Day: September 2, 2025

At a meeting with his Chinese counterpart on Tuesday, the Russian leader said that Moscow’s ties with Beijing had “reached their highest level in history.”

• When Eric Chen was at NYU, he quickly realized the traditional career pipeline wasn’t for him.
• He had a passion for blockchain technology. In 2020, he dropped out of college to build Injective.
• Injective has raised over $50 million and received funding from billionaire Mark Cuban.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 27-year-old Eric Chen, the cofounder of Injective, from New York. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Before going to college, I lived in the Bay Area.

I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and founders, so building a company didn’t seem incredibly novel to me.

But in 2018, I started a company of my own called Injective. We’re a blockchain network that provides infrastructure for finance applications.

We’ve raised over $50 million in funding and got Mark Cuban to invest in our vision. In 2020, I dropped out of college at 22 to focus fully on the business. It was the best choice I could have made to get where I am now.

The college pipeline wasn’t for me

I joined NYU in 2016. I decided to major in business and minor in computer science. I imagined I’d go into finance or tech after graduating.

I went into college with a career-oriented mindset, but I quickly realized I didn’t want to pursue the same career pipeline as everyone else. Instead, I wanted to find out what I was really passionate about and good at.

I was very interested in blockchain technology and decided to explore this area from an academic perspective through my work at college. I could spend hours studying it and not get bored.

I was very interested in an academic discipline called cryptography, but I wasn’t going to be exposed to it until the late stages of my course. I started teaching myself in this area by joining a Ph.D. student reading group and some research labs.

In late 2017, I also started working part-time for a venture investing fund in New York. This helped me gain some industry exposure.

By the summer of 2018, I had ramped up my work with the fund to full-time and was seriously considering taking a leave of absence from college.

I wanted to be fully immersed in the blockchain finance space, and felt that staying at college would be too time-consuming for me to do what I wanted.

I started a company and dropped out of college

Gaining more industry and subject understanding helped me develop the idea behind Injective.

I noticed a problem in the industry: decentralized crypto exchanges had performance issues, like not being able to process orders quickly. I wanted to create something with the same efficiency you’d expect from traditional finance, but in a more decentralized way.

The space was so nascent, and it felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity where someone like me, who didn’t have industry experience or a lot of academic knowledge, could jump in and contribute value right away.

In the fall of 2018, I took a leave of absence from college and officially started Injective. I got a cofounder to help split up the engineering and research tasks. We recruited engineering talent so we could build out our own exchange product more quickly.

When it came to figuring out how to operate a company and get investor buy-in, I engaged with other people in the industry, including my contacts from the fund I worked at, but I also had to figure out a lot of stuff by myself. The industry was so new that people who’d worked in it for a while didn’t have standardized answers.

I took some college courses on the side because my parents encouraged me not to drop out, but eventually, in 2020, I decided not to devote any more time to finishing college.

There were challenges

We vastly underestimated the engineering challenges of building a decent-sized exchange infrastructure with such a green team. Our product iteration process took roughly two years.

If we had millions of dollars in the bank, iterating would have been quicker, but acquiring funding and interest from investors was challenging. At the time, investors didn’t believe that decentralized exchanges had much promise, and having no degree or much industry experience probably didn’t help.

We were bootstrapping and living on low costs to make things work.

When the space started blowing up in 2020, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. We raised a decent seed round, which allowed us to accelerate.

We convinced Mark Cuban to invest in our company

Our head of business once saw Mark Cuban speak at Harvard, where he shared his email for people to pitch him ideas.

Our team decided to pitch him. At the time, the GameStop saga was causing upheaval because Robinhood had prevented people from buying GameStop stock. Mark Cuban commented publicly on it. In our pitch, we spoke to that moment and shared that we were building an open platform with no entity that could control what people can or can’t do.

It kicked off a whole email chain in which Mark asked us questions about our solution, and we had to answer as accurately and quickly as possible. After a bit of back-and-forth, he decided to invest.

Our strategy was to be down-to-earth, so we were honest about our product and not upselling it or exaggerating what we could achieve.

In total, we’ve raised over $50 million.

I’m glad I took advantage of an opportunity

The first few years after leaving college were the most challenging of my life. I was constantly drowning in work and felt pressure to make things work.

I didn’t have a strong dissatisfaction with college; I just felt there were better opportunities for me than being locked into that route.

The space I was building in would’ve been so different if I’d waited just a few years, so I was forced into action.

My most important takeaway is that if you have an opportunity you’re passionate about, you should take it.

Do you have a story to share about dropping out of college to become a young founder? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.

China’s President Xi Jinping convened his Russian and North Korean counterparts in Beijing for the first time on Tuesday, a show of solidarity with countries shunned by the West over their role in Europe’s worst war in 80 years.

The president and his advisers have suggested they will fight a federal appeals court’s ruling that found many of the administration’s tariffs to be illegal.

• Anna Ashurov was a rising star on Business Insider’s 2018 list.
• The then-34-year-old was an executive at Goldman, but has since changed jobs twice.
• Now at BlackRock, Ashurov explains her moves from Goldman to Anheuser-Busch to the world’s largest asset manager.

Anna Ashurov has been busy.

A 2018 member of Business Insider’s rising stars list, Ashurov has changed companies twice since her stint at Goldman Sachs, going from the investment bank to the world’s largest beer brewer and then to the world’s largest asset manager, where she’s worked since 2021.

Ashurov now oversees growth strategy and client relationships for Aladdin, BlackRock’s widely used risk analytics and portfolio management tech. She told Business Insider, she’s focused on “driving growth holistically” instead of structuring deals and advising clients.

We caught up with her on her career changes, and she shared advice for those considering a big leap. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

BI: What has your career been like since Business Insider featured you on our 2018 rising stars list?

AA: When I spoke to your colleagues last, I was at Goldman, in leveraged finance and capital markets. I purposefully wanted to be more on the operating side, and I transitioned into a role within the financing division at Goldman — it was essentially a chief of staff for the financing division. And that gave me a perspective on the operating side within the firm.

From there, I was hired by AB InBev to lead their commercial strategy and transformation. And that was essentially my introduction to being on the operating side, leading commercial strategy, leading market build-out. We had a ton of interesting work that we were doing in our beyond beer strategy, doing some interesting acquisitions. And as I was getting deeper into the operating field, I had an inbound from BlackRock to join the Aladdin business, which to me was absolutely fascinating.

And I decided to make that move. Ultimately, what drove me or drew me to BlackRock was its unique position at the intersection of finance, technology, and innovation. I’ve always been interested in how technology can transform industries. So to me, that was a perfect opportunity to join the fintech world, and I’ve been here since then. It’s been a fun ride.

BI: What core skills from your time at Goldman do you still use today?

AA: My background in finance has been foundational for my current role, and I even think in my role at AB InBev. So early on, I built deep relationships with institutional clients, which taught me how to understand their needs and different challenges, and to deliver solutions.

That sort of client-centric perspective is what I brought with me, and that is essential to creating long-term value. At AB InBev, I had the opportunity to drive commercial strategy and lead those transformational initiatives, so that also gave me the hands-on experience of aligning business priorities and delivering operational execution that I brought here as well.

I had to learn all about technology, which I haven’t done before, but I think some of the foundational skills and being a client-facing executive are something that I’d ultimately apply anywhere.

BI: You’ve been tasked, in an operating role, with growing brands that many would consider to be the leaders in their space. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, while AB InBev is the world’s largest brewer. How do you grow established brands while retaining what got them to this point?

AA: It’s easier to do when the organization has foundational cultural values, right? AB InBev is a big conglomerate, but at the same time, it was absolutely flat in terms of structure. I had direct access to Michel Doukeris, who’s the CEO of the organization, and direct access to the head of strategy — the organization was so agile and nimble that you were able to make decisions and drive change. Same thing at BlackRock. In order for you to be able to actually impact the organization, impact its growth, impact the strategy, and make the difference that you are there to make, you need to have the proper cultural foundation to be able to actually effectuate that change. Both of the organizations have that.

BI: You’ve now worked in different industries, including some known for long hours and grueling schedules. Have you kept a similar routine as far as your day-to-day as you shifted between jobs? Is there something you’ve kept the same even as your roles have changed?

AA: I do read during my commute. That’s actually probably the only time when I have time to read. So I love when I have like an hour-and-a-half commute, I read both ways or I listen to podcasts, but often I read. I like fiction, I like murder mysteries. That’s my time to decompress and release and do something different, because I am kind of on all the time.

BI: What advice would you give someone who is thinking of making a big career move? Maybe someone who has had some success in their career but is thinking of changing industries or firms, as someone who has taken that leap.

AA: If I reflect on my journey and look back at my career, the one sort of constant is that I’ve grown through change. Do not be afraid of change. For me, it’s always been important to not become complacent and to continue to feel challenged. It’s important to continue pushing yourself.