Good morning, friends!

Growing up in Okara, Pakistan, Sidra Qasim had greater ambitions than what society had planned for her.

She had bold ideas and audacious goals, but society wanted her to get married and start a family. She questioned the egregious gender inequality, but society wanted to quiet her voice. She was passionate about starting a business, but society wanted her to stop wasting her time.

"My mom wanted to protect me so she was standing by society, not by my side," Qasim told The Profile. "To be honest, I had no image of 'society.' It was just a word. When she was saying, 'Hey, society will say this,' I wanted to know who these people were and why I should care about them."

As she grew up, Qasim began to understand that there would be biases, judgements, and taboos that would come with all that she wanted to accomplish. Even though she understood, she refused to passively comply with a system designed to keep her trapped.

When she was a teenager, Qasim serendipitously met Waqas Ali while visiting her aunt's home. He had lived in a nearby village, but he was equally curious. More importantly, he respected and listened to Qasim's many ideas.

"I felt that I found someone who I could talk to and someone who understood what I was saying," she says. "I realized that society could be different — that men could be different. For me, Waqas was a screen I could project myself on to."

Unbeknownst to them at the time, Qasim and Ali would become partners — in business and in life. They would start one company, then another, then another. They would even get a chance to leave Pakistan for the first time and travel to the United States to pitch their idea at prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator. They did all of this with two tools at their disposal — their brains and the internet.

The first time Qasim learned about the internet was in 2006. She overheard a conversation in which her uncle explained this innovation to her mother. He said he had heard that people could order chai directly through the internet.

"I imagined chai coming from the wires because I just couldn't imagine how it was possible to order chai from the computer," Qasim says. "Fast forward 15 years, I'm selling shoes on the internet. This is crazy."

"Selling shoes on the internet" is an understatement. Qasim and Ali co-founded Atoms, a sleek direct-to-consumer shoe startup, that has raised more than $8 million in funding from investors including Alexis Ohanian's Initialized Capital, Shrug Capital, and Kleiner Perkins.

"One time my father looked at me and my younger brother because we both had poor grades, and he said, 'You are not going to do anything in your life,'" Qasim recalls. "I said, 'Abu, one day, people will recognize you because of my name.'"

I interviewed Qasim about her mind-blowing journey to entrepreneurship. It details how she designed the life she wanted to live, how refused to give up time and time again, and why, after all these years of struggle, it's all been worth it.

Below is an excerpt of the interview, but I encourage you to watch the full interview here:

When you got accepted into Y Combinator, did you feel relief or did you feel pressure?

QASIM: A lot of pressure. I don't know if I have ever felt relief in my life, because it's always one thing after another. So Y Combinator brought a lot of pressure. There was excitement around, 'Oh we're going to the US, so maybe we'll meet some interesting entrepreneurs' because we were always reading about Silicon Valley and how someone started with a small idea and turned it into a big company, so there was that excitement. But when we came here, the big pressure was the language. Waqas and I were not speaking English in Pakistan, so speaking it was very, very difficult.

There was a lot of passion, but when we had to translate that passion into words, we were focused more on our grammar than our message. That was very hard, and it shook our confidence. We got into a frame of mind where we started believing our own doubts. There were technology companies at YC, and we were selling handmade leather shoes. It was a huge difference.

The second part was the culture. I think it took us a lot of time to adapt to the culture. And when I say culture, it's not just how you wear clothes. Culture is more of a mindset. It took us some time to understand that, but we worked on it very intentionally for the next two to four years when we started Atoms.

Read It on the Website Here

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HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY: Last year, I asked Profile readers to share the keys to a successful relationship. More than 100 people weighed in, and their advice is timeless: “Love is not just an emotion; it is a skill. It has to be worked on; sharpened regularly.” Read it here.

PROFILES.

— The Bitcoin billionaire who remains at large [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]
— The founder making the riskiest bet of his career
— The GameStop trader who turned $500 into a fortune
— The supermodel living by her own rules
— The entrepreneur behind SpaceX's all-civilian mission
— The trailblazing actor
— The house of Bitcoin
— The meltdown of Brooklyn's ice-cream empire

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The Bitcoin billionaire who remains at large: BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes created a cryptocurrency exchange that has traded trillions. Now he’s wanted by U.S. authorities, and insiders wonder whether he and his partners are villains—or victims of a two-tiered justice system that favors big banks over brash outsiders. As the reporter puts it: "This is a tale of new money versus old, financial whiz kids upstaging banking’s old guard, and American authorities attempting to apply 20th-century laws to 21st-century innovation." (Vanity Fair)

“Show me a bank that doesn’t have money-laundering violations and I’ll show you a piggy bank.”

The founder making the riskiest bet of his career: Over the course of his career, Tim Sweeney has been unafraid to take on tech industry giants. The CEO and founder of Epic Games has had a knack for picking the right battles while also shoring up his company's independence. Now Sweeney, 50, is embarking on the biggest battle in Epic’s 30-year history: Epic is suing Apple and Google in a legal challenge that could remake the future of the digital economy. (CNN)

"The point is if you really want to make a difference, you have to buck the system."

The GameStop trader who turned $500 into a fortune: Anubhav Guha, a 24-year-old MIT grad student, started day trading a few thousand dollars in March but managed to lose half of his money despite the stock market’s epic rally last year. He made that up and far, far more betting on GameStop. Here's the story of how Guha turned $500 into $203,411 in less than three weeks with an options trade on the mall retailer. (WSJ; reply to this email if you can't access this article)

“It felt like I was part of something bigger."

The supermodel living by her own rules: Ashley Graham has navigated a lot of firsts in her 21-year career as a model. She was the first size 14 model featured on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue in 2016; the first plus-size model to appear on the cover of Vogue in 2017; and the first curvy model of her generation to receive a major beauty contract in the United States. “My brand is about confidence and owning who you are and being honest with who you are,” she says. In 2020, she became a mother, a podcast host, an activist, and a businesswoman. (WSJ; reply to this email if you can't access this article)

“She’s supremely confident, and that’s a good thing."

The entrepreneur behind SpaceX's all-civilian mission: Jared Isaacman is a self-proclaimed “space geek,” who has an estimated net worth of $2.3 billion. He's a serial entrepreneur who started his first business after dropping out of high school. Now, Isaacman will commandeer SpaceX's first all-civilian mission to space. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, is a charitable endeavor to highlight an effort to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to fight childhood cancer. (CNBC)

“I decided I was going to go to space when I was 5 [years old]. I was pretty calculated about it at that point, it just took me a little while to get it into motion."

The trailblazing actor: What's a typical immigrant story? Korean-American actor Steven Yeun is still trying to overcome the identity crisis present within so many immigrants who have become successful in America. In the beginning of his career, Yeun felt the feeling of helplessness that comes with realizing that nobody who looks like you has done the things you want to do. “It’s painful to feel that aware,” he says. This is a really thought-provoking read. (The New York Times)

“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you."

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The house of Bitcoin: In Argentina, cryptocurrency offered a means of circumventing the volatility of the local economy, and the members of of Voltaire House were early adopters. They believed that Bitcoin would enable them to build a future that didn’t depend on decaying institutions. This story takes you inside the hacker house that produced some of the country's most valuable crypto companies — and then suddenly disappeared. (Rest of World)

“Perhaps, at the beginning, they were supposed to connect people, but then companies just started collecting our data for their own profit.”

The meltdown of Brooklyn's ice-cream empire: Ample Hills Creamery was the Brooklyn ice cream brand famous for its whimsical and elaborate flavors. The company had $19 million in funding, a deal with Disney, Oprah as a customer, and dreams of becoming the next Ben & Jerry’s. So how on God's green earth could everything fall apart so quickly? (Marker)

“We knew it was costing a lot of money but we didn’t have a clear sense of how much.”

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AUDIO TO HEAR.

Whitney Wolfe Herd on love in the time of COVID: How do you date in a global pandemic? In this podcast, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd says that the need for human connection never goes away — even in a socially-distant world. "We saw this fascinating event take place, which was a huge surge in activity," she says. Bumble's in-app video chatting was a feature that was seldom used, but everything changed in 2020. Here's why the casual culture of dating may be on the decline for years to come. (Link available to premium members.)

Elon Musk on getting humans to Mars: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has long said that we need to be a multi-planetary species in order to ensure our survival. If we stay on Earth, he argues, humans will be vulnerable to natural disaster, super volcanoes, and meteors that could make us go extinct. Here's how he plans to colonize Mars. (Link available to premium members.)

VIDEOS TO WATCH.

Jeff Bezos on the power of obsession: In this interview, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos makes a tiny, but important distinction: Obsession can be a massive advantage if you choose to obsess over your customer instead of your competitor. Early in his journey, Bezos would allow his customers to make decisions on behalf of the company by emailing them surveys every time he had a business question. This is a good one. (Link available to premium members.)

Brunello Cucinelli on being a trailblazer: Fashion mogul Brunello Cucinelli often quotes Voltaire: "If you do not accept the changes of your time, perhaps you will miss the greatest part." Let's use the most innovative technologies, he says, but let's use them in a considerate way. Check out his idea of "humanistic capitalism." (Link available to premium members.)

The woman saving her dying language: Imagine being the last person to speak a language that's on the verge of extinction. That's the case for one 81-year-old Native American woman on a mission to keep her language alive. She worked tirelessly for years to put together a dictionary in hopes of passing it on to future generations. (Link available to premium members.)

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