UNIQUE CULTURE

Our team includes a diverse set of unique talents with no pre-conceived biases regarding finance.  We are experts from various fields of industry, with a strong bent for programming, data analysis, and the scientific process.  We harness this blend of abstract knowledge to bring an alternate view to an insider’s game.  And yes, we enjoy the challenge of exploiting markets as a game.

We hold a number of beliefs which, taken together, make us the most effective technology team in the hedge fund industry today:

• We will only succeed as a team.  It’s only through harnessing the collective work of many that we can achieve success against our most difficult problems.  So long as you contribute to our work, you will stay and thrive.
• No assholes allowed.  We reject traditional incentive schemes based on individual performance.  Instead, we encourage and incentivize efforts to work together and for each other to ensure the long-term success of the team.
• We dislike hierarchy and we hate walls.  We are and will remain a flat firm, where ideas can flow freely and unbounded, seeking out other ideas to mingle with, together forming patterns in the noise.  We admire knowledge, but we revere its creative application.
• Incremental improvement is preferable to postponed perfection.  We believe that success is the cumulative result of small, yet consistent, incremental gains which over time generate significantly positive effects.
• Curiosity saves.  We never shed our childhood curiosity, and we’ve come a long way from tearing apart our parents’ toasters.  Reverse engineering is a compulsion we embrace with two hands and a magnifying glass.
• The best ideas come from the most unexpected places.  We believe that good ideas come from making new connections between disparate sources of information, therefore, we encourage our employees to explore their hunches, no matter how far afield they seem to lie. From exploration comes understanding, from understanding comes mastery, and only through mastery can we reliably win.
• But, long-term science projects are a waste of time.  Exploration is a means to an end.  Our work has a purpose, and that purpose is to find signal.  This tenet pervades everything we do.  
• Above all though, we are hackers.  We work together, quick and nimble, to explore and understand the systems we play in.  When we see a potential source of alpha, we explore it immediately.  We don’t block each other’s ideas.  We don’t protect “turf.”  We are not territorial animals and this is not the wild.