In a 2023 interview, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan shared insights into his journey from high-frequency trading to establishing a decentralized exchange. After graduating from Harvard, Yan initially engaged in high-frequency trading before venturing into the crypto space in 2018 with an L2 exchange protocol focused on prediction markets. However, regulatory uncertainties and user acquisition challenges led to its closure. By 2020, Yan had pivoted to systematic proprietary crypto trading, achieving a leading market maker position on centralized exchanges. Following the FTX incident, Yan identified an opportunity for decentralized exchanges and developed an L1 platform to create a fully decentralized order book DEX. He also discussed the differences between market making and order taking, the importance of infrastructure, the concept of 'fair price,' and the role of high-frequency PnL in predicting mid-frequency prices.