I am 28, and live in Tribeca, NYC. I am the founder of perpetually.com, run the tech community JellyNYC, founded StartupXmas and help with New Work City.
In November, 2008, I invested in Frogmetrics, the customer feedback and analytics startup.
I used to work for a statarb hedge fund in New York City until resigning in search of new and more fulfilling challenges.
I take photos, say things, and occasionally use Facebook. Also, I like email.
A dollar bill signed by Michael Moore, from just after he interviewed a few of us over dinner a few months ago for his new movie, which just came out today. I was supposed to be paid $1 for the interview asked him to sign one of mine instead.
Almost forgot! I absolutely love this photo, and had to wait until his movie came out to put it up. I also got a dollar bill with Moore’s autograph.
I haven’t seen the movie, but the dinner was fun. Moore’s heart is typically in the right place, so I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with.
We’ve got some awesome projects in the queue at Perpetually. If you’re into innovative uses for the browser, using the full DNS database for something altogether different, and know (or want to learn) Python, please contact me somehow!
Thanks!
TechCrunch has labeled this year’s TechCrunch50 as, basically, the triumph of the dull. As one of the companies on stage, let me respond by saying, Thanks! It wasn’t clear we could do it, but we did! And your praise means everything.
Sarah Lacy writes,
I want to see huge audacious failures and huge gaudy wins.
This follows Arrington’s argument a couple weeks back that Twitter shouldn’t “turn on revenue” because it might prove bad for business.
We started Perpetually.com to be a real business. We have some serious challenges, and approximately none of them come from a lack of funding, competitive edge or market position. We’re going to make a lot of mistakes (hint: we’re making some right now), and we’re going to fix and learn from all of them. We’re going to innovate in increments and we’re going to stumble into huge blue oceans. But we’re never going to “swing for a fences” when rock-solid improvement will serve our customers and business best.
Jason & TechCrunch were nice enough to provide invites to all TC50 companies (“alumni”) from previous years. You know what *I* kept hearing backstage?
Where are they now?
Turnout was like twenty percent at best. Where did everyone go? After the headlines have gone, where does all that swinging for the fences leave you?
We’re running Perpetually.com as a long-term business exactly because we want to change the world. Our opportunities are so big that we’d be idiots to go for broke with every idea. Only someone with no options swings for the fences.
A few folks insisted I put up our presentation from TechCrunch50. I remember getting up on stage in front of 1500 strangers, but somehow I’m now shy about posting this… not that shy, I guess.
A year ago I left the world of finance and hedge funds in search of something more exciting. While being inspired by Amit and the tech scene in San Francisco, the world was changing back home in New York. While in retrospect the timing was incredibly good, it was really just incredibly lucky.
I did a lot of traveling after that. In January, while reading Alan Greenspan’s autobiography on a long flight, I noticed that when he referenced research from the web he only provided basic information, providing no direct link to the data to which he was referring. So here’s this book, I thought, that’s so critical to our understanding of financial theory and history, and I’m prevented from reading the author’s source material. The problem, it seemed, is that the web is deeply ephemeral. Information readily available one minute is just as easily gone the next.
By March, after some research into this “ephemeral web”, I was hooked. For a few months I worked alone, writing the beginning of a system that could archive web content, giving it permanence. When it became clear how much I didn’t know, I started tapping New York’s tech community: Jelly, New Work City and Python stepped up. I then tried the patience of Stephen, Owen, family, friends and anyone else who might have an interest in helping out. Together, we found some awesome minds in Adam, Carl, Chris, Collin, Erin, Jeremy, Liz, Louise, Mark and Saha.
Today, as a finalist in the TechCrunch50, we launched Perpetually.com. It’s the first public release of The Perpetual Web: A private, permanent and easy archive of any web content that you choose to preserve. I’m super excited about what the team has started. We’re just at the beginning of this thing, and I already can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned in the coming months and years. A new adventure begins!
A new way to prioritize our projects
It’s good to know the NYTimes can still treat as news a story where the reporter’s ignorance is compensated for by his own views. Luckily, this article about high-speed trading (an issue I’m slowly forgetting but in which I have a few years’ experience) is scornful in the right direction.
There are two points the author is making, but because they’re treated as one the effect is to obscure what’s important. First, and most complex is that innovation in equity trading over the last twenty years (from manual to electronic trading) lowered transaction costs for everyone (a good thing) but also created an arms race where only the biggest banks and hedge funds could compete (a bad thing). It’s a complex balancing act: while investors still pay more to trade than those of us who aren’t in the inner circle, any serious discussion must point out that relative to previous generations of equity trading, everything is cheaper.
Most important, however, is that along with all this automation came an enormous amount of noise in the system: many players, and not just those in the inner circle, trade for the point of trading, and have absolutely no interest in investing. One can honestly debate whether this type of trading has any systemic benefit, but it clearly has occasional cost. A strategy that makes money without investing isn’t actually doing anything useful except making money for it’s creators. Put another way, it hard to see how this kind of trading directly serves the market’s goal of allocating capital.
The second issue, which is entirely separate, is that aside from a technological advantage, in some circumstances the inner circle gets information about trades in the market before everyone else. Any lead on information lets you beat your competitors to the punch, which is fundamentally what this game is all about. It’s also an illegal practice, and the “loopholes” that allow it are both new and already under investigation by the SEC. If I understand these sources correctly, basically the SEC created the problem they’re now faced with fixing.
This article is justifiably cynical about how the likes of Goldman make all their money, but the issues raised aren’t actually advanced by a poorly explained roundup of the situation.
I suffer from my own biases. My starting position (yet to be argued with by any of my friends who still work on Wall Street) is that 50% of the jobs on Wall Street could be lopped off and it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone, except in freeing up a generation of well-educated people to do whatever else it is most of them want to do anyway. Once that’s done, the process could probably safely be repeated a few more times.
Update 8/4: Both of my points above have since been addressed by people who, you know, still do this stuff for a living:
Paul Krugman writes:
… What both say is that private information — the kind of information you get by, say, using supercomputers to place trades 30 milliseconds faster than the hoi-polloi — can be privately profitable but socially
usefuluseless, maybe even destructive.
The SEC is making a big deal about how they’re now looking into “flash orders”. Here’s Chuck Schumer (via the WSJ):
We salute the SEC for moving forward with this ban that will restore integrity to the markets. The agency is absolutely making the right call by stepping up and ending this unfair practice…
