Vlad Tenev

You imagine like a sea of people on phones.

But 2008 was a little bit of, there was a discontinuity there because the machines took over and past that point, nearly all the trading on financial markets was electronic trading.

So it was a little bit of a transition point

To be successful in the world of manual trading, you had to be like this aggressive football player type person so that when you were in the trading pit, you would kind of tower above all the people and you'd be able to like take all the tickets first.

You know, a lot of the football players became traders, successful ones.

I didn't know that.

Afterwards, trading became electronic and the action moved off the pits in New York and the trading floors to these data centers in New Jersey.

and then it was kind of like the quants gradually took over and so in 2009 when we when we got started with our first business the big observation was if you were you know three smart mathematicians out of stanford or mit and you had a trading algorithm you could deploy that and actually compete against the big guys and out-compete them because they had old systems and so

We were doing that, and then we saw another opportunity, which was, hey, if this was a gold rush of algorithmic trading, can we sell the picks and shovels rather than panning for gold ourselves?

So we created a second business, which was a software company.

We sold technology and infrastructure to both the startup HFTs, the guys from MIT and all these schools, and to the big banks,

And then at that point, we became much more of a software company.

So I moved back to California to hire software engineers and to grow the engineering office.

Pretty soon, the engineering office became the main office, but this was a very unique time when I moved back.

It was November of 2011.

And that was right when Instagram was getting started in Palo Alto.

Uber had just launched Black Car in San Francisco.

So we kind of had a foot in both worlds, right?

We understood a lot about institutional trading and finance from New York.

And then we also got to see the birth of this mobile industry.