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Yeah the problem is that the average rat lives for less than four years, which doesn't let them see multiple market cycles. We must selectively breed or biologically engineer longer lived rats or else we will be curve fitting for a single market regime.

Yes they have done great work and discovered some really cool stuff, but they have not been able to commercialize it. That's what a CEO/management chain should ultimately be measured by, not whether they've built a great Xerox style research PARC.

Those kinds of people are generally stuck at a lower level. L7/8/9 is very much a political game. To get there (generally) you need to make your entire org/company look very good, and generally to make your team look good you need to work well with them so that you can convince them to work on the high impact projects that you identify.

A shell of Allston (formerly big Java shop) lasted until last year.

Yeah, Jump got on the map by being the first Chicago prop shop with a microwave line between Chicago and New York. They dominated the equity basis trade for a while.

Keeping your name out of the press and staying secretive is incredibly important and I'm shocked that they didn't just throw a fair amount of cash to this guy directly or offer it up as a donation to some Carl Sagan foundation (and offer to let him keep his e-mail address). $200k for a shop like that is literally the shells of peanuts and worth it to keep your name out of people's mouths.

Monday.com spent $191 million in marketing to get $161 million in revenue in 2020. Granted they are only spending $1.2 in marketing per dollar in revenue now so they are doing better than the $1.5 per $1 they had last year in 2019. GnA bumped by $40 million and that brings them more in line with the 2019 marketing cost/revenue ratio though so maybe they creatively characterized GnA.

If their market cap is above 3 dollars I wouldn't touch the stock.

I'm probably not understanding something. How is $250k ARR enough to build a team with? I would think you would need to be a magnitude higher at least to support a team off of that, especially if you are bootstrapped and have no cash reserves.

Humanity's colonization of the stars will eventually be spurred on by the desire improve the resiliency of SaaS.

You don't have to go that far. You could also have automated roll-back of individual servers if they sense something is off, for instance.

Another alternative is low bandwidth flag based roll-backs (for instances such as this where the network is congested but not completely lost).

Potentially leaving them open to the pettiest securities fraud suit ever.

There's an In-N-Out on the north side of SF and Chinatown has a ton of cheap eating options. You can eat for cheap in either city.

Looks like the PyMC maintainers are taking over Theano (but only as it helps PyMC): https://medium.com/@pymc_devs/theano-tensorflow-and-the-futu...

There is a PR to get TensorFlow as the backend for PyMC3 too.

Blind belief in credentials is just as wrong in nutrition science as it is in tech. Check out this amazing paper re-inventing calculus: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract

The author has a doctorate from NYU and the article was published in a peer reviewed journal.

That's just a funny example, but there are tons of poorly researched peer reviewed papers which makes it exceedingly difficult for me to accept credentialis as being a useful signal. I find it's much better to have ideas stand on their own merit, rather than on the shoulders of those who are espousing them.

Why not both? I am not in academia but I was under the impression that some academics might be publishing 'questionable' results that cannot be reproduced at all in order get their paper count up for tenure review. Not to mention puff-pieces from industry that basically serve as PR in peer reviewed journals without furthering their discipline.

So shipping working code (even if it comes with a required pipette) might be a nice requirement for a peer reviewed publication to take on in order to keep their journal relevant. Shipping in Docker or similar guarantees reproducibility.

Heh it's options writers or buyers (just options market makers in general). A lot of stuff is electronically traded but there are still some very large orders with huge deltas that are put up on telephone calls.

And yeah it makes sense to have an extra prompt pop up if it's an order over X contracts or Y ticks from the market. And I've seen a lot of systems set up like that.

A lot of times traders will just punch the "OK" box and do their trade though.

That's of course if traders are manually hedging their portfolio/trade. A lot of times they just set their portfolio to auto-hedge based on certain parameters (ie at Z deltas or we've moved C ticks in a time period).

Yup, orders that are placed well outside the bid/ask just fill every order in the order book until they are filled. It's commonly called sweeping the market and happens on 1-2 ticks (price levels) around the best bid/ask pretty commonly throughout the day depending on the product. Limit order books are actually really fun things to model and the rules around different exchanges books are quite neat.

The problem with disallowing your trader from ripping through a lot of the levels of an order book is that it can be a risk reducing move and what you intend to do sometimes. This trade is a clear fat finger but there are times when you will want to sweep the book to get hedged.

For instance, let's say your desk just got slammed with a ton of risk on an OTC (over the counter) option trade. You can immediately alleviate a lot of that risk (while paying through the nose) by selling 2000 contracts or 5 price levels of the ES (SP500 future). You can immediately place that order and get it filled and be hedged. If there were multiple points of human intervention required then you might lose a substantial amount of money. 2k contracts on the ES is $25,000 a tick. If word leaks that people are going to need to start hedging big then it could easily move 10 or 20 ticks away from you while waiting for your risk management team to approve your trade as not a fat finger.

Generally it's cheaper to just fire error prone traders. Heh, and anyone that is about to execute a 2k contract option trade generally has their hedge order queued up and ready to send to the market as soon as they hear the other side agree to their price.

I think Josu was actually correct and you two are talking about two different things. Josu is saying that if the purchasers cannot find another (greater?) fool to flip the company to then they will have to manage 12 billion dollars in transactions with 0 costs if they are only charging 5% in order to break even. That's just simple math, 5% of 12 billion = the 600 million dollar buy-out price. That's if nothing changes in terms of what percentage they keep and if they have 0 costs. If the purchasers are going to buy and hold they will need to handle 12 billion dollars in transactions at 0 expenses to get their buying power back to buy another company, unless they can flip the company or borrow against it.

You are saying that the purchasers have broken even on the deal so long as they have not lost money on paper in the valuation since they can probably either borrow against it or sell it off.

It comes down to are you paying for current value, or potential growth in value. Frankly, in my opinion, markets that rely upon a greater fool to bail you out to make your money rather than just getting it back the old fashioned way by providing a good or service are way too frothy.

Counter-argument is that you are betting on growth, not a greater fool bail out. In this instance the only way to get that growth while still handling less than 12 billion in transactions is by increasing their take from 5% to something higher or adding on ancillary sales. I'd bet on ancillaries, but this isn't my space.

By the way for those reading who may not know, I was referencing Greater Fool Theory, not making a pejorative statement (heh, beyond what the theory itself may make). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Ah, I think I was not terribly clear when making my point. I don't think that candidate scores are static and, even if they are, there's a significant amount of measurement error no matter the interview process.

Ideally I want a hiring "fun"-nel where a 6.2 can learn the skills necessary to become an 8.3 (or show that they've been an 8.3 all along) through exercises or reading assignments. Sort of an external training/hiring funnel. If nothing else it may also help as a way to build internal training processes and advertise the to the world some of the neat stuff you are working on. I think this is how Matasano recruits and it makes a lot of sense to me.

Pretty much no matter what there is a learning curve associate d with bringing on a new hire. Finding candidates that will attack those curves with gusto is key to building good teams, I think at least. Technical skills can be taught and refined, gumption is a bit harder to instill.

I liked the part about internal recruiter's incentive structure. It's basically the old standby that nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. This implies to me that there's a huge amount of value for companies that can change their hiring metrics and find undervalued engineers.

One thing that I disagree with is the idea that filtering processes can't make candidates better. A properly created process should leave both sides of the equation happy, an engineer can learn new skills and a hiring manager can have a shot at making an offer to an engineer if s/he has the requisite skills. If the candidate doesn't have the skills then give them the tools to learn the skills and see if they come back showing mastery. Work ethic and being ready/willing/able to learn new things is the number one signal that an employee is going to work out well, at least on the teams that I have run.

Companies in the second category are going to be in the market for lemons. Company A has inside knowledge of how each employee is performing and can easily match a price increase for employees that are worth it while letting go of those that aren't. Company A is paying a bit more to purchase an option on skilled employees, Company B is hoping that they don't just get lemons.

But when you rent you have the option to move to another city if you don't like how your tax dollars are being managed. Especially when you are retired/unemployed and thus don't have to worry about living close to your job. You don't even have to move far necessarily depending on the type of tax you are trying to avoid.

The compensation part is actually really interesting. My particular industry is notorious for using really strongly worded non-competes. Those don't fly at all in California but they do fly in a fair number of other states. In Illinois there was a court ruling that stated that non-compete agreements are not enforceable unless a specific bonus is paid for signing the agreement. Continued employment (in that case of just under 2 years, after an acquisition) was not enough compensation.

So, if you are asked to sign one of these things either ask for some cash up front or hold in your back pocket that it's probably not enforceable (though it can certainly end in litigation which can be terrible for everyone involved).

I agree with you on back-testing. Trying to model order book dynamics across multiple exchanges accurately is something of a fool's errand (especially in pro-rata markets). Running stuff in sim generally lets you iron out flaws and then you can just plug and play to see if it pays. Heh, I used to just plug and play directly with small size as a test rather than using sim since my firm didn't have a usable sim set-up at the time. Just put extremely limiting risk limits in terms of order sending rates on and then cut it off it loses too much in the experiment and move to the next one (yes, this did make strategy choice pretty path-dependent...).

RE rate limiter: For this dude's implementation I don't think it matters. He's using IB (a retail broker) for his data rather than the direct market feed. IB sends a sample of market data rather than every single book update and I think they do it at a rate slower than ~10ms so he probably won't run into problems. Heh, I remember some fun times figuring out the optimal way to handle getting spammed by the exchange. It is a neat industry, but kind of makes you feel a bit like a societal leech some times (I know, we're risk salesmen making markets more efficient and all...).

Valuing companies based on revenues is a bit of a stretch in my mind. Actual income/earnings/cashflow makes a lot more sense.

If you don't take into account expenses then you get some really wacky valuations: ie a company is in the business of selling houses (or other large cost item) for a small percentage higher than they bought them. If you don't take into account the cost of buying the house and running the business, and just look at the revenue from each house sale you will drastically over value the business. If they sell 50 $100,000 houses that they bought for $99k each and it cost them $500 in fees per house sale they would have $25k in actual earnings but $5 million in revenue. Valuing on a common "5x the yearly revenue" you would be willing to pay $25 million for a business that produces $25k per year (if you are willing to do so and have a lot of money I'll sell you a lot of businesses like that!).

Software is a higher margin business of course, but at the end of the day as an investor I care about how much cash is going to go into my pocket due to an investment rather than how much total cash passes through the companies books.

Even the 2x to 3x of earnings that sole proprietor/small software shops are getting now sounds outrageous to me. You're betting on growth (and paying like it's there) and hoping that clients don't leave for 2 to 3 years. Higher multiples can make sense if there are expenses you can cut to get earnings (or a very clear, easy to see growth opportunity [if that is there then why are they selling of course?]), otherwise you're just tossing away money.

The coal miner strikes are fascinating (and the teamsters). During WW2 the continental US was bombed (pretty uneventfully) by the Japanese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuo_Fujita

I'll play too! Hawaii was a self-governing territory at the time and thus not a part of America (and they stayed that way until 1959, along with Alaska and the Aleutian islands).

But, during WW2 America was bombed (by sea plane) by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuo_Fujita

Heh, I also solved it a few months ago and didn't get a response (though I wasn't nearly as snarky as you good sir, hat tip). I agree that they should at least send a response to every participant. Even an automated one with a more fun problem would be nice.

Why not a jelly donut with powdered sugar? Boom recurring revenue stream!

This product looks awesome but since gyms get a lot of their revenues from personal trainers I can imagine it might be a semi-difficult sale. How about putting it in home gyms though? If a home user already has a Kinect and a tv you can probably sell them your software as a really cool high tech logging/safety check pretty easily.

Uh, actually as I think about it the home use is super exciting. If you can build some cool visualization software you can sell it to home gym users as a data-driven workout experience. Good luck you two!

I am super excited for these gaming hiring funnels to take off due to your first reason. Dollars to donuts there's a ton of unidentified talent out there that is being filtered out due to those biases (I would also add in academic pedigree bias which is correlated with economic/cultural upbringing). Granted these types of funnels also select for those who have free time to play games so they are not perfect.

Knack, the other company mentioned in the article, seems to have profiles with pictures and names that I assume are visible to hiring managers and others. In my opinion that's a bad move. I want to see a completely objective view of how a candidate is performing without age/experience/appearance getting in the way. These gaming funnels aren't perfect solutions but they are certainly a step in the right direction.