Abraham Thomas

At 13, I spent 3 days in the hold of a cargo ship, escaping a war zone with nothing more than what I could carry in a backpack.

At 21, after graduating from India's top engineering school, I joined a tiny firm that “used math to predict the market”. One of Asia’s first hedge funds, Simplex eventually grew to hundreds of people and billions of dollars. I joined as employee #7.

By 26, I was a portfolio manager at the fund. I set up and ran the fund’s US office; I also co-led the team that designed, built and traded one of the industry’s first high-frequency arbitrage systems.

At 30, I quit my hedge fund job, exited all my positions near the high-water mark of the portfolio in 2007, and moved to Canada. (I’ve been an immigrant three times!)

At 33, I co-founded Quandl. We pioneered the category of “alternative data for finance”, gaining many of the world’s top hedge funds, asset managers, fintechs and investment banks as our customers before being acquired by Nasdaq.