Last month I recounted how John Regino had assumed the day to day leadership of the ULISSES Project and he had then asked me to stay on as a Advisory Board member. I agreed and then he asked me to write a blog, which I agreed to, which this is the second entry as a Board member as opposed to Executive Director. Now that we’re getting ready for Spring I wanted to post another entry, specifically about my new beginning and the two men named James I mentioned last month that helped me make my decision.
The Mathematician and the Statistician
James Harris Simons is a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley who was a government codebreaker and then later a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. Simons had always been interested in finance and the financial markets, and so after some initial forays into business, he began trading, using his mathematical tools to beat the market. He initially made a lot of money, then made a devastating loss, shut down for several years returning to the drawing board, rebuilding and relaunching his fund. His rebirth was manifested in the name of his company, “Renaissance Technologies” or RenTech. Simons not only built a fund that is the envy of every investor in the world, eventually earning himself billions in the process, but everyone who backed him in his “second life” became billionaires themselves. That includes the accountant at the strip mall in Long Island who became his CFO. RenTech are small, secretive, and very wealthy. I was once in Las Vegas and one of the “town fathers” asked me about them because RenTech was funding a casino and no one knew anything about them or what they did. They are that secretive—“the math mob.”
James Howard Goodnight’s path was a little bit more circuitous, earning his Ph.D. in statistics at North Carolina State University and then remaining there as a professor. I know plenty of people who knew Goodnight at the time, and they say to a person, they could not figure out what he was doing or why, as one by one his friends and colleagues left the university to became high paid consultants or taking plush corporate jobs. Instead, Goodnight started a software company and “ate Ramen” for years. Partners in his company left or sold out, but he stayed and persisted. His company SAS eventually rose to provide tools for researchers at places as diverse as the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and the FDA, to say nothing about the industries such as pharmaceuticals, credit cards and insurance that are largely built on the backbone Goodnight and his company built. It wasn’t a victory earned by miles, but inches. Eventually all those friends who took the jobs consulting or at corporations were using his tools, tools that helped make SAS one of the largest software companies in the world. Rich hedge fund guy leading a math mob, or Ramen for years and universal tools? This required some thought. Luckily there are a few people that I look to when faced with difficult decisions.
Big Brothers and the Greater Good
I have been very fortunate over the years that I have had numerous people that have helped to shape my world view, some very famous like Barr Rosenberg or Chuck Palahniuk, others less so. That said, over the years I found two constants, two men I call my “big brothers.” Luckily one had faced just such a decision. Years ago he was faced with several attractive offers and not knowing how to proceed, he went to his mentor, a famous college football coach. The coach said to “choose the decision that will allow you to do the greater good.” By this his mentor meant to choose the action that would allow him to have the greatest impact upon the greatest number of people. My big brother did not give me a simple answer, instead he passed on a process of how to weigh the alternatives. When I did that, the path forward was clear.
You see, my big brother who gave me this advice also had the example of his own life. He left a lucrative career working for Goldman Sachs to return back to a public university so he could not only aid students directly, but in particular so he could focus on those people that are often lost in the shuffle, such as blue chip college athletes who are recruited just to play in the games, and he focused on preparing those athletes for the rest of their lives. Over the years he’s influenced thousands of lives for the better, at the same time leading one of the top Ph.D. programs in the world and maintaining his status as the world’s foremost expert in his area. It was not his words that helped me make my decision, but his actions.
Universal Technologies and Common Goods
The best mathematical minds in finance like Jim Simons, David Shaw, and Barr Rosenberg are always faced with this conundrum. While Barr and Goodnight chose to make their technologies available to the world, Simons and Shaw chose to build extraordinarily successful and secretive hedge funds and keep the innovations to themselves. The justification always seems the same, “I will fund research in my later years.” Sure, men like David Shaw and Jim Simons do this in the twilight years, but I have yet to find one that has really made an impact. Contrast that with people like Barr and Goodnight who chose to make their impact day to day in their work, and there is really no comparison.
It seems like too many of my friends made the hedge fund decision, robbing the world of so many great minds that are tied up in NDAs, non-competes, or just burned out. A friend of mine has told me many times that Jeff Bezos used to be junior to him at DE Shaw (David Shaw’s hedge fund), but what he never mentions is that while Bezos “got out of the game,” he stayed in and faced the consequences. My friend is brilliant and wanted to change the world by providing universal technologies benefiting the common good. While he made tons of money, helping the world was just lost in the shuffle.
While it makes sense to first deploy our tech stack in finance, it has implications far beyond finance, in areas such as political science, epidemiology, and climate research. My friends in those fields have confirmed this precisely as we’ve examined the problems that face them. As I’ve stated, I’ve talked to groups like the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle about this and they’ve told me we are years ahead of them and they wondered when the stack would be available? While I didn’t have an answer then, I will soon.
Now, one more issue. Does this mean that the technological innovations will not be available to the ULISSES Project? Absolutely not. We will continue to supply and support the ULISSES Project as it continues, but expect a divergence. In fact, we will follow a policy like Gurobi, providing tools to academia for free. Of course, there will be differences. For example, while the ULISSES Project core was coded in Eiffel and Python, we’re diverging to producing production-worthy products coded in Rust and Julia, but these tools will still be made available to ULISSES Project.
I’ll talk about this in the next posts.