Podcasts about Two Sigma

Today, we're joined by Ben Wellington, deputy head of feature forecasting at Two Sigma. We dig into the team's end-to-end approach to leveraging AI in equities feature forecasting, covering how they identify and create features, collect and quantify historical data, and build predictive models to forecast market behavior and asset prices for trading and investment. We explore the firm's platform-centric approach to managing an extensive portfolio of features and models, the impact of multimodal LLMs on accelerating the process of extracting novel features, the importance of strict data timestamping to prevent temporal leakage, and the way they consider build vs. buy decisions in a rapidly evolving landscape. Lastly, Ben also shares insights on leveraging open-source models and the future of agentic AI in quantitative finance. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/736.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Welcome to another episode of Venture Unlocked. In this episode, I had the pleasure of welcoming Villi Iltchev, founder and managing partner of Category Ventures. Villi has had a long history in tech, both in operating roles at companies like Box and Lifelock, as well as investing roles at August Capital and Two Sigma, where he departed in 2024 to launch Category Ventures.We covered a lot of ground in our conversation, including his inspiration for starting a new firm and the experiences that informed his true north. We also spoke about the fragmentation of the market and what it means to win in early-stage investing in a heavily crowded market of dedicated seed funds & larger funds who are active in see and Series A. I really enjoyed the authenticity of the conversation and hope you do as well.About Villi IltchevVilli Iltchev is the Founder and Managing Partner of Category Ventures, an early-stage venture firm focused on backing category-defining enterprise software companies. With over two decades of experience as both an operator and investor, Villi has held leadership roles at Box, LifeLock, and Salesforce, where he led investments and acquisitions in companies like HubSpot, MuleSoft, Gusto, and Zapier. As a General Partner at August Capital and later at Two Sigma Ventures, he backed standout startups like GitLab—turning a $20M investment into over $900M in returns. Originally from Bulgaria, Villi brings a global perspective and a founder-first mindset to every partnership.Category Ventures is an early-stage venture firm founded in 2024 by veteran investor Villi Iltchev, focused on backing category-defining enterprise software startups. With a $160M debut fund, the firm invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies across infrastructure, dev tools, AI, and applications. Drawing on Iltchev's track record—including early investments in GitLab, Zapier, and Gusto—Category Ventures brings deep technical and go-to-market expertise to help founders build enduring businesses. Their approach centers on hands-on support and founder-first partnership to shape the future of enterprise software.In this episode, we discuss:* Villi's Background and Journey (1:50)* Lessons from Venture Capital Firms (5:35)* Market Fragmentation in Venture Capital (8:47)* Flexible Investment Strategy (12:24)* Challenges with Traditional VC Models (13:26)* Product Market Fit and Founder Support (17:35)* Counterpoints on Large VC Firms (21:40)* Winning in Venture Capital (24:07)* Kindness and Community (26:24)* Components of Success (30:00)* Decision-Making Process (33:21)* Intellectual Honesty in Investments (36:16)* The Role of Fresh Perspectives (40:08)* Acting on Great Ideas and Final Thoughts (42:27)I'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Villi. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on X. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

What can ancient languages and epic poems teach us about building resilient tech and future-proof teams?Host Andrew Zigler welcomes Matt Greenwood, Chief Innovation Officer of Two Sigma, for a conversation that uniquely blends their shared background in classical languages with over two decades of Matt's experience at the forefront of financial technology. Matt unveils how this classical training has profoundly shaped his approach to building enduring innovation, fostering a resilient company culture, and leading with empathy.Matt explains his vision for building and evolving innovation via platforms, alongside his strategies for effective goal-setting and fostering deep conceptual understanding in his team. He offers invaluable lessons on the importance of forgiving the decisions of our past selves, adapting processes for evolving needs, and thoughtfully engaging with AI to augment human creativity. This conversation is a masterclass in strategic foresight, cultivating a constant hunger for learning, and building an adaptable organization ready for whatever the future holds.Check out:Beyond Copilot: What's Next for AI in Software DevelopmentSurvey: Discover Your AI Collaboration StyleFollow the hosts:Follow BenFollow AndrewFollow today's guest(s):Website: twosigma.comLinkedIn: Matt GreenwoodReferenced in today's show:Google I/OMicrosoft BuildCode with ClaudeJava at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed TechSupport the show: Subscribe to our Substack Leave us a review Subscribe on YouTube Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn Offers: Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream Get your DORA Metrics free forever

What if you could predict consumer behavior—without running a single survey or focus group?  In this episode, host Rebecca Kalogeris sits down with Avi Yashchin, founder and CEO of Subconscious AI, to explore how synthetic respondents and causal AI are transforming the world of market research.   Avi shares how his background in high-frequency trading, behavioral economics, and product management at IBM Watson and Two Sigma led him to reimagine how businesses gain customer insights.  Subconscious AI's platform delivers what Avi calls “SimCity for Market Research”—a behavioral simulation that replaces traditional research with faster, more ethical, and scientifically grounded modeling. From shrinking the say-do gap to exploring causation (not just correlation), Avi outlines a powerful vision for the next era of insight.  For detailed takeaways, show notes, and more, visit: www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/podcasts  Pragmatic Institute is the global leader in Product, Data, and Design training and certification programs for working professionals. Learn more at www.pragmaticinstitute.com. 

Mr. Kenny Lam: Two Sigma APAC CEO, ex-McKinsey Global Partner, UPenn Wharton School Finance Alumni & Asia Executive Board Chairman, Oxford Law Graduate, Author of “Choices,” Project Melo Co-Founder, SmarTone & Bank of East Asia Independent Board Member林國灃先生: Two Sigma 亞洲首席執行官、麥肯錫前全球高級合夥人、數碼通及東亞銀行中國獨立董事、美國賓夕法尼亞大學沃頓商學院校友、牛津大學法律校友、

David Weisberger,  Co-Founder Emeritus of CoinRoutes, has over 40 years' experience as a capital markets executive focused on equity market structure, quantitative finance, and trading automation.  He has worked either directly or alongside all aspects of the investment ecosystem from asset owners through investment managers, investment banks as well as exchanges and other market centers.   This included development of portfolio trading and transition management businesses, impact and trading cost modelling, statistical and index arbitrage strategies, institutional and retail market making, smart order router and algorithm optimization, and the development of statistically valid measurement for analyzing trading effectiveness.   Mr. Weisberger started his career at Morgan Stanley, in technology, where he built their first program and electronic trading systems before moving to the sales and trading business. He subsequently started the non-dollar program trading desk for Salomon Brothers, was the global architect of the firm's equity trading platform where he designed their first trading algorithm and quantitatively managed central risk book before becoming responsible for the statistical arbitrage trading business.  He later ran their smart order routing business before joining Two Sigma to develop their wholesale market making business, which he ran for several years.  Next, Mr. Weisberger was the global head of equity market structure and quantitative equity products for IHS Markit befores co-founding CoinRoutes Inc, which is a market leading provider of algorithmic trading products for institutional crypto market makers, funds and trading firms.

David Weisberger,  Co-Founder Emeritus of CoinRoutes, has over 40 years' experience as a capital markets executive focused on equity market structure, quantitative finance, and trading automation.  He has worked either directly or alongside all aspects of the investment ecosystem from asset owners through investment managers, investment banks as well as exchanges and other market centers.   This included development of portfolio trading and transition management businesses, impact and trading cost modelling, statistical and index arbitrage strategies, institutional and retail market making, smart order router and algorithm optimization, and the development of statistically valid measurement for analyzing trading effectiveness.   Mr. Weisberger started his career at Morgan Stanley, in technology, where he built their first program and electronic trading systems before moving to the sales and trading business. He subsequently started the non-dollar program trading desk for Salomon Brothers, was the global architect of the firm's equity trading platform where he designed their first trading algorithm and quantitatively managed central risk book before becoming responsible for the statistical arbitrage trading business.  He later ran their smart order routing business before joining Two Sigma to develop their wholesale market making business, which he ran for several years.  Next, Mr. Weisberger was the global head of equity market structure and quantitative equity products for IHS Markit befores co-founding CoinRoutes Inc, which is a market leading provider of algorithmic trading products for institutional crypto market makers, funds and trading firms.

How can AI improve clinical trials and accelerate drug development?  In this episode of Data in Biotech, Ross Katz sits down with Patrick Leung, CTO of Faro Health, to explore how AI-driven tools are reshaping clinical trial design. Patrick shares insights into document generation, patient burden analysis, and AI governance in biotech.  Learn how Faro Health is developing clinical protocols and leveraging AI to optimize trial success while ensuring regulatory compliance. Whether you're in biotech or healthcare, this conversation offers valuable takeaways on the future of AI in increasing clinical trial efficiency.  What You'll Learn in This Episode: How AI is used to generate clinical trial protocols and reduce inefficiencies.The role of AI in assessing patient burden and optimizing trial designs.How data model development enables specialized biomedical AI workflows.How large language models (LLMs) support clinical trial automation.Future trends in AI-driven clinical trial optimization. Links: Find out more about Faro Health: https://www.farohealth.comConnect with Ross Katz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/b-ross-katz/ Connect with Patrick Leung on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/puiwah/ Meet Our Guest: Patrick Leung is the Chief Technology Officer at Faro Health, where he leads AI-driven innovations in clinical trial design. With a background in data science and software engineering from companies like Google and Two Sigma, Patrick brings a fresh perspective to life sciences, focusing on optimizing clinical trials through AI and structured data models. About the Host: Ross Katz is the Principal and Data Science Lead at CorrDyn, specializing in applying data science to biotech and healthcare. As the host of Data in Biotech, Ross explores the latest trends and innovations shaping the industry. Enjoying the Show? Visit Faro Health to learn more about AI-driven clinical trial optimization. Don't forget to rate and review Data in Biotech on Apple Podcasts! Sponsored by CorrDyn This episode is brought to you by CorrDyn, a leader in data-driven solutions for biotech and healthcare. Learn more at CorrDyn.

Alex Botte, CFA, CAIA is a Partner focused on investor relations and research at Hack VC, a crypto-native venture capital firm. Previously, she was the Head of Client and Portfolio Solutions at Runa Digital Assets, a liquid token investment manager. Prior to Runa, she spent eight years in quantitative investment management, holding product specialist and business development roles at Two Sigma and AQR. She started her career in prime services at Barclays. Alex holds a BS from Cornell University.

Alex Botte, CFA, CAIA is a Partner focused on investor relations and research at Hack VC, a crypto-native venture capital firm. Previously, she was the Head of Client and Portfolio Solutions at Runa Digital Assets, a liquid token investment manager. Prior to Runa, she spent eight years in quantitative investment management, holding product specialist and business development roles at Two Sigma and AQR. She started her career in prime services at Barclays. Alex holds a BS from Cornell University.

Katie and Matt discuss a Vanguard tax oopsie, buffered Bitcoin ETFs, crypto utility, and a hedge fund model calibration oopsie.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Predictive Modeling (4:15) Human judgement and processes (14:06)Imperfection in models (21:40)BioClaudia Perlich is Managing Director and Head of Strategic Data Science for Investment Management at Two Sigma, where she has worked for seven years. In this role, Claudia is responsible for developing innovative alpha strategies at the intersection of alternative data, thematic hypotheses and machine learning in public markets. Claudia joined Two Sigma from Dstillery, an AI ad targeting company, where she worked as Chief Scientist. Claudia began her career in data science at the IBM Watson Research Center, concentrating on research in data analytics and machine learning for complex real-world domains and applications.Since 2011, Claudia has served as an adjunct professor teaching Data Mining in the M.B.A. program at New York University's Stern School of Business. Claudia received a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Stern School of Business, New York University, holds an M.S. of Computer Science from Colorado University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. Connect with ClaudiaClaudia Perlich on LinkedinConnect with UsMargot Gerritsen on LinkedInFollow WiDS on LinkedIn (@Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide), Twitter (@WiDS_Worldwide), Facebook (WiDSWorldwide), and Instagram (wids_worldwide)Listen and Subscribe to the WiDS Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher

Dr. Mike Schuster is the head of the AI Core team at Two Sigma, where he leads engineers and quantitative researchers in advancing AI technologies across the firm's investment strategies and internal efficiencies. With over 25 years of expertise in machine learning and deep learning, Mike has been at the forefront of AI trends in tech and finance. Prior to Two Sigma, he spent 12 years at Google, contributing to transformative projects like Google Translate as part of the Google Brain team. Dr. Schuster holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and is recognized as a pioneer whose work has significantly shaped the AI landscape.In this conversation, we discuss:The challenges and importance of building collaborative teams for complex AI systems in finance.Key differences between developing AI technologies in tech companies like Google versus finance firms like Two Sigma.The evolution of neural networks and their transformative impact on applications like Google Translate.The ethical considerations and risks of using AI in finance compared to other industries.Insights into data quality challenges and strategies for addressing bias in financial modeling.Predictions for the future of AI, focusing on efficiency, data quality, and practical advancements over the next five years.Resources:Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Mike SchusterAI fun fact articleEpisode on how AI is diagnosing and treating sleep disorders  

Camille Fournier is the author of The Manager's Path, which many consider the definitive guide for navigating one's career path in tech. Camille was previously the CTO of Rent the Runway, VP of Technology at Goldman Sachs, Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma, and Global Head of Engineering and Architecture at JPMorgan Chase. She is about to release new newest book, Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders. In our conversation, we discuss:• What product managers do that annoys engineers• Why major rewrites are a trap• Why you should have fewer one-on-ones• Strategies for organizing and working with platform teams• Tips for new managers• Advice for transitioning from individual contributor to manager• Much more—Brought to you by:• DX—A platform for measuring and improving developer productivity• CommandBar—AI-powered user assistance for modern products and impatient users• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/engineering-leadership-camille-fournier—Where to find Camille Fournier:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camille-fournier-9011812/• Website: https://skamille.medium.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Camille's background(02:17) Common annoyances between PMs and engineers(07:09) Avoiding the telephone game(08:05) Hoarding ideas and over-engineering(09:55) The importance of involving engineers in ideation(11:37) The middle-person dilemma(14:21) Rewriting systems: a big trap?(20:40) Engineering leadership lessons(36:02) Moving from IC to management(40:32) One-on-one meetings(45:10) Pushing beyond comfort zones(45:27) Building a balanced work culture(48:01) Effective time management strategies(54:15) Advice for platform team success(01:02:42) Platform team responsibilities(01:04:43) When to form a platform team(01:07:02) Thriving on a platform team(01:12:48) AI corner(01:17:03) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders: https://www.amazon.com/Platform-Engineering-Technical-Product-Leaders/dp/1098153642/• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change: https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897• 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts: https://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Engineering-Manager-Should/dp/1492050903• Avoiding the Rewrite Trap: https://skamille.medium.com/avoiding-the-rewrite-trap-b1283b8dd39e• Levelsio on X: https://x.com/levelsio• Pieter Levels on the Lex Fridman Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg• GraphQL: https://graphql.org/• New Blue Sun by André 3000 on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/33Ek6daAL3oXyQIV1uoItD• Musk's 5 Steps to Cut Internal Bureaucracy at Tesla and SpaceX: https://icecreates.com/insight/musk-s-5-steps-to-cut-internal-bureaucracy-at-tesla-and-spacex-you-may-say-it-s-his-algorithm/• Ian Nowland on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inowland/• Studio Pulls ‘Megalopolis' Trailer Using Fake Quotes from Famed Movie Critics: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/studio-pulls-megalopolis-trailer-using-fake-quotes-from-famed-movie-critics_n_66c74046e4b0f1ca469413c7• Claude 2: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-2• What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful: https://www.amazon.com/What-Got-Here-Wont-There/dp/1401301304• When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times: https://www.amazon.com/When-Things-Fall-Apart-Difficult/dp/1611803438• Alien: Romulus: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18412256/• Whoop: https://www.whoop.com—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Plus: The Treasury Department completes regulations to address gaps in U.S. anti-money-laundering rules. The Israeli military launches a major ground-and-air operation across a large area of the West Bank to prevent terrorist attacks. J.R. Whalen reports. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marcelo Lebre is the President and Co-founder of Remote, a Global HR Platform that helps companies hire, manage, and pay their entire team — and more effectively compete in the modern global economy through a comprehensive set of core solutions including, HRIS, payroll, international employment, contractor management, and more. Remote has raised to date $500 million from notable investors such as Accel, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst and Day One VenturesIn 2022, Remote surpassed a $1 billion valuation after closing a $300 million Series C round led by Accel. Where to find Marcelo Lebre:• Website: Global HR Solutions & Employment Tools for Distributed Teams | Remote• LinkedIn (9) Marcelo Lebre | LinkedInWhere to find Hadi Radwan:• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedInIf you like our podcast, please don't forget to subscribe and support us on your favorite podcast players. We also would appreciate your feedback and rating to reach more people.We recently launched our new newsletter, Principles Friday, where I share one principle that can help you in your life or business, one thought-provoking question, and one call to action toward that principle. Please subscribe Here.It is Free and Short (2min).

Are LLMs useful for enterprises? Well, what is the use of a large language model that is trained on trillions of tokens but knows little to nothing about your business. To make LLMs actually useful for enterprises, it is important for them to retrieve company's data effectively. LlamaIndex has been at the forefront of providing such solutions and frameworks to augment LLMs. In this episode, Jerry Liu, Co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, joins Raja Iqbal, CEO and Chief Data Scientist at Data Science Dojo, for a deep dive into the intersection of generative AI, data. and entrepreneurship. Jerry walks us through the cutting-edge technologies reshaping the generative AI landscape such as LlamaIndex. He also explores Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning in detail, discussing their benefits, trade-offs, use cases, and enterprise adoption, making these complex tools and topics not just easily understandable but also fascinating. Jerry further ventures into the heart of entrepreneurship, sharing valuable lessons and insights learned along his journey, from navigating his corporate career at tech giants like Apple, Quora, Two Sigma, and Uber, to starting as a founder in the data and AI landscape. Amidst the excitement of innovation, Raja and Jerry also address the potential risks and considerations with generative AI. They raise thought-provoking questions about its impact on society, for instance, whether we're trading critical thinking for convenience. Whether you're a generative AI enthusiast, seasoned entrepreneur, or simply curious about the future, this podcast promises plenty of knowledge and insights for you.

In episode 115 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ben Wellington.Ben is the Deputy Head of Feature Forecasting at Two Sigma, a financial sciences company. Ben has been at Two Sigma for more than 15 years, and currently leads efforts focused on natural language processing and feature forecasting. He is also the author of data science blog I Quant NY, which has influenced local government policy, including changes in NYC street infrastructure and the design of NYC subway vending machines. Ben is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Urban and Community Planning program at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he teaches statistics using urban open data. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:30) Ben's background* (04:30) Why Ben was interested in NLP* (05:48) Ben's work on translational equivalence, dominant techniques* (10:14) Scaling, large datasets at Two Sigma* (12:50) Applying ML techniques to quantitative finance, features in financial ML systems* (17:27) Baselines and time-dependence in constructing features, human knowledge* (19:23) Black box models in finance* (24:00) Two Sigma's presence in the AI research community* (26:55) Short- and long-term research initiatives at Two Sigma* (30:42) How ML fits into Two Sigma's investment strategy* (34:05) Alpha and competition in investing* (36:13) Temporality in data* (40:38) Challenges for finance/AI and beating the market* (44:36) Reproducibility* (49:47) I Quant NY and storytelling with data* (56:43) Descriptive statistics and stories* (1:01:05) Benefits of simple methods* (1:07:11) OutroLinks:* Ben's work on translational equivalence and scalable discriminative learning* Two Sigma Insights* Storytelling with data and I Quant NY Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

Are you ready for a deep dive into quantitative investing, the private credit trend, and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP)? Then this episode is for you! Joining us today is Robin Wigglesworth, The Financial Times' global finance correspondent, and author of Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever, a groundbreaking book about the past, present, and future of passive investing. We talk with Robin about quantitative investing and the ideas he lays out in his article ‘A Quant Winter's Tale', before hearing his insights on the private credit trend and his intriguing new book titled Bonds, all about the history of the bond market. Today's episode also features our Mark to Market segment, where Mark McGrath joins us to talk about the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), providing a comprehensive overview of its inner workings, his response to the criticisms levelled against it, and why he believes it's of huge benefit to a great many Canadians. Next, we take a look back at our conversation with Alexandra Macqueen on annuities before sharing our thoughts on its relevance to today's discussion and why it's worth revisiting. Be sure to stay tuned for our after-show segment where we share our book, blog, and viewing recommendations, plus our favourite reviews, followed by a sneak peek of some of the exciting guests we have coming up. Press play now for a deep dive into quant investing, the hype around private credit, saving for retirement, and a whole lot more!   Key Points From This Episode:   An introduction to today's guest, Robin Wigglesworth, followed by his breakdown of quantitative investing. (0:04:05) Theories on what happened to factor investing between 2018 and 2020; what is meant by the quant winter and why we are now in a quant summer. (0:09:59) How investor sentiment regarding factor investing changed after the quant winter and how the algorithm aversion phenomenon impacted it. (0:15:13) The collapse of value; the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (plus its role in the quant winter), and where we are right now. (0:20:14) An overview of quant investing products, and why many of them are too expensive. (0:23:24) Breaking down the noisy-ness in factor data and Robin's predictions for where factor investing will go from here. (0:25:51) Unpacking the hype around private credit: indications that it's in a bubble, how it could impact broader trends, and who stands to benefit most.  (0:36:36) We hear about the fascinating book that Robin is currently working on about the history of the bond market. (0:40:22) Our Mark to Market segment on the complicated (and divisive) Canada Pension Plan (CPP); how it works, its profound benefits, and responding to the criticism it has received. (0:41:50) A look back at our conversation with Alexandra Macqueen on annuities and how it links in with today's discussion. (01:01:31) Our after-show section: an update on the Money Scope Podcast, reading recommendations, reviews from our listeners, and some of the incredible guests we have coming up! (01:04:33) Links From Today's Episode: Robin Wigglesworth — https://robinwigglesworth.com/ Robin Wigglesworth on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-wigglesworth-17101722 Financial Times — https://www.ft.com/ Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever — https://www.amazon.com/Trillions-Renegades-Invented-Changed-Finance/dp/0593087682 ‘Quant Winter's Tale' — https://www.ft.com/content/e0f98278-432e-4ece-b170-2c40e40d2835 Episode 184: Robin Wigglesworth — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/184 Episode 93: Cliff Asness from AQR — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/93 Cliff Asness — https://www.aqr.com/About-Us/OurFirm/Cliff-Asness-Bio AQR — https://www.aqr.com/ Two Sigma — https://www.twosigma.com/ D.E Shaw — https://www.deshaw.com/ CPP Investments — https://www.cppinvestments.com/ StatsCan — https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/start Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Episode 116: True Cost of CPP with Aravind Sithamparapillai — https://jasonpereira.ca/all-content-jason-pereira-toronto/true-cost-of-cpp-with-aravind-sithamparapillai-e116 Episode 59: Alexandra Macqueen — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/59 Pensionize Your Nest Egg — https://www.amazon.com/Pensionize-Your-Nest-Egg-Allocation/dp/1119025257 Griselda Blanco — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15837600/ Cocaine Cowboys — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380268/ Queen of the South — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1064899/ Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt — https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbilt/dp/0062224069 Farnam Street — https://fs.blog/ 24 in 24 Reading Challenge — https://rationalreminder.ca/24in24 The Money Scope Podcast — https://moneyscope.ca/ The Money Scope Podcast on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@moneyscopepod Rational Reminder on iTunes — https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582. Rational Reminder Website — https://rationalreminder.ca/  Rational Reminder on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/rationalreminder/ Rational Reminder on X — https://twitter.com/RationalRemind Rational Reminder on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/ Rational Reminder Email — info@rationalreminder.ca Benjamin Felix — https://www.pwlcapital.com/author/benjamin-felix/  Benjamin on X — https://twitter.com/benjaminwfelix Benjamin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwfelix/ Cameron Passmore — https://www.pwlcapital.com/profile/cameron-passmore/ Cameron on X — https://twitter.com/CameronPassmore Cameron on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronpassmore/ Mark McGrath on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmcgrathcfp/ Mark McGrath on X — https://twitter.com/MarkMcGrathCFP

S3 Ep8 | What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) have to do with financial activism? And what should investors know as the field continues to evolve? This episode Renegade is joined by Katy Knight, President & Executive Director, Siegel Family Endowment and Deepti Doshi, Co-Director, New_Public to learn more about AI and innovation in this field. Our guests share how leveraging technology for the public good is a critical part of building inclusive access to information, education, and wealth-building opportunities.   About Deepti.Deepti Doshi is a community organizer who has been working at the intersection of social change, social media, and leadership development across the private, non-profit and public sectors. As a Director at Meta, Deepti helped establish the New Product Experimentation team and created the Community Partnerships team. She founded Haiyya, India's largest community organizing platform; Escuela Nueva India, an education company that serves the urban poor; the Fellows Program at Acumen Fund to build leaders for the social enterprise sector. About Katy.Katy Knight is President and Executive Director of Siegel Family Endowment, a foundation focused on the nexus of technology and society. Beginning as Deputy Executive Director in 2017, she has pioneered an inquiry-driven approach to philanthropy, grounded in the scientific method and centered on reframing big questions and learning alongside grantees. Katy has been recognized for her leadership in Crain's Notable Black Leaders in 2022, and City & State's 40 Under 40 Rising Stars in 2015. She previously led Community Engagement at Two Sigma and held positions on Google's Communications and Public Affairs teams, where she acted as a liaison to stakeholders in local government, communities, and nonprofits.Renegade Capital Tools & TipsA renegade not only listens but acts. We've consolidated a few tips from this episode to help you prepare for the future of AI and investing. Be patient. Whether you are a funder, investor, or everyday activist, this work requires thoughtfulness and patience from everyone involved. That means patient capital, taking time to collect the right input, and thinking long term. Embrace duality. The future of technology can feel both exciting and terrifying, and we have to get comfortable with the fact that there are many possibilities. Find the reasons to be optimistic AND ask the hard questions that will push change for the better.Find ways to use and support tech for public good. Deepti and Katy shared several resources for our listeners to use technology in informed and inclusive ways. New_Public Digital Spaces DirectorySiegel Family Endowment: TechCongressSiegel Family Endowment: Public Interest Technology Case StudiesSupport the showLove the podcast? Subscribe and follow to never miss an episode.Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Join our mailing list

Matt Greenwood, Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Investment Management Engineering @ Two Sigma shares some of the most unique and valuable cultural practices behind how the engineering org operates at Two Sigma. We discuss strategies that prepare you for scaling (like intentional relationship-building with your front-line managers); examples of how Two Sigma successfully deployed the “Inverse Conway Maneuver,” how to reinforce a consensus-driven culture from early-days to 1000+, how to navigate both large & small reorgs; and why Two Sigma made the intentional decision to rebrand their R&D org as M&E (modeling & engineering)! Plus, Matt's approach to full-bodied problem-solving.ABOUT MATT GREENWOODMatt is Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Investment Management Engineering at Two Sigma. He joined Two Sigma in 2003 and since then has led a number of company-wide efforts in both engineering and modeling. Matt is also an Advisor at Two Sigma Ventures and works closely with the business' portfolio companies as a board member and advisor.Matt began his career at Bell Labs and later moved to IBM Research, where he was responsible for a number of early efforts in tablet computing and distributed computing. In 2000, Matt was lead developer and manager for Entrisphere, Inc., where he helped create a product providing access equipment for broadband service providers. Matt earned a BA and MA in Math from Oxford University, and a Master's degree in Theoretical Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He also holds a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia University, where he taught for many years."We came to New York in 2003, nothing was happening in New York. Silicon Alley, as they called it back then was just kaput. Then one day, I was browsing Craigslist, because that's what you did in 2003, and there was a little ad, ‘Hedge fund, looking for excellent engineers.' So I was like, 'All right, maybe.' I said to my wife, 'This is either the sketchiest thing ever or the best decision of my life. It's one of those two things.' On Craigslist, there's no other way you can be, right? And it was probably the best decision of my life.”- Matt Greenwood   This episode is brought to you by incident.ioincident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com, Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization.Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.ioInterested in joining an ELC Peer Group?ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroupsSHOW NOTES:Matt's eng leadership journey & discovering Two Sigma on Craigslist (3:34)Key moments of Two Sigma's evolution as an org that sparked excitement (7:26)Lessons learned on keeping your work exciting by focusing on “human problems” (10:25)Create a culture of investing in people's growth across longer timelines (12:22)How Sigma Two intentionally structures its R&D org (15:18)An unexpected way to prepare for scaling your org - intentional relationship-building strategies for your first-line managers (18:10)Frameworks for deploying the inverse Conway maneuver (20:56)The right people / conversations for small & large reorgs (23:30)Consensus-driven culture at 1000+, approaches to create buy-in & ownership with organizational change (26:02)Two Sigma's approach to full-bodied problem solving (30:26)Rapid fire questions (34:06)LINKS AND RESOURCESWhalefall - A scientifically accurate thriller from Daniel Kraus about a scuba diver who's been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Rishi Ganti argues there is a meaningful alternative to investing in tradeable markets — but it's not easy. In this episode of the podcast, Julie Segal talks to Rishi Ganti, a veteran of J.P. Morgan and Two Sigma and co-founder of Orthogon Partners, which invests in untraded or esoteric assets. Or what might be even better described as investments that require discovery, a process Rishi calls magical  — it's finance essentialism, bringing ideas and money together. Julie and Rishi also talk about the seemingly endless stream of college graduates who make their way to Wall Street every year to work in markets that are designed to eliminate exactly what they came for — alpha. People choose to forget what they learned in Economics 101: the law of competition. Rishi, who chose instead to invest in untraded assets, talks about the challenges of finding these opportunities, building structures so they can be invested in, and convincing allocators of the rewards. For more on Orthogon and the problems with modern finance, read ⁠II's story⁠ from 2020.

Ever been on an executive cruise? This episode is brought to you by UnCruise Adventures Small Ship Cruising that connects guests with nature and wildlife while exploring some of the most remote and scenic destinations on the West Coast of the Americas including Alaska, Baja, and Hawaii. Get the latest deals benleads.com/cruise-------This is where teams fail.Brian Finn, COO of Circle of Care, has achieved monumental results in the military, insurance, tech, and now healthcare using a powerful daily execution framework. Success hinges on more than meticulous planning and strategy; ultimately, it thrives on the relentless execution of daily actions.This is an especially painful recognition when you see how much leaders spend on planning but pay little heed to the “get it done” process that should be prioritized. Brian leads one of the largest pediatric therapy providers in the state of Texas with a proven track record in leading organizational transformation and implementing cutting-edge technologies in the healthcare sector.Previously he was COO at Two Sigma, the financial sciences company that combines advanced technology and data science with rigorous human inquiry to solve the toughest challenges in finance.LinkedIn Profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-finn-33745aaCompany Link: https://www.twosigma.com/What You'll Discover in this Episode:What Inspired Brian's Leadership PerspectiveThe Turning Point for his LegacyThe 15-Minute Meeting that Keeps his Team FocusedThe Vital Difference Between Setting a Goal vs IntentionAvoiding the Damage of Task SaturationInstilling the Habit of Daily ExecutionWhat Motocross Teaches You about Leadership-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter

Steve Francia is a highly accomplished technology executive and entrepreneur. Steve is a Managing Director at Two Sigma, serving as the Product Lead for the Investment Management Platform. Two Sigma is a technology-driven investment firm based in New York City. Steve is widely known for his involvement in MongoDB, Hugo, and the Go community. In this episode, Steve takes us through his journey in the tech industry discussing various projects and companies he participated in so far in his career. 00:00 Introduction01:07 What is Steve Doing Today?05:00 First Memories of a Computer15:00 Interests Leading to College24:00 Entering College 33:50 First Tech Jobs in/after College58:45 Discovering MongoDB1:17:00 Creation of Hugo1:22:48 Working at Docker1:28:15 Joining the Go Team1:42:00 Expectations of the Job1:54:20 Contact InfoConnect with Steve: Twitter:  https://twitter.com/spf13?lang=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevefranciaMentioned in today's episode:Docker: https://www.docker.com/MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/Two Sigma: https://www.twosigma.com/Hugo: https://gohugo.io/ Want more from Ardan Labs? You can learn Go, Kubernetes, Docker & more through our video training, live events, or through our blog!Online Courses : https://ardanlabs.com/education/ Live Events : https://www.ardanlabs.com/live-training-events/ Blog : https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog Github : https://github.com/ardanlabs

In this episode, we speak with Lorien Gabel, Co-founder and CEO of Figment, the leading provider of blockchain infrastructure. The company has raised over $150 million and is backed by Thoma Bravo, B Capital, Two Sigma, and other notable investors. Figment provides comprehensive staking solutions for over 250 institutional clients. The world's largest asset managers, custodians, exchanges, foundations, and token holders leverage Figment's infrastructure and APIs to earn staking rewards. Staking is a process in which token holders can earn rewards by helping to secure a blockchain network. Before Co-Founding Figment, Lorien was both a serial entrepreneur and corporate executive.  Along with his brother, Lorien founded three companies - 1) pingg.com, which was acquired by 1800-Flowers, 2) Bird on a Wire Networks, which was acquired by AT&T Canada and 3) Interlog, one of Canada's first commercial ISPs, which was acquired by a large multinational telecommunications provider. Lorien also spearheaded the exponential U.S. growth of UK-based tech company MessageLabs as Global VP Business Development, ran a division of Fortune 500 company Micron, and has served on the advisory board of a number of start-ups. Lorien supports The Murph Challenge. To learn more about the annual event click here. I am your host RJ Lumba.  We hope you enjoy the show.  If you like the episode, click to subscribe.

Want to help define the AI Engineer stack? >800 folks have weighed in on the top tools, communities and builders for the first State of AI Engineering survey, which we will present for the first time at next week's AI Engineer Summit. Join us online!This post had robust discussion on HN and Twitter.In October 2022, Robust Intelligence hosted an internal hackathon to play around with LLMs which led to the creation of two of the most important AI Engineering tools: LangChain

Thoughts on Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his motto "Quid Non" and Benjamin Bloom and his famous "two sigma problem." --- Nintil on Bloom's Two Sigma Problem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest this week is Jeremy Schwartz. Jeremy is global chief investment officer for WisdomTree Investments. In that role, Jeremy leads the firm's investment team and is responsible for constructing its equity indexes, quantitative active strategies, and model portfolios. Jeremy joined WisdomTree in May 2005 and previously held several posts at the firm, including serving as its global head of research. Prior to joining WisdomTree, Jeremy served as a research assistant for Professor Jeremy Siegel and is credited as Siegel's co-author of the sixth edition of the book, Stocks for the Long Run. Jeremy received his bachelor's degree from the Wharton School and is a CFA charterholder.BackgroundBioStocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies, Sixth Edition, by Jeremy Siegel, with Jeremy SchwartzThe Future for Investors: Why the Tried and True Triumphs Over the Bold and the New, by Jeremy SiegelDo-Nothing Strategies“What Beat the S&P 500 Over the Past Three Decades? Doing Nothing,” by Jeffrey Ptak, Morningstar.com, April 17, 2023.Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them, by Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan“Wise Words in Warren's Recent Letter,” by Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, March 8, 2023.“Long-Term Returns on the Original S&P 500 Companies,” by Jeremy Siegel and Jeremy Schwartz, jstor.org, 2006.Market Outlook“The Most Important Charts for 2023,” by Jeremy Schwartz and Brian Manby, caia.org, May 8, 2023.Risk and Return“A Surprise Influence in S&P 500 Earnings? The Dollar,” by Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, May 31, 2023.Fama and French Three Factor Model Definition: Formula and Interpretation, by Adam Hayes, www.investopedia.com, May 31, 2022.“A Deep Dive Into Growth & Momentum,” by Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, July 12, 2021.“A Surprising Rebalance Season for S&P Style Indexes,” by Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, Jan. 5, 2023.WisdomTree Index Performance AttributionInflation and Dividends“A New Regime for Commodities: An Update,” by Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, May 31, 2022.“To Reveal Value, Start With Dividends,” Focus Points video series with Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, Jan. 11, 2023.“Quality Dividend Growth Performance Viewed Through Venn by Two Sigma,” by Jeremy Schwartz and Christopher Carrano, wisdomtree.com, May 15, 2023.Foreign Stocks“Lowering Your China Risk,” by Jeremy Schwartz and Matt Wagner, wisdomtree.com, May 19, 2023.“Values Strong Run in Emerging Markets,” by Aneeka Gupta and Jeremy Schwartz, wisdomtree.com, May 5, 2023.“Don't Layer Currency Risk on Top of Equity Exposure,” by Jeremy Schwartz and Christopher Gannatti, wisdomtree.com, 2019.ESG“Revisiting the WisdomTree ESG Model Portfolios,” by Scott Welch, wisdomtree.com, Oct. 14, 2022.“Aswath Damodaran: A Valuation Expert's Take on Inflation, Stock Buybacks, ESG, and More,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, May 16, 2023.

In this episode, we are joined by Chris Carrano, Vice President of Strategic Research at Venn by Two Sigma, to discuss the work that Venn is doing in the digital assets space, the Venn platform, and how returns-based analytics can help investors better understand their risk.  Listen in as Chris discusses: Venn by Two Sigma's … Read More Read More

Rember when you needed a full tech team to launch a simple brochureware website? Now you can just jump on Wix or Squarespace and spin up a well designed, responsive website in seconds. The rise of the no-code movement has helped increase the pace and usefulness of technology and it has transcended into lots of other applications and use cases. It's a win - win, as business users can create applications or make changes on the fly, while the engineering team gets to spend their time working on more complex and sophisticated problems. Candu is right in the strikezone of this no-code movement, as the company is building a better way to activate users and release new features. The simple, drag-and-drop UI Editor empowers product and customer teams to create UI themselves, saving developer time and trimming technical debt. Candu is venture backed by Two Sigma, CRV, Angular Ventures, and Haystack. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice for improving the activation rate for SaaS products and whether or not those post activation email campaigns are effective. * Jonathan's background story and how his career accelerated while at InsightSquared, plus the details on wayOUT, a non-profit he co-founded. * How Candu came to fruition and the evolution of the platform to its current state including sample use cases for product growth teams and its value. * The vibe around raising venture capital in the current market and how entrepreneurs need to think about today's market reality. * Advice on how to have a successful launch on Product Hunt. * Business ideas from spending one year writing down a new startup idea every day. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

In this episode of the [i3] Podcast, we look at machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our guests are Kaggle Founder Anthony Goldbloom and Stanford CS Professor Chris Manning, who are both involved in venture capital firm AIX Ventures, as investment directors. We speak about the state of play in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the most interesting applications, including ChatGPT, and opportunities for investors in this space, covering smart sensors, travel agents and personal assistants. Overview of the podcast: Anthony Goldbloom: 04:00 The idea for Kaggle came from a conference competition 06:00 Looking for the most accurate algorithms 07:30 Before Kaggle, every academic discipline had their own set of machine learning techniques 08:00 One technique won problem after problem 09:00 Rise of neural networks: 2012 is often called the annus mirabilis for machine learning 10:30 I'm mind blown by what you can do with ChatGPT 11:30 Using summarization through ChatGPT 12:30 We are in a world right now where the capabilities of these models run far ahead of the applications. People haven't really build companies around these models yet 14:50 The rise of chat-powered travel agents? Adding databases to ChatGPT 17:00 Why was Google interested in Kaggle? 19:00 Tweaking the value estimation algorithm for US real estate website Zillow 21:00 Surpassing physicians on diagnosing lung cancer 22:30 Two Sigma and Optiver also used Kaggle to solve problems 23:00 Hedge funds who crowdsourced investment problems 24:00 Being a one person band is hard in investing: you need to not only find the alpha signal, but also implement the trade in a way that doesn't move the market 27:00 Does machine learning work in time series? Yes, but it requires more babysitting if your algorithm works in an adversarial setting 32:00 What I bring to AIX Ventures is the understanding of where the gaps are in the tools for machine learning 33:00 Examples of companies we invested in 35:00 Embedding ultra light machine learning into appliances Chris Manning: 37:24 I was interested in how people learn languages, while I was always playing around with computers. Then I became interested in Ross Quinlan's ID3 algorithm for natural language processing 40:00 I started to work with large digital language databases slightly before the world wide web really kicked off 43:00 The combination of neutral networks and predictive text led to the revolutionary breakthroughs we see now with ChatGPT 45:30 You can use ChatGPT for text analysis, such as sentiment analysis or summarization of specific information 46:00 These models are just wonderful, but of course there are still problems. On occasion these models tend to hallucinate. They are just as confident producing made up stuff. And at times they lack consistency in thinking. They will say things that contradicts what they said previously 47:00 Human learning is still far more efficient in getting signal from data than machine learning 50:00 The majority of businesses are conducted through human language, whether it is sales or support. These models can help people work fast and better. 52:00 The case of Google and zero shot translation 57:00 Facebook experimented with two systems talking to each other, but they found the systems would not stick to English, but developed a more efficient symbol system 1:00:00 Interesting businesses we've invested in: weather prediction 1:02 A lot of computing that was previously done in the cloud is now done on the device, which is much quicker 1:04 Can NPL read the sentiment of a market by consuming just a lot of text? Well, a lot of mob mentality is expressed in language rather than numbers 1:07 The start of AIX Ventures and the two Australians 1:11 What might be the next big thing in NPL? 1:13 Future applications of language models might potentially look at video and personal assistants

Ramiro Berrelleza is Founder & CEO of Okteto, the Kubernetes development platform that allows developers to spin up production-like dev environments in the cloud. Okteto's open source project, also called Okteto, allows users to spin up a development container, which is configured like the user's production Kubernetes deployment. Today, it has 2.8K start on GitHub. Okteto has raised $18M from investors including Root VC and Two Sigma. In this episode, we discuss the challenges of building with kubernetes, figuring out market timing, how to position for your specific users & more!

In this episode, we speak with Warren Valdmanis, Partner at Two Sigma Impact, the impact investing business of Two Sigma exclusively focused on workforce impact. Two Sigma Impact combines active, principled ownership and data science with the goal of achieving superior returns and positive social outcomes. It invests in industries that rely heavily on human capital such as education and training, healthcare, consumer, and business services. They believe improving employee engagement and creating more good jobs can improve business performance and create a model for other companies to emulate. Previously, Warren was a Managing Director at Bain Capital, where he helped launch the firm's first dedicated social impact fund and develop the firm's strategic approach to social impact investing.  Warren worked at Bain Capital from 2005 to 2019. I am your host RJ Lumba. We hope you enjoy the show.

Unless you were already in the sector, topics within the manufacturing and supply chain industry were probably not on the radar for most people. As consumers, when you went to the store, you bought what you needed and that was that. However, people became very aware of the importance that these industries play in our lives during the pandemic when everything changed. Supply chain and manufacturing issues were the topics of the nightly news as shelves were bare with lots of essential items missing or purchasing a new car was almost impossible due to inventory shortages. Even though technology has helped these industries evolve over time, there is still a massive opportunity for disruption within the manufacturing and supply chain industries. It is a topic that Colin is thinking deeply about in terms of making investments and we start out our conversation with a discussion around the trends and opportunities for technology to make an impact to these sectors. Two Sigma Ventures is an early stage venture firm that was started in 2012 under the Two Sigma umbrella. The firm has made over 100 investments across many industries. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Colin's professional background including how he gained experience in the tech industry and then as an Investment Banker at Lehman Brothers. * What led him down the path of early stage investing and starting Two Sigma Ventures. * An overview of the firm today including portfolio examples. * His decision making criteria for making new investments. * How the tech scene has evolved in NYC. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Listen to Screaming in the Cloud: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/learning-in-public-with-swyx/Episode SummaryToday Corey sits down with swyx, head of developer experience at Airbyte, and so much more! They begin by chatting about swyx's career history, professional motivation, and an industry taboo: following the money. Then Corey and swyx move into a discussion about the surprisingly challenging nature of developer experience and what it means to “learn in public.” swyx talks about expertise and how to quantify and demonstrate learning. Corey and swyx discuss swyx's book “The Coding Career Handbook” and career coaching. swyx shares about his most recent foray into management in the era of zoom meetings, and conclude the conversation by talking about data integration and swyx's latest job at Airbyte.Links Referenced: “Learning Gears” blog post: https://www.swyx.io/learning-gears The Coding Career Handbook: https://learninpublic.org Personal Website: https://swyx.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx TranscriptCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Some folks are really easy to introduce when I have them on the show because, “My name is, insert name here. I built thing X, and my job is Y at company Z.” Then we have people like today's guest.swyx is currently—and recently—the head of developer experience at Airbyte, but he's also been so much more than that in so many different capacities that you're very difficult to describe. First off, thank you for joining me. And secondly, what's the deal with you?swyx: [laugh]. I have professional ADD, just like you. Thanks for having me, Corey. I'm a—Corey: It works out.swyx: a big fan. Longtime listener, first time caller. Love saying that. [laugh].Corey: You have done a lot of stuff. You have a business and finance background, which… okay, guilty; it's probably why I feel some sense of affinity for a lot of your work. And then you went into some interesting directions. You were working on React and serverless YahvehScript—which is, of course, how I insist on pronouncing it—at Two Sigma, Netlify, AWS—a subject near and dear to my heart—and most recently temporal.io.And now you're at Airbyte. So, you've been focusing on a lot of, I won't say the same things, but your area of emphasis has definitely consistently rhymed with itself. What is it that drives you?swyx: So, I have been recently asking myself a lot of this question because I had to interview to get my new role. And when you have multiple offers—because the job market is very hot for DevRel managers—you have to really think about it. And so, what I like to say is: number one, working with great people; number two, working on great products; number three, making a lot of money.Corey: There's entire school of thought that, “Oh, that's gauche. You shouldn't mention trying to make money.” Like, “Why do you want to work here because I want to make money.” It's always true—swyx: [crosstalk 00:03:46]—Corey: —and for some reason, we're supposed to pretend otherwise. I have a lot of respect for people who can cut to the chase on that. It's always been something that has driven me nuts about the advice that we give a new folks to the industry and peop—and even students figuring out their career path of, “Oh, do something you love and the money will follow.” Well, that's not necessarily true. There are ways to pivot something you'd love into something lucrative and there are ways to wind up more or less borderline starving to death. And again, I'm not saying money is everything, but for a number of us, it's hard to get to where we want to be without it.swyx: Yeah, yeah. I think I've been cast with the kind of judgmental label of being very financially motivated—that's what people have called me—for simply talking about it. And I'm like, “No. You know, it's number three on my priority list.” Like, I will leave positions where I have a lot of money on the table because I don't enjoy the people or the products, but having it up there and talking openly about it somehow makes you [laugh] makes you sort of greedy or something. And I don't think that's right. I tried to set an example for the people that I talk to or people who follow me.Corey: One of the things I've always appreciated about, I guess, your online presence, which has remained remarkably consistent as you've been working through a bunch of different, I guess, stages of life and your career, is you have always talked in significant depth about an area of tech that I am relatively… well, relatively crap at, let's be perfectly honest. And that is the wide world of most things front-end. Every time I see a take about someone saying, “Oh, front-end is junior or front-end is somehow less than,” I'd like to know what the hell it is they know because every time I try and work with it, I wind up more confused than I was when I started. And what I really appreciate is that you have always normalized the fact that this stuff is hard. As of the time that we're recording this a day or so ago, you had a fantastic tweet thread about a friend of yours spun up a Create React App and imported the library to fetch from an endpoint and immediately got stuck. And then you pasted this ridiculous error message.He's a senior staff engineer, ex-Google, ex-Twitter; he can solve complex distributed systems problems and unable to fetch from a REST endpoint without JavaScript specialist help. And I talk about this a lot in other contexts, where the reason I care so much about developer experience is that a bad developer experience does not lead people to the conclusion of, “Oh, this is a bad interface.” It leads people to the conclusion, “Oh, I'm bad at this and I didn't realize it.” No. I still fall into that trap myself.I was under the impression that there was just this magic stuff that JS people know. And your tweet did so much to help normalize from my perspective, the fact that no, no, this is very challenging. I recently went on a Go exploration. Now, I'm starting to get into JavaScript slash TypeScript, which I think are the same thing but I'm not entirely certain of that. Like, oh, well, one of them is statically typed, or strongly typed. It's like, “Well, I have a loud mechanical keyboard. Everything I do is typing strongly, so what's your point?”And even then we're talking past each other in these things. I don't understand a lot of the ecosystem that you live your career in, but I have always had a tremendous and abiding respect for your ability to make it accessible, understandable, and I guess for lack of a better term, to send the elevator back down.swyx: Oh, I definitely think about that strongly, especially that last bit. I think it's a form of personal growth. So, I think a lot of people, when they talk about this sending the elevator back down, they do it as a form of charity, like I'm giving back to the community. But honestly, you actually learn a lot by trying to explain it to others because that's the only way that you truly know if you've learned something. And if you ever get anything wrong, you'll—people will never let you forget it because it is the internet and people will crawl over broken glass to remind you that you're wrong.And once you've got it wrong, you will—you know, you've been so embarrassed that you'll never forget it. So, I think it's just a really good way to learn in public. And that's kind of the motto that I'm kind of known for. Yeah, we can take the direction anywhere you want to go in JavaScript land. Happy to talk about it all day. [laugh].Corey: Well, I want to start by something you just said where you're doing the learning in public thing. And something I've noticed is that there are really two positions you can take—in the general sense—when you set out to make a bit of a reputation for yourself in a particular technical space. You can either do the, “I'm a beginner here, same as the rest of you, and I'm learning in public,” or you can position yourself as something of an expert. And there are drawbacks and advantages to both. I think that if you don't look as wildly over-represented as I do, both of them are more fraught in different ways, where it's, “Oh, you're learning in public. Ah, look at the new person, she's dumb.”Or if you're presenting yourself as an expert, you get nibbled to death by ducks on a lot of the deep technical nuances and well, actually'ed to death. And my position has always been and this is going to be a radical concept for some folks, is that I'm genuinely honest. I tend to learn in public about the things that I don't know, but the things that I am something of a subject matter expert in—like, I don't know, cloud billing—I don't think that false modesty necessarily serves me particularly well. It's yeah, I know exactly what I'm talking about here. Pretending otherwise it's just being disingenuous.swyx: I try to think of it as having different gears of learning in public. So, I've called this “Learning Gears” in a previous blog post of mine, where you try to fit your mode of learning to the terrain that you're on, your domain expertise, and you should never over-represent the amount that you know because I think people are very rightly upset when there are a lot of people—let's say on Twitter, or YouTube, or Udemy even—who present themselves as experts who are actually—they just read the docs the previous night. So, you should try not to over-represent your expertise.But at the same time, don't let your imposter syndrome stop you from sharing what you are currently learning and taking corrections when you're wrong. And I think that's the tricky balance to get which is constantly trying to put yourself out there while accepting that you might be wrong and not getting offended when or personally attacked when someone corrects you, inevitably. And sometimes people will—especially if you have a lot of followers, people will try to say—you know, someone of your following—you know, it's—I kind of call this follower shaming, like, you should act, uh—invulnerable, or run every tweet through committee before you tweet after a certain sort of following size. So, I try to not do that and try to balance responsibility with authenticity.Corey: I think that there's something incredibly important about that, where there's this idea that you either become invulnerable and get defensive and you yell at people, and down that path lies disaster because, believe it or not, we all get it wrong from time to time, and doubling down and doubling down and doubling down again, suddenly, you're on an island all by yourself and no one respectable is going to be able to get there to help you. And the other side of it is going too far in the other direction, where you implicitly take any form of criticism whatsoever as being de facto correct. And I think that both paths don't lead to super great places. I think it's a matter of finding our own voices and doing a little bit of work as far as the validity of accepting a given piece of feedback goes. But other than that, I'm a big fan of being able to just more or less be as authentic as possible.And I get that I live in a very privileged position where I have paths open to me that are not open to most folks. But in many respects so to you are one of the—easily—first five people I would think of if someone said, “Hey if I need to learn JavaScript for someone, who should I talk to first?” You're on that list. And you've done a lot of things in this area, but you've never—you alluded to it a few minutes ago, but I'm going to call it out a little more pointedly—without naming names, let's be clear—and that you're never presented as a grifter, which is sort of the best way I can think of it of, “Well, I just learned this new technology stack yesterday and now I'm writing a book that I'm going to sell to people on how to be an expert at this thing.” And I want to be clear, this is very distinct from gatekeeping because I think that, “Oh, well, you have to be at least this much of an expert—” No, but I think that holding yourself out as I'm going to write a book on how to be proud of how to become a software engineer.Okay, you were a software engineer for six months, and more to the point, knowing how to do a thing and knowing how to teach a thing are orthogonal skill sets, and I think that is not well understood. If I ever write a book or put something—or some sort of info product out there, I'm going to have to be very careful not to fall into that trap because I don't want to pretend to be an expert in things that I'm not. I barely think I'm an expert in things that I provable am.swyx: there are many ways to answer that. So, I have been accused a couple of times of that. And it's never fun, but also, if you defend yourself well, you can actually turn a critic into a fan, which I love doing.Corey: Mm-hm.swyx: [laugh].Corey: Oh yes.swyx: what I fall back to, so I have a side interest in philosophy, based on one of my high school teachers giving us, like, a lecture in philosophy. I love him, he changed my life. [Lino Barnard 00:13:20], in case—in the off chance that he's listening. So, there's a theory of knowledge of, like, how do you know what you know, right? And if you can base your knowledge on truth—facts and not opinions, then people are arguing with the facts and not the opinions.And so, getting as close to ground truth as possible and having certainty in your collection of facts, I think is the basis of not arguing based on identity of, like, “Okay, I have ten years experience; you have two years experience. I am more correct than you in every single opinion.” That's also not, like, the best way to engage in the battlefield of ideas. It's more about, do you have the right amount of evidence to support the conclusions that you're trying to make? And oftentimes, I think, you know, that is the basis, if you don't have that ability.Another thing that I've also done is to collect the opinions of others who have more expertise and present them and curate them in a way that I think adds value without taking away from the individual original sources. So, I think there's a very academic way [laugh] you can kind of approach this, but that defends your intellectual integrity while helping you learn faster than the typical learning rate. Which is kind of something I do think about a lot, which is, you know, why do we judge people by the number of years experience? It's because that's usually the only metric that we have available that is quantifiable. Everything else is kind of fuzzy.But I definitely think that, you know, better algorithms for learning let you progress much faster than the median rate, and I think people who apply themselves can really get up there in terms of the speed of learning with that. So, I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. [laugh].Corey: It's a hard thing to solve for. There's no way around it. It's, what is it that people should be focusing on? How should they be internalizing these things? I think a lot of it starts to with an awareness, even if not in public, just to yourself of, “I would like advice on some random topic.” Do you really? Are you actually looking for advice or are you looking—swyx: right.Corey: For validation? Because those are not the same thing, and you are likely to respond very differently when you receive advice, depending on which side of that you're coming from.swyx: Yeah. And so, one way to do that is to lay out both sides, to actually demonstrate what you're split on, and ask for feedback on specific tiebreakers that would help your decision swing one way or another. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely people who ask questions that are just engagement bait or just looking for validation. And while you can't really fix that, I think it's futile to try to change others' behavior online. You just have to be the best version of yourself you can be. [laugh].Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: So, you wrote a book that is available at learninpublic.org, called The Coding Career Handbook. And to be clear, I have not read this myself because at this point, if I start reading a book like that, and you know, the employees that I have see me reading a book like that, they're going to have some serious questions about where this company is going to be going soon. But scrolling through the site and the social proof, the testimonials from various people who have read it, more or less read like a who's-who of people that I respect, who have been on this show themselves.Emma Bostian is fantastic at explaining a lot of these things. Forrest Brazeal is consistently a source to me of professional envy. I wish I had half his musical talent; my God. And your going down—it explains, more or less, the things that a lot of folks people are all expected to know but no one teaches them about every career stage, ranging from newcomer to the industry to senior. And there's a lot that—there's a lot of gatekeeping around this and I don't even know that it's intentional, but it has to do with the idea that people assume that folks, quote-unquote, “Just know” the answer to some things.Oh, people should just know how to handle a technical interview, despite the fact that the skill set is completely orthogonal to the day-to-day work you'll be doing. People should just know how to handle a performance review, or should just know how to negotiate for a raise, or should just know how to figure out is this technology that I'm working on no longer the direction the industry is going in, and eventually I'm going to wind up, more or less, waiting for the phone to ring because there's only three companies in the world left who use it. Like, how do you keep—how do you pay attention to what's going on around you? And it's the missing manual that I really wish that people would have pointed out to me back when I was getting started. Would have made life a lot easier.swyx: Oh, wow. That's high praise. I actually didn't know we're going to be talking about the book that much. What I will say is—Corey: That's the problem with doing too much. You never know what people have found out about you and what they're going to say when they drag you on to a podcast.swyx: got you, got you. Okay. I know, I know, I know where this is going. Okay. So, one thing that I really definitely believe is that—and this happened to me in my first job as well, which is most people get the mentors that they're assigned at work, and sometimes you have a bad roll the dice. [laugh].And you're supposed to pick up all the stuff they don't teach you in school at work or among your friend group, and sometimes you just don't have the right network at work or among your friend group to tell you the right things to help you progress your career. And I think a lot of this advice is written down in maybe some Hacker News posts, some Reddit posts, some Twitter posts, and there's not really a place you to send people to point to, that consolidates that advice, particularly focused at the junior to senior stage, which is the stage that I went through before writing the book. And so, I think that basically what I was going for is targeting the biggest gap that I saw, which is, there a lot of interview prep type books like Crack the Coding Career, which is kind of—Crack the Coding Interview, which is kind of the book title that I was going after. But once you got the job, no one really tells you what to do after you got that first job. And how do you level up to the senior that everyone wants to hire, right? There's—Corey: “Well, I've mastered cracking the coding interview. Now, I'm really trying to wrap my head around the problem of cracking the showing up at work on time in the morning.” Like, the baseline stuff. And I had so many challenges with that early in my career. Not specifically punctuality, but just the baseline expectation that it's just assumed that by the time you're in the workplace earning a certain amount of money, it's just assumed that you have—because in any other field, you would—you have several years of experience in the workplace and know how these things should play out.No, the reason that I'm sometimes considered useful as far as giving great advice on career advancement and the rest is not because I'm some wizard from the future, it's because I screwed it all up myself and got censured and fired and rejected for all of it. And it's, yeah, I'm not smart enough to learn from other people's mistakes; I got to make them myself. So, there's something to be said for turning your own missteps into guidance so that the next person coming up has an easier time than you did. And that is a theme that, from what I have seen, runs through basically everything that you do.swyx: I tried to do a lot of research, for sure. And so, one way to—you know, I—hopefully, I try not to make mistakes that others have learned, have made, so I tried to pick from, I think I include 1500 quotes and sources and blog posts and tweets to build up that level of expertise all in one place. So hopefully, it gives people something to bootstrap your experience off of. So, you're obviously going to make some mistakes on your own, but at least you have the ability to learn from others, and I think this is my—you know, I'm very proud of the work that I did. And I think people have really appreciated it.Because it's a very long book, and nobody reads books these days, so what am I doing [laugh] writing a book? I think it's only the people that really need this kind of advice, that they find themselves not having the right mentorship that reach out to me. And, you know, it's good enough to support a steady stream of sales. But more importantly, like, you know, I am able to mentor them at various levels from read my book, to read my free tweets, to read the free chapters, or join the pay community where we have weekly sessions going through every chapter and I give feedback on what people are doing. Sometimes I've helped people negotiate their jobs and get that bump up to senior staff—senior engineer, and I think more than doubled their salary, which was very personal proud moment for me.But yeah, anyway, I think basically, it's kind of like a third place between the family and work that you could go to the talk about career stuff. And I feel like, you know, maybe people are not that open on Twitter, but maybe they can be open in a small community like ours.Corey: There's a lot to be said for a sense of professional safety and personal safety around being—having those communities. I mean, mine, when I was coming up was the freenode IRC network. And that was great; it's pseudo-anonymous, but again, I was Corey and network staff at the time, which was odd, but it was great to be able to reach out and figure out am I thinking about this the wrong way, just getting guidance. And sure, there are some channels that basically thrived on insulting people. I admittedly was really into that back in the early-two-thousand-nothings.And, like, it was always fun to go to the Debian channel. It's like, “Yeah, can you explain to me how to do this or should I just go screw myself in advance?” Yeah, it's always the second one. Like, community is a hard thing to get right and it took me a while to realize this isn't the energy I want in the world. I like being able to help people come up and learn different things.I'm curious, given your focus on learning in public and effectively teaching folks as well as becoming a better engineer yourself along the way, you've been focusing for a while now on management. Tell me more about that.swyx: I wouldn't say it's been, actually, a while. Started dabbling in it with the Temporal job, and then now fully in it with Airbyte.Corey: You have to know, it has been pandemic time; it has stood still. Anything is—swyx: exactly.Corey: —a while it given that these are the interminable—this is the decade of Zoom meetings.swyx: [laugh]. I'll say I have about a year-and-a-half of it. And I'm interested in it partially because I've really been enjoying the mentoring side with the coding career community. And also, I think, some of the more effective parts of what I do have to be achieved in the planning stages with getting the right resources rather than doing the individual contributor work. And so, I'm interested in that.I'm very wary of the fact that I don't love meetings myself. Meetings are a means to an end for me and meetings are most of the job in management time. So, I think for what's important to me there, it is that we get stuff done. And we do whatever it takes to own the outcomes that we want to achieve and try to manage people's—try to not screw up people's careers along the way. [laugh]. Better put, I want people to be proud of what they get done with me by the time they're done with me. [laugh].Corey: So, I know you've talked to me about this very briefly, but I don't know that as of the time of this recording, you've made any significant public statements about it. You are now over at Airbytes, which I confess is a company I had not heard of before. What do y'all do over there?swyx: [laugh]. “What is it we do here?” So Airbyte—Corey: Exactly. Consultants want to know.swyx: Airbyte's a data integration company, which means different things based on your background. So, a lot of the data engineering patterns in, sort of, the modern data stack is extracting from multiple sources and loading everything into a data warehouse like a Snowflake or a Redshift, and then performing analysis with tools like dbt or business intelligence tools out there. We like to use MetaBase, but there's a whole there's a whole bunch of these stacks and they're all sort of advancing at different rates of progress. And what Airbyte would really like to own is the data integration part, the part where you load a bunch of sources, every data source in the world.What really drew me to this was two things. One, I really liked the vision of data freedom, which is, you have—you know, as—when you run a company, like, a typical company, I think at Temporal, we had, like, 100, different, like, you know, small little SaaS vendors, all of them vying to be the sources of truth for their thing, or a system of record for the thing. Like, you know, Salesforce wants to be a source of truth for customers, and Google Analytics want to be source of truth for website traffic, and so on and so forth. Like, and it's really hard to do analysis across all of them unless you dump all of them in one place.So one, is the mission of data freedom really resonates with me. Like, your data should be put in put somewhere where you can actually make something out of it, and step one is getting it into a format in a place that is amenable for analysis. And data warehouse pattern has really taken hold of the data engineering discipline. And I find, I think that's a multi-decade trend that I can really get behind. That's the first thing.Corey: I will say that historically, I'm bad at data. All jokes about using DNS as a database aside, one of the reasons behind that is when you work on stateless things like web servers and you blow trunks and one of them, oops. We all laugh, we take an outage, so maybe we're not laughing that hard, but we can reprovision web servers and things are mostly fine. With data and that going away, there are serious problems that could theoretically pose existential risk to the business. Now, I was a sysadmin and a, at least mediocre one, which means that after the first time I lost data, I was diligent about doing backups.Even now, the data work that we do have deep analysis on our customers' AWS bills, which doesn't sound like a big data problem, but I assure you it is, becomes something where, “Okay, step one. We don't operate on it in place.” We copy it into our own secured environment and then we begin the manipulations. We also have backups installed on these things so that in the event that I accidentally the data, it doesn't wind up causing horrifying problems for our customers. And lastly, I wind up also—this is going to surprise people—I might have securing the access to that data by not permitting writes.Turns out it's really hard—though apparently not impossible—to delete data with read-only calls.swyx: [crosstalk 00:28:12].Corey: It tends to be something of just building guardrails against myself. But the data structures, the understanding the analysis of certain things, I would have gotten into Go way sooner than I did if the introduction to Go tutorial on how to use it wasn't just a bunch of math problems talking about this is how you do it. And great, but here in the year of our lord 2022, I mostly want a programming language to smack a couple of JSON objects together and ideally come out with something resembling an answer. I'm not doing a whole lot of, you know, calculating prime numbers in the course of my week. And that is something that took a while for me to realize that, no, no, it's just another example of not being a great way of explaining something that otherwise could be incredibly accessible to folks who have real problems like this.I think the entire field right now of machine learning and the big data side of the universe struggles with this. It's, “Oh, yeah. If you have all your data, that's going to absolutely change the world for you.” “Cool. Can you explain how?” “No. Not effectively anyway.” Like, “Well, thanks for wasting everyone's time. It's appreciated.”swyx: Yeah, startup is sitting on a mountain of data that they don't use and I think everyone kind of feels guilty about it because everyone who is, like, a speaker, they're always talking about, like, “Oh, we used our data to inform this presidential campaign and look at how amazing we are.” And then you listen to the podcasts where the data scientists, you know, talk amongst themselves and they're like, “Yeah, it's bullshit.” Like, [laugh], “We're making it up as we go along, just like everyone else.” But, you know, I definitely think, like, some of the better engineering practices are arising under this. And it's professionalizing just like front-end professionalized maybe ten years ago, DevOps professionalized also, roughly in that timeframe, I think data is emerging as a field that is just a standalone discipline with its own tooling and potentially a lot of money running through it, especially if you look at the Snowflake ecosystem.So, that's why I'm interested in it. You know, I will say there's also—I talked to you about the sort of API replication use case, but also there's database replication, which is kind of like the big use case, which, for example, if you have a transactional sort of SQL database and you want to replicate that to an analytical database for queries, that's a very common one. So, I think basically data mobility from place to place, reshaping it and transferring it in as flexible manner as possible, I think, is the mission, and I think there's a lot of tooling that starts from there and builds up with it. So, Airbyte integrates pretty well with Airflow, Dexter, and all the other orchestration tools, and then, you know, you can use dbt, and everything else in that data stack to run with it. So, I just really liked that composition of tools because basically when I was a hedge fund analyst, we were doing the ETL job without knowing the name for it or having any tooling for it.I just ran a Python script manually on a cron job and whenever it failed, I would have to get up in the middle of night to go kick it again. It's, [laugh] it was that bad in 2014, '15. So, I really feel the pain. And, you know, the more data that we have to play around with, the more analysis we can do.Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing what becomes of this field as folks like you get further and further into it. And by, “Well, what do you mean, folks like me?” Well, I'm glad you asked, or we're about to as I put words in your mouth. I will tell you. People who have a demonstrated ability not just to understand the technology—which is hard—but then have this almost unicorn gift of being able to articulate and explain it to folks who do not have that level of technical depth in a way that is both accessible and inviting. And that is no small thing.If you were to ask me to draw a big circle around all the stuff that you've done in your career and define it, that's how I would do it. You are a storyteller who is conversant with the relevant elements of the story in a first-person perspective. Which is probably a really wordy way to put it. We should get a storyteller to workshop that, but you see the point.swyx: I try to call it, like, accessibly smart. So, it's a balance that you want to make, where you don't want to talk down to your audience because I think there are a lot of educators out there who very much stay at the basics and never leave that. You want to be slightly aspirational and slightly—like, push people to the bounds of their knowledge, but then not to go too far and be inaccessible. And that's my sort of polite way of saying that I dumb things down as service. [laugh].Corey: But I like that approach. The term dumbing it down is never a phrase to use, as it turns out, when you're explaining it to someone. It's like, “Let me dumb that down for you.” It's like, yeah, I always find the best way to teach someone is to first reach them and get their attention. I use humor, but instead we're going to just insult them. That'll get their attention all right.swyx: No. Yeah. It does offend some people who insist on precision and jargon. And I'm quite against that, but it's a constant fight because obviously there is a place at time for jargon.Corey: “Can you explain it to me using completely different words?” If the answer is, “No,” the question then is, “Do you actually understand it or are you just repeating it by rote?”swyx: right.Corey: There's—people learn in different ways and reaching them is important. [sigh].swyx: Exactly.Corey: Yeah. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about all the various things you're up to, where's the best place to find you?swyx: Sure, they can find me at my website swyx.io, or I'm mostly on Twitter at @swyx.Corey: And we will include links to both of those in the [show notes 00:33:37]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.swyx: Thanks so much for having me, Corey. It was a blast.

On this episode of Numerically Speaking: The Anaconda Podcast, host Peter Wang welcomes pandas maintainer Jeff Reback, Managing Director at Two Sigma.   Jeff began his career on Wall Street in the 1990's and used Perl for a long time. He developed an interest in Python in the 2000's. He was then quickly drawn to pandas and began to spend his hour-long ferry commutes contributing to its open-source code. His contributions over the years have been significant, to say the least.   When it comes to open source, says Peter, “my flame isn't diminished by lighting your candle.” Cloning a copy of pandas, for example, does not make the original copy any less valuable. In fact, source code actually increases in value as it circulates.   Until recently, only volunteers worked on pandas—but as of 2022, three full-time maintainers are paid to contribute, review code, and triage issues.   Jeff's advice for anybody interested in contributing to open source? Find a community and just help out.   Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHqxODJG9k to check out “Two Sigma Presents Pandas at a Crossroads the Past Present and Future with Jeff Reback” on YouTube.   You can find a human-verified transcript of this episode here  - https://know.anaconda.com/rs/387-XNW-688/images/ANACON_Jeff%20Reback_V1.docx.pdf Resources: Peter Wang LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pzwang/ Jeff Reback LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-reback-3a20876/ Two Sigma LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/two-sigma-investments/   If you enjoyed today's show, please leave a 5-star review. For more information, visit https://anaconda.com/podcast.

Vinay Iyengar is a Principal at Two Sigma Ventures, focusing on early-stage investments in enterprise software, machine learning, marketplaces, and infrastructure. Prior to Two Sigma Ventures, Vinay was an Investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, having been an angel or co-invested with Bessemer in the likes of Canva, Discord, Zapier among others. Before Bessemer, Vinay started his career as a Machine Learning Engineer at Intel Corporation before moving to Quantitative Trading at Goldman Sachs. Vinay also holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics from Harvard. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

“There are things that are much more important about investing in technology companies than technology,” says Colin Beirne, Founder of Two Sigma Ventures. TSV has invested in around 100 start-ups over the last 10 years, and funded 10 unicorns. They're part of Two Sigma, a hedge fund with more than $60 billion under management. Colin is surrounded by data scientists and programmers, but doesn't have a background in programming. Listen to this episode to hear how Colin went from a liberal arts college to becoming one of the world's leading deep tech investors. Learning notes from this episode: “The winning company is not always the one with the best technology. Tech can be a differentiator, but usually it's only temporary. The job of a venture capitalist is not to figure out which company has the best tech. It's to figure out which company has the best business that can ultimately be the biggest impact,” says Colin. Data science and knowing how to analyse data to spot trends is domain agnostic. This is why you often see data scientists changing jobs from completely different fields, such as going from insurance to social media.  Companies across industries can and do use data analysis to make better decisions at scale. Media companies do this when serving us content and advertising, and investment firms do this to decide which companies to invest in. To decide whether joining a start-up is a good idea, evaluate the founders: do you think they have the ability to grow a successful business? Resources mentioned in this episode: Tech for Non-Techies podcast: Lessons from the Netflix C Suite  Tech for Non-Techies podcast: The Business of AI with Harvard Business School Prof Marco Iansiti Book: Competing in the Age of AI Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World  Book: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World   Get your FREE guide to the top 10 concepts non-technical leaders need to work with developers, designers and data scientists.  ----- If you like learning about how tech products and profits get made, you'll like our newsletter. It's funny too. Sign up here. ----- There are 2 ways to apply this work to your goals: For individuals, APPLY FOR A CONSULTATION CALL for Tech For Non-Techies membership. For companies: If you want to increase productivity, innovation and diversity, then your non-technical teams need to learn how to collaborate with the techies.  BOOK A CALL to discuss bespoke training & consulting. We love hearing from our readers and listeners. So if you have questions about the content or working with us, just get in touch on info@techfornontechies.co   Say hi to Sophia on Twitter and follow her on LinkedIn. Following us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok will make you smarter. 

About swyxswyx has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS, and now serves as Head of Developer Experience at Airbyte. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His nontechnical writing was recently published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers.Links Referenced: “Learning Gears” blog post: https://www.swyx.io/learning-gears The Coding Career Handbook: https://learninpublic.org Personal Website: https://swyx.io Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: Let's face it, on-call firefighting at 2am is stressful! So there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is that you probably can't prevent incidents from happening, but the good news is that incident.io makes incidents less stressful and a lot more valuable. incident.io is a Slack-native incident management platform that allows you to automate incident processes, focus on fixing the issues and learn from incident insights to improve site reliability and fix your vulnerabilities. Try incident.io, recover faster and sleep more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Some folks are really easy to introduce when I have them on the show because, “My name is, insert name here. I built thing X, and my job is Y at company Z.” Then we have people like today's guest.swyx is currently—and recently—the head of developer experience at Airbyte, but he's also been so much more than that in so many different capacities that you're very difficult to describe. First off, thank you for joining me. And secondly, what's the deal with you?swyx: [laugh]. I have professional ADD, just like you. Thanks for having me, Corey. I'm a—Corey: It works out.swyx: a big fan. Longtime listener, first time caller. Love saying that. [laugh].Corey: You have done a lot of stuff. You have a business and finance background, which… okay, guilty; it's probably why I feel some sense of affinity for a lot of your work. And then you went into some interesting directions. You were working on React and serverless YahvehScript—which is, of course, how I insist on pronouncing it—at Two Sigma, Netlify, AWS—a subject near and dear to my heart—and most recently temporal.io.And now you're at Airbyte. So, you've been focusing on a lot of, I won't say the same things, but your area of emphasis has definitely consistently rhymed with itself. What is it that drives you?swyx: So, I have been recently asking myself a lot of this question because I had to interview to get my new role. And when you have multiple offers—because the job market is very hot for DevRel managers—you have to really think about it. And so, what I like to say is: number one, working with great people; number two, working on great products; number three, making a lot of money.Corey: There's entire school of thought that, “Oh, that's gauche. You shouldn't mention trying to make money.” Like, “Why do you want to work here because I want to make money.” It's always true—swyx: [crosstalk 00:03:46]—Corey: —and for some reason, we're supposed to pretend otherwise. I have a lot of respect for people who can cut to the chase on that. It's always been something that has driven me nuts about the advice that we give a new folks to the industry and peop—and even students figuring out their career path of, “Oh, do something you love and the money will follow.” Well, that's not necessarily true. There are ways to pivot something you'd love into something lucrative and there are ways to wind up more or less borderline starving to death. And again, I'm not saying money is everything, but for a number of us, it's hard to get to where we want to be without it.swyx: Yeah, yeah. I think I've been cast with the kind of judgmental label of being very financially motivated—that's what people have called me—for simply talking about it. And I'm like, “No. You know, it's number three on my priority list.” Like, I will leave positions where I have a lot of money on the table because I don't enjoy the people or the products, but having it up there and talking openly about it somehow makes you [laugh] makes you sort of greedy or something. And I don't think that's right. I tried to set an example for the people that I talk to or people who follow me.Corey: One of the things I've always appreciated about, I guess, your online presence, which has remained remarkably consistent as you've been working through a bunch of different, I guess, stages of life and your career, is you have always talked in significant depth about an area of tech that I am relatively… well, relatively crap at, let's be perfectly honest. And that is the wide world of most things front-end. Every time I see a take about someone saying, “Oh, front-end is junior or front-end is somehow less than,” I'd like to know what the hell it is they know because every time I try and work with it, I wind up more confused than I was when I started. And what I really appreciate is that you have always normalized the fact that this stuff is hard. As of the time that we're recording this a day or so ago, you had a fantastic tweet thread about a friend of yours spun up a Create React App and imported the library to fetch from an endpoint and immediately got stuck. And then you pasted this ridiculous error message.He's a senior staff engineer, ex-Google, ex-Twitter; he can solve complex distributed systems problems and unable to fetch from a REST endpoint without JavaScript specialist help. And I talk about this a lot in other contexts, where the reason I care so much about developer experience is that a bad developer experience does not lead people to the conclusion of, “Oh, this is a bad interface.” It leads people to the conclusion, “Oh, I'm bad at this and I didn't realize it.” No. I still fall into that trap myself.I was under the impression that there was just this magic stuff that JS people know. And your tweet did so much to help normalize from my perspective, the fact that no, no, this is very challenging. I recently went on a Go exploration. Now, I'm starting to get into JavaScript slash TypeScript, which I think are the same thing but I'm not entirely certain of that. Like, oh, well, one of them is statically typed, or strongly typed. It's like, “Well, I have a loud mechanical keyboard. Everything I do is typing strongly, so what's your point?”And even then we're talking past each other in these things. I don't understand a lot of the ecosystem that you live your career in, but I have always had a tremendous and abiding respect for your ability to make it accessible, understandable, and I guess for lack of a better term, to send the elevator back down.swyx: Oh, I definitely think about that strongly, especially that last bit. I think it's a form of personal growth. So, I think a lot of people, when they talk about this sending the elevator back down, they do it as a form of charity, like I'm giving back to the community. But honestly, you actually learn a lot by trying to explain it to others because that's the only way that you truly know if you've learned something. And if you ever get anything wrong, you'll—people will never let you forget it because it is the internet and people will crawl over broken glass to remind you that you're wrong.And once you've got it wrong, you will—you know, you've been so embarrassed that you'll never forget it. So, I think it's just a really good way to learn in public. And that's kind of the motto that I'm kind of known for. Yeah, we can take the direction anywhere you want to go in JavaScript land. Happy to talk about it all day. [laugh].Corey: Well, I want to start by something you just said where you're doing the learning in public thing. And something I've noticed is that there are really two positions you can take—in the general sense—when you set out to make a bit of a reputation for yourself in a particular technical space. You can either do the, “I'm a beginner here, same as the rest of you, and I'm learning in public,” or you can position yourself as something of an expert. And there are drawbacks and advantages to both. I think that if you don't look as wildly over-represented as I do, both of them are more fraught in different ways, where it's, “Oh, you're learning in public. Ah, look at the new person, she's dumb.”Or if you're presenting yourself as an expert, you get nibbled to death by ducks on a lot of the deep technical nuances and well, actually'ed to death. And my position has always been and this is going to be a radical concept for some folks, is that I'm genuinely honest. I tend to learn in public about the things that I don't know, but the things that I am something of a subject matter expert in—like, I don't know, cloud billing—I don't think that false modesty necessarily serves me particularly well. It's yeah, I know exactly what I'm talking about here. Pretending otherwise it's just being disingenuous.swyx: I try to think of it as having different gears of learning in public. So, I've called this “Learning Gears” in a previous blog post of mine, where you try to fit your mode of learning to the terrain that you're on, your domain expertise, and you should never over-represent the amount that you know because I think people are very rightly upset when there are a lot of people—let's say on Twitter, or YouTube, or Udemy even—who present themselves as experts who are actually—they just read the docs the previous night. So, you should try not to over-represent your expertise.But at the same time, don't let your imposter syndrome stop you from sharing what you are currently learning and taking corrections when you're wrong. And I think that's the tricky balance to get which is constantly trying to put yourself out there while accepting that you might be wrong and not getting offended when or personally attacked when someone corrects you, inevitably. And sometimes people will—especially if you have a lot of followers, people will try to say—you know, someone of your following—you know, it's—I kind of call this follower shaming, like, you should act, uh—invulnerable, or run every tweet through committee before you tweet after a certain sort of following size. So, I try to not do that and try to balance responsibility with authenticity.Corey: I think that there's something incredibly important about that, where there's this idea that you either become invulnerable and get defensive and you yell at people, and down that path lies disaster because, believe it or not, we all get it wrong from time to time, and doubling down and doubling down and doubling down again, suddenly, you're on an island all by yourself and no one respectable is going to be able to get there to help you. And the other side of it is going too far in the other direction, where you implicitly take any form of criticism whatsoever as being de facto correct. And I think that both paths don't lead to super great places. I think it's a matter of finding our own voices and doing a little bit of work as far as the validity of accepting a given piece of feedback goes. But other than that, I'm a big fan of being able to just more or less be as authentic as possible.And I get that I live in a very privileged position where I have paths open to me that are not open to most folks. But in many respects so to you are one of the—easily—first five people I would think of if someone said, “Hey if I need to learn JavaScript for someone, who should I talk to first?” You're on that list. And you've done a lot of things in this area, but you've never—you alluded to it a few minutes ago, but I'm going to call it out a little more pointedly—without naming names, let's be clear—and that you're never presented as a grifter, which is sort of the best way I can think of it of, “Well, I just learned this new technology stack yesterday and now I'm writing a book that I'm going to sell to people on how to be an expert at this thing.” And I want to be clear, this is very distinct from gatekeeping because I think that, “Oh, well, you have to be at least this much of an expert—” No, but I think that holding yourself out as I'm going to write a book on how to be proud of how to become a software engineer.Okay, you were a software engineer for six months, and more to the point, knowing how to do a thing and knowing how to teach a thing are orthogonal skill sets, and I think that is not well understood. If I ever write a book or put something—or some sort of info product out there, I'm going to have to be very careful not to fall into that trap because I don't want to pretend to be an expert in things that I'm not. I barely think I'm an expert in things that I provable am.swyx: there are many ways to answer that. So, I have been accused a couple of times of that. And it's never fun, but also, if you defend yourself well, you can actually turn a critic into a fan, which I love doing.Corey: Mm-hm.swyx: [laugh].Corey: Oh yes.swyx: what I fall back to, so I have a side interest in philosophy, based on one of my high school teachers giving us, like, a lecture in philosophy. I love him, he changed my life. [Lino Barnard 00:13:20], in case—in the off chance that he's listening. So, there's a theory of knowledge of, like, how do you know what you know, right? And if you can base your knowledge on truth—facts and not opinions, then people are arguing with the facts and not the opinions.And so, getting as close to ground truth as possible and having certainty in your collection of facts, I think is the basis of not arguing based on identity of, like, “Okay, I have ten years experience; you have two years experience. I am more correct than you in every single opinion.” That's also not, like, the best way to engage in the battlefield of ideas. It's more about, do you have the right amount of evidence to support the conclusions that you're trying to make? And oftentimes, I think, you know, that is the basis, if you don't have that ability.Another thing that I've also done is to collect the opinions of others who have more expertise and present them and curate them in a way that I think adds value without taking away from the individual original sources. So, I think there's a very academic way [laugh] you can kind of approach this, but that defends your intellectual integrity while helping you learn faster than the typical learning rate. Which is kind of something I do think about a lot, which is, you know, why do we judge people by the number of years experience? It's because that's usually the only metric that we have available that is quantifiable. Everything else is kind of fuzzy.But I definitely think that, you know, better algorithms for learning let you progress much faster than the median rate, and I think people who apply themselves can really get up there in terms of the speed of learning with that. So, I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. [laugh].Corey: It's a hard thing to solve for. There's no way around it. It's, what is it that people should be focusing on? How should they be internalizing these things? I think a lot of it starts to with an awareness, even if not in public, just to yourself of, “I would like advice on some random topic.” Do you really? Are you actually looking for advice or are you looking—swyx: right.Corey: For validation? Because those are not the same thing, and you are likely to respond very differently when you receive advice, depending on which side of that you're coming from.swyx: Yeah. And so, one way to do that is to lay out both sides, to actually demonstrate what you're split on, and ask for feedback on specific tiebreakers that would help your decision swing one way or another. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely people who ask questions that are just engagement bait or just looking for validation. And while you can't really fix that, I think it's futile to try to change others' behavior online. You just have to be the best version of yourself you can be. [laugh].Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: So, you wrote a book that is available at learninpublic.org, called The Coding Career Handbook. And to be clear, I have not read this myself because at this point, if I start reading a book like that, and you know, the employees that I have see me reading a book like that, they're going to have some serious questions about where this company is going to be going soon. But scrolling through the site and the social proof, the testimonials from various people who have read it, more or less read like a who's-who of people that I respect, who have been on this show themselves.Emma Bostian is fantastic at explaining a lot of these things. Forrest Brazeal is consistently a source to me of professional envy. I wish I had half his musical talent; my God. And your going down—it explains, more or less, the things that a lot of folks people are all expected to know but no one teaches them about every career stage, ranging from newcomer to the industry to senior. And there's a lot that—there's a lot of gatekeeping around this and I don't even know that it's intentional, but it has to do with the idea that people assume that folks, quote-unquote, “Just know” the answer to some things.Oh, people should just know how to handle a technical interview, despite the fact that the skill set is completely orthogonal to the day-to-day work you'll be doing. People should just know how to handle a performance review, or should just know how to negotiate for a raise, or should just know how to figure out is this technology that I'm working on no longer the direction the industry is going in, and eventually I'm going to wind up, more or less, waiting for the phone to ring because there's only three companies in the world left who use it. Like, how do you keep—how do you pay attention to what's going on around you? And it's the missing manual that I really wish that people would have pointed out to me back when I was getting started. Would have made life a lot easier.swyx: Oh, wow. That's high praise. I actually didn't know we're going to be talking about the book that much. What I will say is—Corey: That's the problem with doing too much. You never know what people have found out about you and what they're going to say when they drag you on to a podcast.swyx: got you, got you. Okay. I know, I know, I know where this is going. Okay. So, one thing that I really definitely believe is that—and this happened to me in my first job as well, which is most people get the mentors that they're assigned at work, and sometimes you have a bad roll the dice. [laugh].And you're supposed to pick up all the stuff they don't teach you in school at work or among your friend group, and sometimes you just don't have the right network at work or among your friend group to tell you the right things to help you progress your career. And I think a lot of this advice is written down in maybe some Hacker News posts, some Reddit posts, some Twitter posts, and there's not really a place you to send people to point to, that consolidates that advice, particularly focused at the junior to senior stage, which is the stage that I went through before writing the book. And so, I think that basically what I was going for is targeting the biggest gap that I saw, which is, there a lot of interview prep type books like Crack the Coding Career, which is kind of—Crack the Coding Interview, which is kind of the book title that I was going after. But once you got the job, no one really tells you what to do after you got that first job. And how do you level up to the senior that everyone wants to hire, right? There's—Corey: “Well, I've mastered cracking the coding interview. Now, I'm really trying to wrap my head around the problem of cracking the showing up at work on time in the morning.” Like, the baseline stuff. And I had so many challenges with that early in my career. Not specifically punctuality, but just the baseline expectation that it's just assumed that by the time you're in the workplace earning a certain amount of money, it's just assumed that you have—because in any other field, you would—you have several years of experience in the workplace and know how these things should play out.No, the reason that I'm sometimes considered useful as far as giving great advice on career advancement and the rest is not because I'm some wizard from the future, it's because I screwed it all up myself and got censured and fired and rejected for all of it. And it's, yeah, I'm not smart enough to learn from other people's mistakes; I got to make them myself. So, there's something to be said for turning your own missteps into guidance so that the next person coming up has an easier time than you did. And that is a theme that, from what I have seen, runs through basically everything that you do.swyx: I tried to do a lot of research, for sure. And so, one way to—you know, I—hopefully, I try not to make mistakes that others have learned, have made, so I tried to pick from, I think I include 1500 quotes and sources and blog posts and tweets to build up that level of expertise all in one place. So hopefully, it gives people something to bootstrap your experience off of. So, you're obviously going to make some mistakes on your own, but at least you have the ability to learn from others, and I think this is my—you know, I'm very proud of the work that I did. And I think people have really appreciated it.Because it's a very long book, and nobody reads books these days, so what am I doing [laugh] writing a book? I think it's only the people that really need this kind of advice, that they find themselves not having the right mentorship that reach out to me. And, you know, it's good enough to support a steady stream of sales. But more importantly, like, you know, I am able to mentor them at various levels from read my book, to read my free tweets, to read the free chapters, or join the pay community where we have weekly sessions going through every chapter and I give feedback on what people are doing. Sometimes I've helped people negotiate their jobs and get that bump up to senior staff—senior engineer, and I think more than doubled their salary, which was very personal proud moment for me.But yeah, anyway, I think basically, it's kind of like a third place between the family and work that you could go to the talk about career stuff. And I feel like, you know, maybe people are not that open on Twitter, but maybe they can be open in a small community like ours.Corey: There's a lot to be said for a sense of professional safety and personal safety around being—having those communities. I mean, mine, when I was coming up was the freenode IRC network. And that was great; it's pseudo-anonymous, but again, I was Corey and network staff at the time, which was odd, but it was great to be able to reach out and figure out am I thinking about this the wrong way, just getting guidance. And sure, there are some channels that basically thrived on insulting people. I admittedly was really into that back in the early-two-thousand-nothings.And, like, it was always fun to go to the Debian channel. It's like, “Yeah, can you explain to me how to do this or should I just go screw myself in advance?” Yeah, it's always the second one. Like, community is a hard thing to get right and it took me a while to realize this isn't the energy I want in the world. I like being able to help people come up and learn different things.I'm curious, given your focus on learning in public and effectively teaching folks as well as becoming a better engineer yourself along the way, you've been focusing for a while now on management. Tell me more about that.swyx: I wouldn't say it's been, actually, a while. Started dabbling in it with the Temporal job, and then now fully in it with Airbyte.Corey: You have to know, it has been pandemic time; it has stood still. Anything is—swyx: exactly.Corey: —a while it given that these are the interminable—this is the decade of Zoom meetings.swyx: [laugh]. I'll say I have about a year-and-a-half of it. And I'm interested in it partially because I've really been enjoying the mentoring side with the coding career community. And also, I think, some of the more effective parts of what I do have to be achieved in the planning stages with getting the right resources rather than doing the individual contributor work. And so, I'm interested in that.I'm very wary of the fact that I don't love meetings myself. Meetings are a means to an end for me and meetings are most of the job in management time. So, I think for what's important to me there, it is that we get stuff done. And we do whatever it takes to own the outcomes that we want to achieve and try to manage people's—try to not screw up people's careers along the way. [laugh]. Better put, I want people to be proud of what they get done with me by the time they're done with me. [laugh].Corey: So, I know you've talked to me about this very briefly, but I don't know that as of the time of this recording, you've made any significant public statements about it. You are now over at Airbytes, which I confess is a company I had not heard of before. What do y'all do over there?swyx: [laugh]. “What is it we do here?” So Airbyte—Corey: Exactly. Consultants want to know.swyx: Airbyte's a data integration company, which means different things based on your background. So, a lot of the data engineering patterns in, sort of, the modern data stack is extracting from multiple sources and loading everything into a data warehouse like a Snowflake or a Redshift, and then performing analysis with tools like dbt or business intelligence tools out there. We like to use MetaBase, but there's a whole there's a whole bunch of these stacks and they're all sort of advancing at different rates of progress. And what Airbyte would really like to own is the data integration part, the part where you load a bunch of sources, every data source in the world.What really drew me to this was two things. One, I really liked the vision of data freedom, which is, you have—you know, as—when you run a company, like, a typical company, I think at Temporal, we had, like, 100, different, like, you know, small little SaaS vendors, all of them vying to be the sources of truth for their thing, or a system of record for the thing. Like, you know, Salesforce wants to be a source of truth for customers, and Google Analytics want to be source of truth for website traffic, and so on and so forth. Like, and it's really hard to do analysis across all of them unless you dump all of them in one place.So one, is the mission of data freedom really resonates with me. Like, your data should be put in put somewhere where you can actually make something out of it, and step one is getting it into a format in a place that is amenable for analysis. And data warehouse pattern has really taken hold of the data engineering discipline. And I find, I think that's a multi-decade trend that I can really get behind. That's the first thing.Corey: I will say that historically, I'm bad at data. All jokes about using DNS as a database aside, one of the reasons behind that is when you work on stateless things like web servers and you blow trunks and one of them, oops. We all laugh, we take an outage, so maybe we're not laughing that hard, but we can reprovision web servers and things are mostly fine. With data and that going away, there are serious problems that could theoretically pose existential risk to the business. Now, I was a sysadmin and a, at least mediocre one, which means that after the first time I lost data, I was diligent about doing backups.Even now, the data work that we do have deep analysis on our customers' AWS bills, which doesn't sound like a big data problem, but I assure you it is, becomes something where, “Okay, step one. We don't operate on it in place.” We copy it into our own secured environment and then we begin the manipulations. We also have backups installed on these things so that in the event that I accidentally the data, it doesn't wind up causing horrifying problems for our customers. And lastly, I wind up also—this is going to surprise people—I might have securing the access to that data by not permitting writes.Turns out it's really hard—though apparently not impossible—to delete data with read-only calls.swyx: [crosstalk 00:28:12].Corey: It tends to be something of just building guardrails against myself. But the data structures, the understanding the analysis of certain things, I would have gotten into Go way sooner than I did if the introduction to Go tutorial on how to use it wasn't just a bunch of math problems talking about this is how you do it. And great, but here in the year of our lord 2022, I mostly want a programming language to smack a couple of JSON objects together and ideally come out with something resembling an answer. I'm not doing a whole lot of, you know, calculating prime numbers in the course of my week. And that is something that took a while for me to realize that, no, no, it's just another example of not being a great way of explaining something that otherwise could be incredibly accessible to folks who have real problems like this.I think the entire field right now of machine learning and the big data side of the universe struggles with this. It's, “Oh, yeah. If you have all your data, that's going to absolutely change the world for you.” “Cool. Can you explain how?” “No. Not effectively anyway.” Like, “Well, thanks for wasting everyone's time. It's appreciated.”swyx: Yeah, startup is sitting on a mountain of data that they don't use and I think everyone kind of feels guilty about it because everyone who is, like, a speaker, they're always talking about, like, “Oh, we used our data to inform this presidential campaign and look at how amazing we are.” And then you listen to the podcasts where the data scientists, you know, talk amongst themselves and they're like, “Yeah, it's bullshit.” Like, [laugh], “We're making it up as we go along, just like everyone else.” But, you know, I definitely think, like, some of the better engineering practices are arising under this. And it's professionalizing just like front-end professionalized maybe ten years ago, DevOps professionalized also, roughly in that timeframe, I think data is emerging as a field that is just a standalone discipline with its own tooling and potentially a lot of money running through it, especially if you look at the Snowflake ecosystem.So, that's why I'm interested in it. You know, I will say there's also—I talked to you about the sort of API replication use case, but also there's database replication, which is kind of like the big use case, which, for example, if you have a transactional sort of SQL database and you want to replicate that to an analytical database for queries, that's a very common one. So, I think basically data mobility from place to place, reshaping it and transferring it in as flexible manner as possible, I think, is the mission, and I think there's a lot of tooling that starts from there and builds up with it. So, Airbyte integrates pretty well with Airflow, Dexter, and all the other orchestration tools, and then, you know, you can use dbt, and everything else in that data stack to run with it. So, I just really liked that composition of tools because basically when I was a hedge fund analyst, we were doing the ETL job without knowing the name for it or having any tooling for it.I just ran a Python script manually on a cron job and whenever it failed, I would have to get up in the middle of night to go kick it again. It's, [laugh] it was that bad in 2014, '15. So, I really feel the pain. And, you know, the more data that we have to play around with, the more analysis we can do.Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing what becomes of this field as folks like you get further and further into it. And by, “Well, what do you mean, folks like me?” Well, I'm glad you asked, or we're about to as I put words in your mouth. I will tell you. People who have a demonstrated ability not just to understand the technology—which is hard—but then have this almost unicorn gift of being able to articulate and explain it to folks who do not have that level of technical depth in a way that is both accessible and inviting. And that is no small thing.If you were to ask me to draw a big circle around all the stuff that you've done in your career and define it, that's how I would do it. You are a storyteller who is conversant with the relevant elements of the story in a first-person perspective. Which is probably a really wordy way to put it. We should get a storyteller to workshop that, but you see the point.swyx: I try to call it, like, accessibly smart. So, it's a balance that you want to make, where you don't want to talk down to your audience because I think there are a lot of educators out there who very much stay at the basics and never leave that. You want to be slightly aspirational and slightly—like, push people to the bounds of their knowledge, but then not to go too far and be inaccessible. And that's my sort of polite way of saying that I dumb things down as service. [laugh].Corey: But I like that approach. The term dumbing it down is never a phrase to use, as it turns out, when you're explaining it to someone. It's like, “Let me dumb that down for you.” It's like, yeah, I always find the best way to teach someone is to first reach them and get their attention. I use humor, but instead we're going to just insult them. That'll get their attention all right.swyx: No. Yeah. It does offend some people who insist on precision and jargon. And I'm quite against that, but it's a constant fight because obviously there is a place at time for jargon.Corey: “Can you explain it to me using completely different words?” If the answer is, “No,” the question then is, “Do you actually understand it or are you just repeating it by rote?”swyx: right.Corey: There's—people learn in different ways and reaching them is important. [sigh].swyx: Exactly.Corey: Yeah. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about all the various things you're up to, where's the best place to find you?swyx: Sure, they can find me at my website swyx.io, or I'm mostly on Twitter at @swyx.Corey: And we will include links to both of those in the [show notes 00:33:37]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.swyx: Thanks so much for having me, Corey. It was a blast.Corey: swyx, head of developer experience at Airbyte, and oh, so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice or if it's on the YouTubes thumbs up and subscribe, whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing, five-star review wherever you want, hit the buttons on the YouTubes, but also leaving insulting comment that is hawking your book: Why this Episode was Terrible that you're now selling as a legitimate subject matter expert in this space.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Get started with Educative! Follow this URL for 10% off: https://educative.io/educativelee We know that not every line of code is equally valuable, but how do you work on valuable things? Developers obsess over frameworks and code quality, but in reality the best outcomes are more determined by product-market-founder fit than code quality. Swyx is a former hedge fund investor turned developer and has some interesting thoughts based on seeing through 2 unicorn startups. Watch the YouTube HERE: https://youtu.be/NqAGxYWgYZk   ABOUT OUR GUEST   swyx has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS, and now serves as Head of Developer Experience at Temporal.io. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His nontechnical writing was recently published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers. Visit Educative to start your journey into code ►► https://educative.io Don't forget to subscribe to Educative Sessions on YouTube! ►► https://www.youtube.com/c/EducativeSessions   ABOUT EDUCATIVE   Educative (educative.io) provides interactive and adaptive courses for software developers. Whether it's beginning to learn to code, grokking the next interview, or brushing up on frontend coding, data science, or cybersecurity, Educative is changing how developers continue their education. Stay relevant through our pre-configured learning environments that adapt to match a developer's skill level. Educative provides the best author platform for instructors to create interactive and adaptive content in only a few clicks.   More Videos from Educative Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/c/EducativeSessions/   Episode 108: "Angel Investing Your TIME" with Shawn Wang of Temporal.io | Educative Sessions

Warren Valdmanis, partner at Two Sigma Impact, speaks with Penta senior writer Abby Schultz about why companies should focus more on creating good jobs and how to do it.

Andy Kangpan, a Principal at Two Sigma Ventures, shares his experience supporting founders building enterprise software, cybersecurity, and crypto startups. Andy talks about the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and gives real-life risk management tips for entrepreneurs and investors wishing to venture into DeFi. In this episode, you'll learn:4:15 Risk-taking for venture capital investors means thoughtfully making calculated bets on ideas that have a clear path to sustainability.8:30 Ideas for finding unique insights into quickly growing nascent spaces12:13 Decentralized finance represents a big paradigm shift, but are we there yet?16:33 How risky is decentralized finance as an asset class? What should founders know before venturing into this field?The non-profit organization that Andy is passionate about: NYU Entrepreneurship InstituteAbout Guest SpeakerAndy Kangpan is a Principal at Two Sigma Ventures. He currently focuses on investments in enterprise software, cybersecurity, and crypto. Andy has been an operator, advisor and investor. Prior to joining Two Sigma, he was an investor with ff Venture Capital where he invested in early-stage companies building innovative technologies in areas such as robotics and machine learning.Fun fact: In his spare time, Andy enjoys skateboarding, gaming, devouring science fiction, and going to concerts around the city.About Two Sigma VenturesTwo Sigma Ventures is a New York City-based venture capital firm investing in transformative companies harnessing information growth and computing power to change the world. The firm supports data- and computing-driven transformation in every industry - from infrastructure tools and healthcare to real estate and consumer hardware. Its portfolio companies include Anomalo, Brella, Carbon, Enveda, Firedome, GitLab, Odeko, Remote, Radar among others.Next Week's EpisodeComing up next week in Episode 87, we welcome Winter Mead, the founder and CEO of Coolwater Capital. Coolwater is a new organization that is changing the way venture capital investors build new firms. Winter will take us behind the scenes to show us how venture capital works, how LPs think about the industry and what Coolwater is doing to revolutionize the sector.Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode that will drop next Tuesday. Follow Us:  Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook

In this episode I speak to Vera Shulgina of SigTech, a software platform for quantitative investors. Vera has recently joined SigTech having previously enjoyed a successful career on the operations side of hedge funds including Two Sigma and Citadel.In our conversation, Vera and I talk about the recent trend of buysiders moving across into product companies, SigTech's offering, and some of the challenges Vera faces in creating a new US office. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Susan Soh, is Head of Capital Formation and Business Development at GrowthCurve Capital, a private equity firm focused on building world-class businesses by leveraging data, analytics, and machine learning, combined with a comprehensive approach to human capital, to accelerate growth and drive value creation.  At the time of the podcast recording she was Chief of Strategy and Capital Development for the private investment activities at Two Sigma, a $60B financial sciences firm with businesses in investment management, insurance, private equity and venture capital.  She was previously a founding partner and Global Head of Marketing and Client Services at Perella Weinberg Partners and prior to that held a series of roles in business development at a series of hedge funds and private equity firms. She originally trained as a lawyer and M&A banker. She is a Board Member of AAAIM since 2014 – Association of Asian American Investment Managers.Our conversation traces Susan's childhood and the expectations of her Chinese American family, as well as her cycle through her expected career, and then an unexpected one.  This naturally led us to discuss what Susan describes as "AQ" - adaptive intelligence, and how being able to pivot and adapt to life's surprises is so key.  We return to the topic of diversity time and time again - in particular the unique position of Asian Americans and why setting the standard is so important for role models of all kinds. This podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Pluscios Capital, a women-owned, WBENC certified investment management firm based in Evanston, IL. With over 60+ years of combined investment management experience, co-founders Constance Teska and Kelly Chesney are committed to the development of bespoke investment solutions on behalf of institutions and intermediaries. In addition to broadly diversified core and catalyst solutions, Pluscios provides hands on product development support and custom solutions with a focus on diversity-led and emerging managers.

This week we had on Vinay Iyengar (@VinIyengar) of Two Sigma Ventures. Two Sigma is a multi-strategy fund that invests from seed to Series B across a number of industries. Vinay helps lead up the San Francisco office, and he focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise software, machine learning, marketplaces, and infrastructure. In this talk, we discuss: Why now is the golden age to start a business Implications and second order effects of software becoming commoditized Ways to demystify the job search process

In this episode, we talk with Jehron Petty from the Class of 2020, founder and CEO of ColorStack, a nonprofit on a mission to increase the number of Black, Latinx, and Native American college students in computing through community building and career development. While studying Computer Science at Cornell, he interned at companies like Two Sigma and Google as both a software engineer and product manager. Jehron turned down the Google APM program and instead raised over $500K to seed ColorStack.

With over 1,000 data scientists and engineers and 70 petabytes of data, Two Sigma is uniquely positioned to seek to bring data science to impact investing. Warren Valdmanis co-founded the Two Sigma Impact team after 14 years at Bain Capital, including a role in creating Bain Double Impact. Warren is focused on solving two threats to our economy: companies and executives prioritizing short term profits over long term growth and and the hollowing out of the middle-class workforce.  Both topics have social impact metrics where private capital can play a role in helping to shape the future.

In Season 2, Episode 1 of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, talks to Camille Fournier, Managing Director of Two Sigma and author of The Manager's Path, about boring stuff — specifically building boring tech and making boring plans. Camille and Jean discuss: Limited innovation tokens and how to decide where to spend them (hint: it's not on cool tech)! What boring plans actually look like, especially when you do need to upgrade to more interesting tech so your team doesn't fall behind. Rolling out company-wide platform updates as rigorously as you would plan for an external launch How to manage up and build credibility that you're delivery value when undertaking long-running technical projectsAdditional Resources: The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change  Make Boring Plans by Camille FournierChoose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

Our guest for today's podcast is Susan Oh, a 25 year veteran at the Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirement System, a $64 billion defined benefit pension plan.  Over her career at PSERS, Susan has been a serial entrepreneur and a true innovator for the fund including 1) establishing their $13 billion swap overlay program, 2) building out their currency hedging program, 3) launching their internally managed risk parity program leveraging Bridgewater, and 4) now taking on the new challenge of implementing ESG for impact and returns.  Susan is the epitome of GSD (Getting Stuff Done!)   Away from her personal accomplishments, we were inspired by Susan's strong faith and her recognition that she has a higher calling.  Having shattered both the bamboo and glass ceiling, Susan is a role model for Asian Americans and women in the industry, a responsibility she cherishes and doesn't take lightly.    Joining me on the podcast as lead host is fellow AAAIM board member, Susan Soh, Chief of Strategy and Capital Development for the Private Investments arm of Two Sigma.   Without further ado, here is our conversation with Susan Oh.

Our guest for today's podcast is Suzanne Yoon, Founder and Managing Partner of Kinzie Capital Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm focused on providing creative solutions through equity investments in lower middle-market businesses going through transitions.   Suzanne openly takes us through her personal journey overcoming tragedy at a young age after the death of her father and jumping head first into world of finance.  Through grit, determination, and a strong belief in “diversity and inclusion”, Suzanne successfully navigates the ultra competitive world of private equity, culminating in launching her own private equity firm in 2017.  Her story not only sends chills through my body but also brings a bright smile to my face.   Joining me on the podcast as lead host is fellow AAAIM board member, Susan Soh, Chief of Strategy and Capital Development for the Private Investments arm of Two Sigma.   Brace yourself and prepare to hear what it takes to be the best.  Without further ado, here is our conversation with Suzanne Yoon.