlet, the only over-the-counter, FDA-cleared wearable baby monitor. Workman and his co-founders Zach Bomsta, Jordan Monroe and Jacob Colvin met in college and launched Owlet in 2015, building it from $0 to $20 million in revenue in its first year. The company went public in 2021.

Owlet has served more than 2.5 million babies, monitored more than 21 trillion heartbeats and collected two billion hours of sleep data, per the company. Additionally, Owlet just launched its new Baby Safety Task Force, a committee created to raise baby safety standards across the category, in partnership with legislators, clinicians and other brands. This piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 I’m a dad of three. My oldest is 12, almost 13, and my youngest is seven. So this product really came from a dad’s perspective, not from an engineer’s or clinician’s. I studied chemical engineering, but it was the wrong kind of engineering for what I ended up doing with the rest of my life.

When my wife was a baby, she had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. They sent her home from the hospital, and she had a coarctation of the aorta and then a bunch of holes in her heart. Ten days later, her mom just happened to check on her when she was going into cardiac arrest, and they rushed her to the hospital. Luckily, they were able to do heart surgery that saved her life. 

So when we were thinking about having kids, we visited my wife’s cardiologist to see if it was okay for her to get pregnant because she’s had three heart surgeries and will likely have more. They said she would be okay, but our kids were at risk of the same thing. I’m the worrier in the relationship, and I couldn’t let it go. How would I know? What exists for parents at home to monitor the health of their baby? At the time, you had a video monitor and a thermometer. That was the tool set for new parents. Neither of those could help.

Then I learned about this technology that they used in the hospital called pulse oximetry, which is now in every Apple Watch and Fitbit. It’s an incredible tool that, through light, tracks the pulse rate and the oxygen levels in the blood. In the hospital, with babies, most of the time they put pulse oximeters on the foot. So we came up with this idea of a little sock. 

When we showed it to a few parents, their eyes lit up. I remember going to a home where the mom had one of these big, clunky hospital monitors that does the same thing, and she just started crying. I was totally taken aback because I hadn’t actually used one of these hospital monitors before. I’m like, What’s going on? Did we offend her? And she was just like, “It’s awful trying to move this thing around. There’s alarms going off all day. I can’t sleep. I would give anything for that.”

We spent three years developing the product. We did six different beta tests. The first one failed miserably. It just kept getting a little bit better. 

It was hard to raise money at first because my co-founders and I had very little experience in that area. On top of that, there was a startup out of MIT that was developing a onesie babies could wear with a sensor that would sense the motion of the belly while they were breathing, and it had already raised money. Then there was another similar company out of San Francisco. Everybody kind of looked at us like, Why would we invest in you? 

Crowdfunding, then meeting investors through Techstars

We launched a crowdfunding campaign, and from the dollars in pre-sales, it was okay. We didn’t have a lot of views on our video. There just wasn’t a lot of awareness. But our conversion rate was much higher than some of our competitors because we were focused on this core element — the heart rate and oxygen — and notifying parents if something changed. 

That focus allowed Owlet to gain some traction. Then we went through the Techstars program in New York. That got us outside of Salt Lake City into a broader network. We met our first investors. One was a woman named Milena Adamian. She’s a cardiologist out of New York City. She had a medical device-focused fund called Azimuth Ventures. Then the other one is John Frankel with ff Ventures out of New York City. He had a strong thesis around IoT and connected hardware. So it was a perfect blend.

When we launched in 2015, we thought that the best strategy would be to buy ads when somebody searched for “baby monitor” on Google. Because millions of parents search for a baby monitor. That failed miserably because they already knew that they wanted a video monitor and audio monitor. So our bounce rate was terrible; our conversion rate was awful. 

Pivoting to educate parents on Owlet’s new category

We pivoted pretty quickly and realized it was all about education. This was a new category. We couldn’t assume that biometric monitoring for babies was obvious — because it wasn’t. We switched the strategy to heavily focus on PR, influencer partnerships, video content to educate, and that started to get some traction. 

Also, we avoided retail the first year. We had interest from Target, Buy Buy Baby and some other retailers. But we wanted to spend all the margin dollars on building awareness and education. We ended up driving 50 million video views that first year. We had a ton of great press. That first year, we went from $0 to $20 million in revenue — with no retail, no partners, no Amazon, just on our website. 

That then opened the door to retailers. We got better placement on the shelf. We had better margins, so we could do more marketing to support the retailers. Owlet just started to explode in retail. This was a new category, so every dollar for retailers was incremental to their baby category.

Going public and receiving an FDA warning letter

Then, in 2021 Owlet went public. That was intense. There were a lot of companies going public through stocks, so there was just a lot of activity happening in the market. We went from going out to raise a round of capital, our Series C, to getting this offer to go public at a great valuation with a lot of money attached to it. The offer was so much better than anything we were looking at raising privately that we decided to go for it. It was an expensive and time-consuming process to go public. Then, right after going public, we got a warning letter from the FDA. 

The FDA said that we had not classified the product correctly. Most of these wearables are wellness devices, and we had positioned our product in that way. All of our labeling, all of our claims, the feature set. The FDA disagreed with that, so for one quarter, we had to take the product off the shelf. We were able to negotiate with the FDA to get it back on the market, prior to getting clearance, with a changed feature set. Then we worked on getting FDA clearance over the next year and a half. 

Getting FDA clearance and regaining sales momentum

In that period of time, our sales dropped by about 30%, then dropped again, before they started to climb back. We got clearance at the end of 2023 — and saw sales double overnight. It was a huge win for the company. But by that point, not only had the stock market kind of crumbled, and you lose a lot of investors through that, but also this FDA overhang created a lot of overhang for the business, and that was a scary time where we had to get to profitability. 

So we built a leaner business. We learned that our biggest expense was marketing. We’d thought that our marketing was efficient and contributing to sales. When we cut marketing by 80% out of necessity — we were spending about $3 million a year — we learned that 85% of the traffic still came to our website, and the other 15% went to our page on Amazon or Target. We were just paying a $3 million tax to Google.

Owlet bridges the gap between hospital and home

Since then, we’ve doubled down on our focus: How do we help bridge the gap between the hospital and the home? Unfortunately, more than 4,000 babies pass away unexpectedly in the home every year. Babies are naturally vulnerable. We’re using healthcare as this giant triage clinic, and our goal was to bring that home. We launched our data subscription platform that built out that data, and this year, we integrated telehealth into our service. So we’re trying to build that ecosystem. We also launched our first hospital partnerships and opened up medical record integrations so that data can flow seamlessly to physicians. 

Even though we’ve had ups and downs in our journey, the level of adoption from parents is amazing. Almost one in eight babies in the U.S. now has an Owlet. We think pretty soon that will be one in five. So the adoption of this new category has been incredible. It’s higher than any other from an adoption percentage basis, higher than any other new wearable. So we’re really proud of that. We’re also seeing incredible adoption of our subscription, which means this data is empowering parents. And, again, we’re the first and only FDA-cleared monitor. It’s amazing what we’ve been able to move in this category.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Kurt Workman, co-founder and CEO of Owlet, the only over-the-counter, FDA-cleared wearable baby monitor. Workman and his co-founders Zach Bomsta, Jordan Monroe and Jacob Colvin met in college and launched Owlet in 2015, building it from $0 to $20 million in revenue in its first year. The company went public in 2021.

Owlet has served more than 2.5 million babies, monitored more than 21 trillion heartbeats and collected two billion hours of sleep data, per the company. Additionally, Owlet just launched its new Baby Safety Task Force, a committee created to raise baby safety standards across the category, in partnership with legislators, clinicians and other brands. This piece has been edited for length and clarity. 

 I’m a dad of three. My oldest is 12, almost 13, and my youngest is seven. So this product really came from a dad’s perspective, not from an engineer’s or clinician’s. I studied chemical engineering, but it was the wrong kind of engineering for what I ended up doing with the rest of my life.

According to iHire’s 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report, 79% of employees who experienced a toxic workplace pointed to poor leadership and management as the cause, citing leaders who were unethical, unaccountable or unsupportive. Executives rarely see it the same way. When performance dips, the diagnosis that gets reached for first is almost always “culture,” a word

I have spent close to 20 years inside companies watching leaders reach for that same explanation. Culture is safe to blame because it points everywhere at once. Naming your own decisions points back at exactly one person.

Fixing performance starts with a tougher question: “What have I been doing, specifically, that’s producing this?” Here’s where to start looking:

1. Notice the distance before diagnosing culture

Executives rarely think of themselves as the reason performance stalls — they’ve usually stopped being close enough to the work to see their own fingerprints on it. In an interview, Jana Boone, SVP of growth enablement at full-funnel digital marketing agency Intero Digital, told me the behavior executives overlook in themselves is almost always the same one: “Poor performance gets labeled a culture problem when it’s often just distance.”

Boone said the more common issue isn’t culture at all, but a leader who hasn’t spent hands-on time with their people in a while and whose instinct is to solve rather than listen. The job has changed since that leader last did it themselves, she said, and they often don’t know what’s actually standing in someone’s way.

Boone’s point cuts against the instinct that made most of these leaders successful in the first place: solving fast. Before assuming a capability gap, she recommended asking a person directly how they’re feeling about the work, the pace and the environment. “And then be quiet long enough to hear the real answer,” she said.

2. Trace the label back to a decision

Boeing‘s regulator ended up saying the quiet part out loud, even while reaching for the same word everyone else does. After a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max mid-flight in January 2024, an FAA audit found that Boeing’s culture had placed more emphasis on mass production than safety standards, Administrator Michael Whitaker told NBC News.

But the specifics he pointed to weren’t cultural in any vague sense. Boeing’s own protocols, he said, weren’t what you’d expect “if safety is the first priority.” The failures traced back to a specific, correctable set of leadership decisions: what got rewarded, what got skipped and what got signed off without a safety briefing.

The lesson scales down well below aircraft manufacturing. Before a team’s output gets filed under “culture,” name the actual decision behind it, including what got approved, what got ignored and what got rewarded that shouldn’t have been. A culture is hard to fix because it’s everywhere and nowhere. A decision has a name attached to it.

3. Ask the question you don’t want answered

Most leaders who genuinely want to audit their own habits don’t know where to start, and that uncertainty is often reason enough to quit before trying. Boone said the self-examination most leaders skip starts with a simple, uncomfortable request: Ask people above you, your peers and your direct reports what they see as your strengths and your weaknesses.

“You’ll get three different answers, and the gaps between them are the point,” she said. The instruction that follows is the hard part. “Don’t explain, don’t contextualize, don’t defend — just take it, and pay attention to where the three groups disagree as much as where they agree,” she explained.

She recommended writing down a personal read on what’s going well and what needs work, and then holding it against what came back from the three groups. The distance between those two lists, Boone said, is the actual audit. Most leaders skip this step for the reason she named directly: “A culture diagnosis produces a workshop, while an honest look at your own habits produces a list of conversations you now have to have.”

4. Reward the problem before demanding a fix

A University of Iowa study found that management teams respond with more urgency to employees who point out a problem than to those who show up with a proposed fix for it, according to researcher Daniel Newton. Newton said the instinct to demand a solution alongside every problem is backward. When people learn they need a fix in hand before they can speak up, they often stay quiet instead, so problems go unreported and unresolved.

That same filter operates at the top of an organization, not just on the front line. If a leader only takes a concern seriously once someone arrives with a solution attached, the leader is training people to withhold the exact information that would trace a performance problem back to a specific decision instead of a vague mood.

Loosen that filter — ask what’s going wrong before asking what to do about it — and problems get named earlier, closer to the source and easier to trace back to something a leader controls instead of a culture that implicates no one.

You don’t need a workshop, a survey or a new deck to fix this. You need to notice the distance, name the decision, ask the people who actually see you and reward the person who tells you something’s wrong before they know how to fix it.

Pick one of those four things and do it this week. Your team already knows which one you’ve been avoiding.

According to iHire’s 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report, 79% of employees who experienced a toxic workplace pointed to poor leadership and management as the cause, citing leaders who were unethical, unaccountable or unsupportive. Executives rarely see it the same way. When performance dips, the diagnosis that gets reached for first is almost always “culture,” a word

I have spent close to 20 years inside companies watching leaders reach for that same explanation. Culture is safe to blame because it points everywhere at once. Naming your own decisions points back at exactly one person.

Fixing performance starts with a tougher question: “What have I been doing, specifically, that’s producing this?” Here’s where to start looking:

Early in the evolution of social media marketing, I was interviewing a recent college graduate for an entry-level position. During the conversation, I found myself explaining how organizations were beginning to embrace social media as an important marketing channel. I spoke confidently about how brands could connect with consumers in new ways and believed I had a strong understanding of where the industry was heading.

Then something unexpected happened.

The candidate began building on several of my points and offered insights that went far beyond anything I had discussed. She understood the platforms, user behaviors and emerging trends at a level I simply did not. While I had learned about social media through corporate training programs, agencies and industry experts, she had grown up immersed in these platforms every day.

Within minutes, the dynamic shifted. I stopped trying to teach and started asking questions. What platforms were gaining traction? How were younger consumers using them differently? What trends did she see that marketers were overlooking? By the end of the conversation, I realized I had learned far more than I had taught.

That experience eventually inspired a reverse mentoring initiative where younger employees shared expertise with senior leaders. More importantly, it taught me a lesson that has shaped every mentoring relationship since. The greatest value of mentoring is rarely the advice being shared. It is the perspective being gained.

Stop treating mentoring like a one-way conversation

The best mentors enter conversations with the belief that they have something to teach and something to learn. They understand that every person sees the world through a different set of experiences, challenges and assumptions. Those differences often create insights that would never emerge otherwise.

This shift in thinking is important because it changes the goal of the relationship. Instead of trying to provide the perfect answer, great mentors focus on helping people think more clearly. They use questions to uncover assumptions, identify blind spots, and encourage deeper reflection. At the same time, they remain open to having their own perspectives challenged. Curiosity creates better mentoring conversations than expertise ever will.

The framework I use to create growth on both sides of the relationship

Over the last 20 years, I have coached and mentored people across every stage of their careers. One thing I learned early is that mentoring becomes far more effective when it is tailored to where someone is in their professional journey.

The challenges facing an employee in their first few years of work look very different from those facing a senior leader. Early in a career, individual wins and setbacks can feel defining. Later in a career, experience often provides a broader perspective that changes how people evaluate opportunities and challenges. Because of this, I rarely begin a mentoring relationship by offering advice. Instead, I focus on creating a deeper understanding of the individual sitting across from me. The process generally follows four steps.

1. Start with self-awareness

Most people are eager to discuss goals, promotions and career aspirations. I prefer to begin somewhere else. The first step is helping people understand themselves more clearly. We explore strengths, development opportunities, motivations and long-term aspirations. The objective is to establish a baseline understanding of who they are today before discussing where they want to go tomorrow.

This step creates value for mentors as well. It forces us to listen carefully rather than assume we already understand someone’s challenges based on our own experiences.

2. Gather perspectives you cannot see yourself

One of the most valuable exercises I use involves gathering feedback from five people within the individual’s network. I encourage them to compare that feedback against their own self-assessment and look for patterns. Where do the perceptions align? Where do they differ? What strengths appear consistently? What development opportunities keep surfacing?

Many professionals spend years relying exclusively on self-reflection. Feedback introduces perspectives that are often impossible to uncover on your own.

3. Separate perception from reality

This is where many mentoring conversations become transformational. Whether we agree with feedback or not, perception influences opportunities, relationships and career progression. The goal is not to debate what people think. The goal is to understand how others experience us.

I encourage people to resist the urge to explain or defend feedback immediately. Instead, sit with it. Look for recurring themes. Ask yourself why multiple people may have reached similar conclusions. Some of the greatest career breakthroughs happen when people stop arguing with perceptions and start learning from them.

4. Refine the stories that define you

Every professional has stories that shape how others perceive their leadership potential. These stories often involve successes, failures, setbacks, difficult decisions and lessons learned. Yet many people struggle to communicate them effectively. The final step focuses on identifying those experiences and learning how to share them with intention.

When people can clearly articulate what they learned from challenges and how those experiences shaped their growth, they become far more effective at communicating their value, leadership style and potential.

Treat every mentoring conversation as leadership practice

One reason mentoring accelerated my own career is that it gave me an opportunity to practice leadership long before I had a leadership title.

Early in my career, I proactively sought out coaching and mentoring opportunities because I knew I wanted to become a people leader. Those experiences taught me how to listen, build trust, provide feedback and help others navigate challenges. More importantly, they taught me how to influence people without relying on authority.

Many aspiring leaders spend years waiting for a promotion before developing leadership skills. I would argue the opposite approach is more effective. Develop the skills first and let the title catch up later. Mentoring allows you to practice leadership every time you help someone. By the time formal leadership opportunities appear, you have already developed many of the capabilities required to succeed.

The question every mentor should ask

Before ending any mentoring conversation, ask yourself one simple question. What did I learn from this person today?

That habit changes the nature of the relationship. Mentoring stops being an exercise in sharing expertise and becomes an opportunity for mutual growth.

Every mentoring relationship begins with the assumption that one person has knowledge to share. The most powerful mentoring relationships end with both people seeing something they could not see before. That is why the best mentors ask more questions than they answer and use the experience to mutually grow.

Early in the evolution of social media marketing, I was interviewing a recent college graduate for an entry-level position. During the conversation, I found myself explaining how organizations were beginning to embrace social media as an important marketing channel. I spoke confidently about how brands could connect with consumers in new ways and believed I had a strong understanding of where the industry was heading.

Then something unexpected happened.

The candidate began building on several of my points and offered insights that went far beyond anything I had discussed. She understood the platforms, user behaviors and emerging trends at a level I simply did not. While I had learned about social media through corporate training programs, agencies and industry experts, she had grown up immersed in these platforms every day.

Every entrepreneur eventually reaches a season when growth slows. Revenue levels off, referrals become less predictable and sales meetings run longer because everyone is searching for answers. Before long, someone around the table says the same thing: “We need more marketing.”

I’ve learned to resist that instinct.

Over the years, my brother and I have built companies in healthcare, staffing, consulting and hospice. We’ve experienced periods of rapid growth and seasons when the numbers refused to move. Early in my career, I viewed every plateau as a sales and marketing problem. Today, I see it differently.

Growth has a way of hiding operational weaknesses. When business is booming, inefficiencies stay buried beneath new revenue. Once growth slows, those weaknesses become impossible to ignore. The plateau is a signal that your business has outgrown its current operating model. Whenever that happens, I spend the next 30 days looking inward before I look outward.

Here’s the operational reset I recommend.

Week one: Listen

The first mistake many leaders make is trying to solve a problem they haven’t fully understood.

My background is in accounting and finance. Numbers tell a story, but only if you slow down long enough to read it. During the first week, I tell leadership teams to stop introducing new initiatives. Hold off on launching another campaign or changing compensation plans. Your only assignment is to understand what your business is trying to tell you.

I start with the financials because cash rarely lies. Revenue may appear stable while profit quietly disappears. Accounts receivable may have doubled even though sales have stayed flat. Labor costs may have crept up because processes have become less efficient, not because people are working less effectively.

Then I leave the spreadsheets. Some of the best operational insights come from the people closest to the work. I sit with department leaders. I ask frontline employees where they lose time every day. I ask managers which decisions keep getting pushed back because nobody owns them.

One lesson I’ve learned while growing multiple businesses is that leaders often diagnose symptoms instead of causes. Someone says scheduling is the issue. Another believes it’s hiring. Finance blames collections, and operations blames staffing. Usually, they’re all describing different symptoms of the same operational breakdown.

By the end of the week, I want three answers:

• Where are we losing time?
• Where are we losing money?
• Where are we losing accountability?

Everything else can wait.

Week two: Stabilize

Once you understand the business, protect its foundation.

Cash flow has always been one of my biggest priorities because I’ve watched profitable companies fail while less profitable ones survived. The difference was rarely demand. It was liquidity.

Healthcare taught us that lesson early. Reimbursement cycles can stretch for weeks or even months, but payroll comes due every two weeks whether insurance payments have arrived or not. If leaders fail to manage cash aggressively, growth can create more financial pressure than stability does.

During this second week, I focus on operational leaks:

• Outstanding invoices get immediate attention.
• Recurring expenses get challenged.
• Projects that consume resources without producing measurable value get paused.
• Inventory, software subscriptions, vendor agreements and purchasing habits all get another look.

This is also when I ask a difficult question: “If I were building this company today, would I spend money on this?” The answer is no, surprisingly often. Businesses accumulate expenses the same way houses accumulate clutter. Every year something new gets added, but very little gets removed. A plateau is the right time to simplify before complexity becomes expensive.

Week three: Align

I’ve sat in leadership meetings where every executive had a different idea of the company’s priorities. Sales wanted growth. Operations wanted efficiency. Human resources wanted hiring. Finance wanted stronger margins. Every goal made sense on its own, yet together they created friction.

As we expanded into multiple businesses, we found that leadership alignment matters more than leadership talent. A room full of talented executives moving in different directions creates confusion much faster than progress.

This is the week I realign KPIs. Too many organizations measure activity instead of outcomes. Instead of asking whether people stayed busy, ask whether the work moved the business forward. Every department should understand exactly how its scorecard contributes to the company’s larger objectives. If finance measures one thing, operations another and sales something else entirely, people will naturally optimize for their own department instead of the business.

I also ask every leader the same question individually: “What are our three most important priorities over the next 90 days?” If the answers differ, communication needs work before execution can improve.

Week four: Accelerate

By the fourth week, the focus shifts from identifying problems to executing solutions. Every priority should have a clear owner, a deadline and a way to measure progress. Otherwise, the reset becomes another productive conversation that never changes the business.

Accountability drives momentum. Every leader should leave the reset knowing exactly what they own and how success will be measured. Once that clarity is in place, the business is ready to invest in growth again. Marketing, hiring and expansion produce far better results when the operation behind them is aligned and prepared.

The real work of sustainable growth

I appreciate business plateaus much differently than I did earlier in my career. What I once treated as a sales and marketing problem, I now see as valuable feedback. A plateau reveals where communication has broken down, accountability has weakened and systems have failed to keep pace with the company’s growth.

That’s why I resist the urge to solve every slowdown with more marketing. The strongest companies pause long enough to listen, stabilize, align and accelerate with discipline. In my experience, sustainable growth comes from strengthening the business behind the numbers before chasing the next opportunity.

Every entrepreneur eventually reaches a season when growth slows. Revenue levels off, referrals become less predictable and sales meetings run longer because everyone is searching for answers. Before long, someone around the table says the same thing: “We need more marketing.”

I’ve learned to resist that instinct.

Over the years, my brother and I have built companies in healthcare, staffing, consulting and hospice. We’ve experienced periods of rapid growth and seasons when the numbers refused to move. Early in my career, I viewed every plateau as a sales and marketing problem. Today, I see it differently.

Christina Qi boasts an impressive resume. As a 21-year-old undergraduate at MIT, she quietly did something most finance veterans spend decades attempting: She started her own hedge fund. At its height, the fund, Domeyard, traded $7 billion in volume per day. 

In 2020, after eight years of running Domeyard, Qi and her fellow founding partners realized that the fund was not scalable, and performance was suffering. “We had a really bad year in 2020; performance was down 12%, and so we told our investors that we were shutting down,” Qi tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. 

She started fresh that year with a different idea, co-founding and serving as CEO of a new startup called Databento. The company strives to become “the single source of truth for financial information,” Qi explains. It provides market data for researchers at hedge funds and AI labs and now has 70,000 customers, including Nvidia and OpenAI. 

Databento raised $97 million in a Series B funding round in July, bringing the startup’s total disclosed funding to about $127 million. Qi has not made the startup’s valuation public. Earlier this year, Databento’s head of quantitative analytics, Lou Lindley, disclosed that the startup had 8-figure annual recurring revenue.

“We grew our revenue almost tenfold from a base well above single-digit millions,” Qi says. “We have a lot of competitors in this industry, which is probably why we don’t share exact figures.”

Despite having customers concentrated in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Qi chooses to reside in her home state of Utah. She runs the business, which employs 38 people, remotely. Instead of seeing coworkers when she steps outside, she looks out at her 10 chickens, two turtles and 15-year-old dog. 

An unconventional founder

Qi explains her entrepreneurial journey “does feel like the American dream to an extent.” She grew up on food stamps and welfare in a low-income household in Utah before attending MIT. 

“Was it harder? Maybe. Look, the starting line might have been a few steps back,” Qi says. “It might have been a little bit more difficult as a result because of where I’m from.”

She adds that people don’t consider her “CEO material” in social settings.

“When I go to a networking event, people sometimes ask if I can speak English,” Qi says. “Or people think I’m a waitress. I got mistaken for a waitress eight or nine times now in my career. Even two weeks ago, I got mistaken as a waitress at a cafeteria.”

People ask Qi where she is “really from” all the time and aren’t satisfied when she tells them she’s from Utah. “People also say my English is great all the time, but it’s my native language,” she says. 

Qi notes that these experiences were frustrating and demonstrated that she had a “disadvantage” compared to her peers.

“I still managed to raise a lot of funding, hire a fantastic team and run a tech business selling to quants, who are mostly men in finance,” she says. “I’m in a very male-dominated industry, and I’ve managed to still be fine.”

Qi points out that her story proves it is possible to achieve startup success even when you start at a disadvantage. She hopes to inspire more people to pursue their dreams and be unafraid of starting their own ventures.

In 2019, Qi was elected co-chair of the board of Invest in Girls, a nonprofit organization focused on financial literacy for high school girls.  She has also held board and committee roles with the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association and 100 Women in Finance, a nonprofit that helps women advance their finance careers.

A shift in mindset

Qi says in the Asian American culture she grew up in, admitting to failure is something to avoid at all costs.

She experienced this firsthand at MIT. As a freshman, she applied to her first internship and received a rejection within 24 hours. “I cried,” Qi says. “I just remember that core memory.”

She applied to 100 internships after that, and then it just became like clockwork. “You realize, Oh, rejection is just normal,” Qi says. “The first time, it hurts the most.” 

Now, Qi considers failure a part of her daily life. Investors and customers reject her every day, and she considers it a part of her job. If she is not facing failure, then she is not doing enough or putting herself out there enough, she says. 

“Part of your job description as a founder, as a CEO, is to put yourself out there, embarrass yourself on stage and get rejected,” Qi says. 

That mindset applied when Qi closed down Domeyard. She wrote in a July 2023 LinkedIn announcement that shutting down the hedge fund “felt like losing a part of my identity.”

“Domeyard will always be my first venture — letting go was one of the most difficult decisions we’ve ever made,” she wrote.

Qi said earlier, in a 2020 MIT Sloan interview, that her friends “inspired” her to step away from Domeyard after a “particularly rough year” in 2020. They urged her to take a break and evaluate her career trajectory.

Databento arose out of that self-reflection. Qi worked up the courage to start the venture despite Domeyard shutting down. She was able to learn from that setback.

The founder archetype

Qi also asserts that it is okay to be vulnerable as a founder. She says there’s a certain archetype of founder who is very cutthroat and steps over other founders to obtain funding and attention. Qi encourages founders to follow a different path and be the kind of leader who supports other founders. 

“You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.”

Christina Qi boasts an impressive resume. As a 21-year-old undergraduate at MIT, she quietly did something most finance veterans spend decades attempting: She started her own hedge fund. At its height, the fund, Domeyard, traded $7 billion in volume per day. 

In 2020, after eight years of running Domeyard, Qi and her fellow founding partners realized that the fund was not scalable, and performance was suffering. “We had a really bad year in 2020; performance was down 12%, and so we told our investors that we were shutting down,” Qi tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. 

She started fresh that year with a different idea, co-founding and serving as CEO of a new startup called Databento. The company strives to become “the single source of truth for financial information,” Qi explains. It provides market data for researchers at hedge funds and AI labs and now has 70,000 customers, including Nvidia and OpenAI. 

In 2009, U.S. merchants paid $62.1 billion to accept credit and debit cards. In 2025, they paid $198.25 billion, according to Nilson Report figures published by the Merchants Payments Coalition. For most businesses, card acceptance is now the largest operating cost after labor.

You would think the rates themselves must have exploded. They haven’t. When the Government Accountability Office studied interchange in 2009, Mastercard’s highest interchange rate was 3.25%. Today it is 3.30%, five basis points in 17 years. Visa’s top rate was 2.95%. It is now 3.15%, but that increase is recent, and most Visa transactions still clear at 2.95% or less. More people paying by card explains much of the growth in that $198 billion total. It does not explain why so many merchants watch their own effective rate creep up year after year while the networks’ published rates barely move.

That gap is the processor’s markup and the fees stacked on top of it. I know, because I helped collect them. I spent more than a decade in the credit card processing division of a commercial bank, as an executive at Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments. During the Great Recession, merchants processed less, so our revenue fell.

Instead of riding it out, the answer was new fees. The day we announced another one, a monthly charge of about $8.95 per merchant ID, the mood was celebration, not regret. I could no longer do it. I blurted out in a boardroom meeting I got into banking to make my mother proud, and I’m leaving because I could no longer tell my mother what I did for a living. That was January 2009.

Later that year, three other former executives and I founded a credit card processing auditing firm to protect merchants from unethical billing practices. Our audits reveal overbilling in about 99% of the statements we review, and more than 90% of the accounts we audit aren’t set up properly from the start. 

Here’s the important math: Interchange, the wholesale cost every processor pays, accounts for 80% to 90% of what a merchant should typically pay. A competitive markup over interchange can be as low as 0.02% to 0.05%. However, commonly reported markups range from 0.15% to 0.90%. For example, on $2 million in annual card sales, the difference between a 0.50% markup and a 0.05% markup is $9,000 a year, not even accounting for additional junk fees.

Before you sign, ask these five questions. Get every answer in writing, signed by an officer of the company, on paper. Not an email, not a phone call. You want something that will hold up in court.

Question 1: “Is my rate fixed, or can you raise it without my signature?”

Nearly every merchant agreement lets the processor change its fees, and even its terms, at any time with nothing more than notice. That notice usually arrives as a line of fine print in the message box on your monthly statement, which almost nobody reads. Visa and Mastercard release rate changes twice a year, in April and October, with more than 200 rules and rates changing at once. A processor increase that lands in the same cycle disappears into that noise. A signed rate is a starting position, not a guarantee.

Question 2: “Will you show me your markup separately from interchange?”

This is the single most revealing question on the list. Interchange-plus pricing shows interchange on one line and the processor’s markup on another. Tiered and flat-rate pricing blend the two, so you can never tell what the processor is keeping. If a processor won’t unbundle it, it is hiding the markup. Then ask the follow-up: Is interchange passed through at cost, or padded?

Question 3: “What happens if I want to leave?”

Look for early termination fees, liquidated damages clauses that bill you for the processor’s projected profit on the rest of the term, and equipment leases that survive after the processing contract ends. Then find the auto-renewal clause. Many require you to cancel inside a narrow window years in the future, and some processors have pushed that notice period out to 90 days before renewal. By the time most merchants look, the window has closed and they are locked in for another term.

Question 4: “Which fees on my statement do you control?”

The card brands set interchange and network assessments. The processor sets much of what sits on top, even when it is named to sound official. “Annual PCI fee,” “regulatory compliance fee” and similar line items sound like government or card-brand charges, and are often pure margin. Ask the processor to label every line on your statement as either a pass-through or its own. Anything it controls, you can negotiate. That $8.95 fee I watched get invented never appeared on anyone’s statement as “extra profit.”

Question 5: “Will you put every verbal promise in writing?”

The classic pitch is a rep quoting a low effective rate that disappears after 90 days, or a promise to match any offer that nobody can find a year later. If the promise isn’t in the contract, it doesn’t exist.

The contract is your only protection

It does not matter how good your rates are if the contract lets the processor change them whenever it wants. Negotiate the contract as hard as the pricing: strike or cap the termination fees, shorten or remove the auto-renewal and lock the markup in writing.

Then keep watching. Processors know most merchants have no idea what the codes and acronyms on a statement mean, and the ones who do have too many other fires to spend hours each month checking for overbilling. That is how accounts drift.

Remember, this is not like other vendor agreements where you validate the bill and then pay it. With merchant processing, you are giving them unvetted access to your bank account — which I often refer to as the “keys to the kingdom.” They take what they want, and then they send you a statement that you can’t read or validate.

Whether you’re negotiating a contract or having an attorney vet it to ensure you are not signing a bad contract that could cost you a lot of money, you should use a firm that is an expert in this space. 

Yes, our firm can help with that, but many others can as well. However, do your homework, too. Make sure they are not a credit card processor pretending to be a credit card processing auditing firm. Check out their BBB, their LinkedIn profiles, etc., and make sure you dont sign anything that is not month-to-month and has a money-back guarantee.  

In 2009, U.S. merchants paid $62.1 billion to accept credit and debit cards. In 2025, they paid $198.25 billion, according to Nilson Report figures published by the Merchants Payments Coalition. For most businesses, card acceptance is now the largest operating cost after labor.

You would think the rates themselves must have exploded. They haven’t. When the Government Accountability Office studied interchange in 2009, Mastercard’s highest interchange rate was 3.25%. Today it is 3.30%, five basis points in 17 years. Visa’s top rate was 2.95%. It is now 3.15%, but that increase is recent, and most Visa transactions still clear at 2.95% or less. More people paying by card explains much of the growth in that $198 billion total. It does not explain why so many merchants watch their own effective rate creep up year after year while the networks’ published rates barely move.

That gap is the processor’s markup and the fees stacked on top of it. I know, because I helped collect them. I spent more than a decade in the credit card processing division of a commercial bank, as an executive at Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments. During the Great Recession, merchants processed less, so our revenue fell.

At 36, I sold the fintech company I had spent years building and walked away with an eight-figure exit. No client needed an answer. No product roadmap demanded a decision. No inbox confirmed that I was useful. I thought it would feel like freedom. It felt like an identity crisis.

As CEO, I had been time-starved but important. My calendar told me where to go, and my business card told me who I was. Then both disappeared. I had achieved the exit many entrepreneurs dream about, yet I had never stopped to ask how I actually liked to spend my time.

It took therapy, experimentation, motherhood and eventually another company to understand that the goal is not simply more time. The goal is time choice: the ability to decide how your hours are spent before someone or something else decides for you.

Don’t wait for retirement to discover what makes you happy

During my first year of time abundance, I treated my life like a research project. I learned chess. I attempted sewing. I tried yoga and Zumba. I took MasterClass courses for no practical reason at all. I was not trying to earn a credential, impress an investor or turn a hobby into a side hustle. I was simply exploring.

That was surprisingly uncomfortable. Entrepreneurs are trained to value activities with measurable returns, and time invested purely in joy is hard to quantify.

That is exactly why it pays to find out what lights you up now. Put leisure on your calendar with the same seriousness you give a board meeting. You don’t need an exit to get curious about yourself.

Being needed is not the same as being valuable

Eventually, there will be no email requiring your attention. It may happen after an exit, a career change or retirement. If being needed has become your main source of identity, the silence can be destabilizing.

I had to separate my value from my speed at solving other people’s problems. Therapy helped. So did doing things badly. Pole dancing class did not care that I had been a CEO. Singing lessons humbled me; I do not sound like Taylor Swift, even when I use my diaphragm as instructed. No art gallery called about my adult coloring.

Each experience taught me something about myself and added a layer of confidence. None of them advanced a business objective. They simply interested me.

Schedule joy before life schedules over it

My mother died when I was 27. She was 65 and had only recently taken her first flight in first class, something she had put off until the timing felt right. Her death taught me that later is not guaranteed. Even so, I kept planning my time reactively.

Becoming a parent made the lesson concrete. Within a year of selling my company, I welcomed a child, and my calendar filled again, this time with sleep schedules, feedings and more household duties. The time abundance disappeared, but the insight remained: Joy does not protect its own place on your calendar. You have to plan for it.

Spend money to buy back time

At 41, I returned to entrepreneurship with a provocative question: Are wealthy parents happier?

The short answer is yes, when money buys back time. Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans found that couples who paid for housekeeping, meal delivery and other time-saving services reported happier relationships. What mattered was how they used the hours they recovered.

I had lived the research before I read it. A night nurse gave me sleep. A nanny gave me more patient time with my children. Grocery delivery, meal preparation and laundry help kept weekends from disappearing. I was investing in the energy to enjoy the life I had built.

Delegate the thinking, not only the doing

That belief led me to found Peacock Parent, a company built around delegating at home without guilt. After talking with thousands of parents, I learned something I had not expected: They were as overwhelmed by anticipating and planning the work of a household as they were by doing it, even when the tasks themselves were handed off well.

I felt it too. I worried about forgetting details. I wanted future needs flagged before they landed on me. And I felt the strain of the sandwich generation: I missed my own mom looking out for me while I cared for my 81-year-old dad.

The lesson for anyone buying back time is to hand off the mental load along with the task. When you outsource something, give away the remembering, the scheduling and the follow-up too, whether to a person, a shared system or a tool. If you are still the one keeping track, you have not bought back much.

Choose how you spend the time you buy

Buying back time only works if you are intentional about where it goes. I will gladly pay an extra $50 for an in-home appointment so that someone else does the driving. I skip the rush out the door, the traffic and the search for parking, and I get my lash extensions at home in my pajamas. I am buying calm as much as convenience.

Then I decide what the recovered time is for. Sometimes it is adult coloring, an audiobook or a hip-hop lesson. Sometimes it is posting on social media, but only when I have something meaningful to share, not to feed an algorithm.

Don’t wait for retirement to decide how you want to spend your life. You can start planning for joy today.

At 36, I sold the fintech company I had spent years building and walked away with an eight-figure exit. No client needed an answer. No product roadmap demanded a decision. No inbox confirmed that I was useful. I thought it would feel like freedom. It felt like an identity crisis.

As CEO, I had been time-starved but important. My calendar told me where to go, and my business card told me who I was. Then both disappeared. I had achieved the exit many entrepreneurs dream about, yet I had never stopped to ask how I actually liked to spend my time.

It took therapy, experimentation, motherhood and eventually another company to understand that the goal is not simply more time. The goal is time choice: the ability to decide how your hours are spent before someone or something else decides for you.

Everyone is asking who AI will replace. Almost nobody is asking the better question: Who will AI release?

It will release the person whose mind produces 10 ideas before breakfast and loses eight by lunch. The person who sees connections nobody else in the room sees but cannot get them into a memo anyone will read. The person who has heard “so much potential, if you could get organized” in every performance review of their career.

For 100 years, the modern workplace sorted people on one dominant trait. It wasn’t intelligence, creativity or judgment. It was the ability to convert thought into tidy, linear output, on schedule and in the right format. If you could do that, you advanced. If you couldn’t, the quality of your thinking never mattered, because nobody saw it.

I have spent decades building software companies, and the pattern held in every one. The most original minds I worked with were rarely the most organized. They thought in webs, not lines. They could hold an entire system in their heads and still miss the status meeting about it. The promotions went to the people who wrote clean documents and answered email in order.

Entrepreneurship has always drawn heavily from these minds. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 29% of the entrepreneurs he studied reported ADHD. The CDC estimates that 6% of U.S. adults, about 15.5 million people, currently have the diagnosis. Many founders with ADHD landed in company-building because it was the only structure that did not punish the way their minds work.

Then AI arrived, and over the past three years it has started removing an obstacle those minds have faced their entire lives.

The packaging problem

Before anyone takes an idea seriously, it has to be packaged. That means hours spent sequencing, structuring, formatting and polishing good thinking into an acceptable format. I think of it as an organization tax: the toll charged between having an insight and getting credit for one.

That work was never equally hard for everyone. A linear, methodical mind barely notices it, because thinking and packaging are the same motion. A fast, associative mind, of which the ADHD mind is the clearest example, finds it punishing. The thinking arrives in fragments, out of order, three threads at once. So the insight dies in a notes app, or arrives two weeks late, or comes out as a ramble in a meeting where a tidier person restates it and collects the credit.

The workplace has always treated difficulty packaging ideas as a character flaw: Lacks follow-through. Needs to prioritize. Not detail-oriented. Those performance-review phrases measure packaging. We spent a century grading packaging and calling it potential.

Now flip the lens. If your career was built on packaging, meaning faithful execution, clean formatting and polished delivery of ideas that mostly originated elsewhere, AI is pointed directly at you.

I wrote here recently about the Prompt Test: If the instructions for a task could be dropped into an AI tool and produce the same output, the role as currently performed is automatable. Packaging is the other side of that ledger. AI absorbed more than instruction-following. It absorbed organizing itself. Structuring, summarizing, sequencing and formatting are now available for the price of a streaming subscription.

The trait the old system selected for hardest is the first one AI fully commoditized. The people who fail in this era will not fail because AI outthinks them. They will fail because packaging was their product, packaging is now free, and they kept defending it instead of climbing above it.

The scattered mind gets a translator

On the other end of the spectrum, something new is happening. For the first time, a mind that produces thought in fragments has a tool that assembles fragments into wholes. You can talk at an AI in 10 directions, and it hands back the through-line. You can dump three weeks of half-formed notes into one window and get back a structure you recognize as yours.

People with ADHD often describe this the same way: For the first time, I can see the bigger picture of my own thinking. The dots were always there. Connecting them was the hard part, and AI connects.

There is evidence behind the anecdote. When the U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade ran a three-month evaluation of Microsoft 365 Copilot across 1,000 employees, neurodivergent staff reported significantly higher satisfaction than their neurotypical colleagues and were more likely to recommend the tool. One said it had leveled the playing field.

What the research shows

The pattern extends beyond neurodivergence. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, with MIT’s Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, studied more than 5,000 customer support agents given a generative AI assistant. Productivity rose 14% on average, 34% for the newest, least-skilled agents, while the most experienced barely moved. A Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group experiment with 758 consultants found the same shape: The bottom half of performers improved 43% with GPT-4, more than double the 17% gain of the top half.

Read together, the findings say AI compresses the execution gap and leaves the judgment gap. Whatever separated the bottom of the distribution from the top in speed, polish and format, AI closes. What it cannot supply is the quality of the raw thinking, the taste to know which of 10 threads matters, and the judgment to see that the assignment itself is wrong.

So the question that decides success is not whether you use AI. Everyone will. The question is what is left of you once the packaging is free. If your thinking was always better than your output, AI is the best thing that has ever happened to your career. If your output was always better than your thinking, you have a harder conversation ahead, and less time for it than you think.

The new sort

Every technology re-sorts the workforce. The assembly line rewarded punctuality. The corporation rewarded organization. AI rewards original judgment and the curiosity to keep feeding it.

That should worry some people and liberate others. For a century, work sorted people by how well they could organize their thoughts. It is starting to sort them by whether the thoughts were worth organizing. Some people are about to be found out. Others are about to be found.

Everyone is asking who AI will replace. Almost nobody is asking the better question: Who will AI release?

It will release the person whose mind produces 10 ideas before breakfast and loses eight by lunch. The person who sees connections nobody else in the room sees but cannot get them into a memo anyone will read. The person who has heard “so much potential, if you could get organized” in every performance review of their career.

For 100 years, the modern workplace sorted people on one dominant trait. It wasn’t intelligence, creativity or judgment. It was the ability to convert thought into tidy, linear output, on schedule and in the right format. If you could do that, you advanced. If you couldn’t, the quality of your thinking never mattered, because nobody saw it.

AI leaders, including two of Anthropic’s co-founders, have cautioned that AI could rapidly replace human jobs, leading to mass unemployment. Now Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is outlining a different future, where AI leads to human labor shortages instead. 

In an interview earlier this week with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Bezos predicted that AI-driven productivity gains could eventually reshape the economics of family life.

“You’re not going to need to have a two-earner income household,” Bezos said. He predicted a future in which AI would allow for one salary to support a family.

Choosing a three-day workweek

Bezos also suggested that AI could change how much time people need to spend earning a living. If the technology delivers the productivity gains he expects, workers could make enough money to avoid the traditional five-day week.

“Some people will also decide, you know what, I can support my family working three days a week,” Bezos said. “That’s what productivity in the economy means.”

Bezos predicted that AI’s productivity gains could allow more people to opt out of the workforce, leaving employers with a smaller pool of candidates to recruit.

“It’s going to actually be difficult to hire people because the productivity in the economy is going to make it so that if people don’t want to work two jobs, they won’t have to,” he said. 

Bezos is not alone in envisioning a future where employees work less because of AI. 

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has also predicted that AI could give future generations more time away from work. In an October 2023 interview with Bloomberg TV, Dimon said today’s children would “probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.”

Elon Musk has offered a similarly optimistic view of an AI-powered economy. Musk said last year at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum that AI would make money “irrelevant.” He suggested that as AI progresses, it will make work “optional,” like playing sports and video games.  

Yet other leaders offer a more pessimistic view

As AI takes on more office work, some leaders have warned that companies could use it to cut staff rather than shorten workweeks — potentially leaving millions of people without jobs.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offered one of the starkest forecasts in May 2025, telling Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years and push U.S. unemployment to between 10% and 20%.

Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering researcher known as the “Godfather of AI,” has also warned that the financial benefits could come at workers’ expense. “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” he told the Financial Times in September 2025. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley raised a similar alarm at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2025. “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” he said.

AI leaders, including two of Anthropic’s co-founders, have cautioned that AI could rapidly replace human jobs, leading to mass unemployment. Now Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is outlining a different future, where AI leads to human labor shortages instead. 

In an interview earlier this week with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Bezos predicted that AI-driven productivity gains could eventually reshape the economics of family life.

“You’re not going to need to have a two-earner income household,” Bezos said. He predicted a future in which AI would allow for one salary to support a family.