The 2015 Tech 50: Neil Katz

WhenNeil Katzgraduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a BS in electrical engineering and a BA in quantitative economics, he had every intention of going for a master’s in computer science and then applying to a Ph.D. program. Then he got a letter from D.E. Shaw & Co. inviting him to New York for an interview. Katz didn’t know much about the hedge fund firm, which had been founded by computer scientist and Stanford alum David Shaw six years earlier, but he couldn’t pass up a free trip to the Big Apple. “All these senior people met with me, and I was really impressed because they were clearly very smart,” says Katz, who learned to hack as a kid on an Atari 400 home computer. “As a double major I was interested in both finance and technology, and this was a firm that was at the intersection of both, so that was attractive to me.” Katz joined the then-$350 million-in-assets D.E. Shaw as a junior programmer and operations person in its U.S. equities trading group. Two decades later, at 43, he is still with the firm — which now manages $36 billion in alternative and long-only investment strategies — and oversees the hardware and software at the heart of its trading systems and information technology infrastructure. A key to D.E. Shaw’s success is its culture, which emphasizes creativity and values the contributions of technologists, quants and traders alike, Katz says. By working closely with the investment staff, Katz’s team of more than 250 technologists focuses on “building transformative tools” that enable the firm’s researchers to test their investment ideas and trading algorithms using the trillion data events that D.E. Shaw collects daily. “Our commitment to building these tools — which have transformed the way we provide, process and visualize large volumes of data — means that our researchers have been able to run experiments more quickly and get forecasts into production faster than ever,” he adds.

See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”