START: Ryaan Aqid, Founder & CEO, Quirk “ Infrastructure for information asymmetry”

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Somewhere, someone already has the thing you're looking for.

A dataset, a patent, a capability, a customer, an answer. Most of the time neither of you ever finds out.

That's the problem Ryaan Aqid built Quirk around, and he first recognized it in Bangladesh, watching workers earning $50–100 a month while Upwork listed work paying ten times more. Nothing separated them except information. The opportunity already existed; the connection never happened.

It runs through everything. Institutions sit on datasets they'll never open, companies shelve technology somebody else is desperate for, and entire markets fail to form because two people who'd have built something never met. Ryaan calls it the largest economy nobody can see: the things that were never made.

Quirk builds infrastructure to dissolve that asymmetry, with agents that do the looking so neither side has to move first. Holding something you won't use? It works out who it's worth something to. Stuck? It finds whoever got past this a year ago, without you having to describe the problem.

"Agents that find deals neither side knew existed."

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🎙️ Ryaan Aqid, Founder & CEO, Quirk on Fondo START
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01:05 Getting the buyers to say exactly what they needed
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01:30 Building distribution through government relationships in Bangladesh
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02:00 Why he thinks the average person's information gets sold through intermediaries
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02:40 The high school nonprofit in Bangladesh
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03:08 Realizing freelance platforms could 10x a worker's income
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03:25 Moving people up Maslow's hierarchy of needs
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04:05 Leaving Cornell two days after classes started
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05:05 What's next and where to follow along

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Check out at www.quirklabs.ai