Darrell Silver!

One Year Later…

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!

NYTimes Throws Darts

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 useful useless, 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…

Google App Engine Getting Awesomer

Google App Engine is becoming super exciting! The team recently released “Task Queues”, a utility that allows you to run a slow process independent of web requests, which must always be fast.  This is the same basic functionality as Amazon’s Simple Queue Service, but Google’s implementation carries none of the overhead of setting up or scaling large queues of tasks, as SQS does.  With SQS, one has to write a custom daemon to read from the queue, and scale that daemon on new EC2 instances as your queue length grows.  In GAE, all this administrative work is handled for you.

Google’s approach is fundamentally far superior to Amazon’s and will prove a no-brainer once the technology becomes more mature, unless Amazon changes direction.  I can’t wait for Google to loosen up some of their usage restrictions, such as support for long-running tasks, big data storage, and more flexible python libraries.

Until then, I’m sticking with Amazon’s alphabet soup (AWS, EC2, S3, SQS) and looking for ways to make migration to GAE as easy as possible when it becomes viable.

Time to Take a Deep Breath

New Hampshire has just become the sixth state to allow marriage equality.  The lion’s share of debate in N.H., as I understand it, was over whether religious institutions (churches, ministers, etc.) would be obligated under the law to perform and recognize same-sex marriages.

I can only imagine how imposing it must be for a religious institution that honestly doesn’t approve of same-sex marriage to be forced to recognize and perform them.  I find it hard to respect the same-sex couple that would force a church into being an unwilling participant in this deeply personal and shared ceremony.  In fact, I believe such a couple doesn’t actually exist.

As this NYTimes article points out, there are those who believe that the

language adopted by New Hampshire and several other states does not go far enough because it protects only religious groups and their employees. New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage bill does not exempt photographers or florists, for example, from having to provide services at gay weddings.

No one will use their wedding day as an opportunity to pay, offend and then aggravate a photographer who will inevitably under-perform at this important job.  In fact, the wedding industry is almost unanimously excited about the increase in business they’ll see.  But fundamentally this stuff really isn’t what’s important here.  Everyone involved in this debate needs to take a deep breadth.  We need to take a minute to understand the personal feelings of our opponents, and create laws that codify this respect.

Marketing 2.0 in the EU

From an ab-sol-ute-ly-hi-lar-io-us WSJ article on marketing and understanding the upcoming European Parliament elections:

“We wanted somebody youth could relate to,” says Ans Persoons, who directed the initiative. “So we picked an American rapper, but we wanted him to be European, so we hung a big gold euro sign around his neck.”

But It’s Not Google

Introducing Bing via the NYT:

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”