HASEEB QURESHI

Qureshi's story starts at a poker table, not a trading desk. As a teenager he became a serious online poker pro and won hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then it fell apart in a cheating scandal that ended his poker career and taught him a brutal lesson young. He reinvented himself completely.

He learned to code through the App Academy bootcamp and became a software engineer at Airbnb. There he negotiated his job offer so well that he turned it into a blog post read by millions.

From engineering he moved into crypto, first as a partner at the hedge fund MetaStable Capital, then to Dragonfly, where he is a managing partner. Along the way he became one of crypto's most-read writers and podcasters.

Dragonfly is where Qureshi invests today. It is a global crypto firm known for going deep on technology and for a strong reach into Asia.

Under his watch Dragonfly has backed core crypto infrastructure. Matter Labs, the team behind the zkSync scaling network.

Layer-1 blockchains like Near and Avalanche. DeFi names like 1inch and Compound.

In 2022 Dragonfly closed a roughly $650 million fund. Before Dragonfly, Qureshi was a partner at MetaStable Capital, an early crypto hedge fund.

He also co-hosts a widely followed crypto podcast where he argues the industry's big debates in public.

Qureshi invests like a poker player, because he was one. Poker teaches you to think in expected value.

What is the payoff, what is the probability, and what is the cost if you are wrong. He applies the same math to crypto.

He looks for bets where the upside dwarfs the downside and sizes them so a bad outcome never wipes him out. He goes deep on the technology because he can read the code himself.

And he is happy to be contrarian. His whole career is proof that the crowd is often wrong.

The comeback itself. A busted poker player with a scandal on his record is not supposed to end up running hundreds of millions at a top crypto fund.

Qureshi got there by treating his own career like an expected-value bet. Learn a high-demand skill, negotiate hard, and keep moving toward bigger tables.

He landed at Airbnb as an engineer, then rode into crypto early, and helped grow Dragonfly into a firm that closed a roughly $650 million fund in 2022. The kid who lost it all rebuilt a bigger stack.

The poker cheating scandal that ended his first career. As a young pro and coach, Qureshi got tangled in a cheating scandal involving a player he had promoted.

It cost him his reputation and his poker career almost overnight. What makes it worth reading is what he did next.

He publicly owned his part, returned money, and wrote honestly about the whole thing rather than hiding. The lesson he took was permanent.

Your name is the one bankroll you can never rebuy, so protect it harder than the chips.

Think in expected value and protect the bankroll. Qureshi's whole framework comes from poker.

Every decision is a bet with a probability and a payoff, so figure out the math before you act. Bet big only when the edge is clearly in your favor.

Never risk so much that one bad beat takes you out of the game. He also believes in thinking in public.

He writes and debates his views openly because being forced to defend an idea is the fastest way to find out if it is actually good.

Qureshi keeps his personal and family life mostly private, which is striking given how much of his thinking he shares in public. He is American and based in the United States.

What people know about him comes from his essays, his podcast, and his very active presence in crypto debates, not from personal profiles. He would rather tell you what he thinks about a blockchain than about his home life.

The public Haseeb is all ideas, arguments, and expected value.

Qureshi's education is not the usual finance pedigree, and that is the point. His first real school was the poker table, where he learned probability, discipline, and how to lose.

His second was App Academy, the coding bootcamp that turned him into a working software engineer. Almost everything else he taught himself by doing.

Reading code, writing essays, and testing his ideas against smart people in public. It is a self-made path, and it shows in how independently he thinks.

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