Online Propaganda Department | "Everything is distribution"
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Had a Jane Street interview in 2019.
Round 8. Interviewer texts: 'Equinox Brookfield. 6 AM. Bring a calculator you won't use.'
I show up. He's on the StairMaster reading a printout of the CBOE VIX term structure.
Doesn't get off. Nods at the machine next to him.
'You see that guy on the rower? Goldman MD. Comes here every morning at 6:04. Leaves at 6:38. What's the implied vol on his arrival time?'
'I don't know his variance.'
'Sample size of one year, 250 sessions. Standard deviation is 90 seconds. Annualize it.'
I do the math in my head. '90 seconds times sqrt(250). About 24 minutes annualized.'
'Wrong. You annualized like it's a return. Time-of-arrival doesn't compound. It's a Poisson process with drift. The correct answer is his arrival is more punctual than the 6 train. Now price me an option on whether he shows up tomorrow.'
I think for a second. 'If he's been here 250 days in a row, base rate is 99.6%. But you have to adjust for his vacation schedule and probability of injury, call it 96%.'
'Strike?'
'$10 if he shows, $0 if he doesn't.'
'I'll sell you that option for $9.40.'
I think about it. 'No. Expected value is $9.60. You're underpricing by 20 cents.'
'Correct. Now why am I selling it to you?'
I freeze.
'Because I just saw him limp on the way in. You're buying my information for 20 cents. You overpaid.'
We get off the machines. Walk to the smoothie bar. He orders a $19 smoothie, doesn't drink it.
'Last question. The girl behind the counter makes 200 smoothies per morning. She has perfect information on who's actually here and who's faking it. Citadel guys leak their attendance to her every day for the price of a tip. If I gave you $50,000 to set up a market on which Citadel PM gets fired this quarter, what's your bid-ask?'
'Insider trading.'
'Wrong answer. There's no public security. Try again.'
I think. 'I'd quote 8 to 12 percent on any given PM. Spread of 4 points to cover adverse selection. Tighten the spread for PMs I have data on.'
'Where do you get the data?'
'The smoothie girl.'
'Good. How much do you pay her?'
'10% of P&L.'
'Wrong. You pay her a flat $200 a week. If you pay her on P&L she becomes your counterparty. Right now she's your data source. Don't conflate edges.'
He hands me the untouched smoothie.
'Throw this out on Vesey Street, not in the building. The staff knows what gets wasted. Outside, it was consumed. Same smoothie, different signal.'
I do it.
Thursday I get the email.
'Offer rescinded. Your bid-ask on the PM market was too tight. 4 points doesn't cover the tail. The girl is a single point of failure and you didn't price her counterparty risk. Also you held the smoothie in your right hand. Right-handers throw with their right hand. Camera saw the hesitation.'
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before.
At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000+ ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine.
I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed.
Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are
- Tether ($90M+ profit/emp)
- Hyperliquid ($80M+ profit/emp)
and on revenue:
- Valve ($50M/emp)
- OnlyFans ($37M/emp)
- Craigslist ($14M/emp)
- Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate)
- OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate)
For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
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saw a video on instagram this week about seneca.
in his letters to lucilius he said you should set aside a few days each month and just live with meager food and rough clothes on purpose.
then ask yourself “is this the condition that i feared?”
idea being if you test hardship on your own terms the fear of losing everything loses its power, because the anxiety of it is usually worse than actually having little.
many such cases.
an example - when i was a kid i was kinda scared of jellyfish because i thought it was gonna hurt a lot aha so whenever i saw one at the ocean i just left and it kinda ruined my day.
the more i thought about the pain the worse it got in my head. then on my birthday this year i actually got stung and man… it barely hurt.
you feel some pain obviously but was that what i was scared of?
i almost felt thankful i got stung.a lot of things are like that tbh.
you get through it. you’ll survive. it’s fine. take bigger risks, don’t be afraid.
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André retweeted
the best founders i know are ok looking stupid
they dm strangers, post unfinished work, ask dumb questions
ego is the bottleneck
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Wrote about Brazil’s crypto market around a year ago.
@chainalysis just put out new LATAM data and a lot of the same trends are still playing out.
Brazil is still the biggest market in the region and its stablecoin economy has grown almost 5x.
LATAM keeps getting more interesting.
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this tbh
Mark Zuckerberg: failure doesn’t matter.
“The question is how much you win, when you win.”
“@WalterIsaacson wrote this biography of Einstein. One of the interesting things were all the theories he had that were wrong.”
“People don’t remember those.”
“We’re all going to get a lot of stuff wrong, what matters are the intellectual and cultural contributions we make that help push stuff forward.”
“We have a resilient company that is not afraid of failure.”
“That allows us to take some big swings and tolerate being ridiculed for long periods of time.”
“If you’re trying to do something that’s really new, people have to think it’s ridiculous. If they didn’t, someone else would’ve already done it.”
“In creation, the upside is infinite.”
“If you build something that hundreds of millions, or billions of people like, then that makes up for a lot of ideas that didn’t end up working.”
Via @Complex
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love this
Ben Horowitz cosigned the Databricks co-founders in 2013, when they were Berkeley academics.
" When I met with them, they were like, 'We need to raise $200,000.'"
"I said, 'I'm not gonna write you a check for $200,000. I'll write you a check for $10 million.'"
"You need to build a company. You need to really go for it if you're gonna do this, otherwise you guys should stay in school."
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warning my followers - if you have an acc on @bitget. stay safe!
Fanning it out pretty suspiciously too. 500E bridges and 1k ETH chunks to a few places
arbiscan.io/address/0x202e8C…
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André retweeted
Come join me listen to this important talk! 🤗
kudos to @AlexFiskum for pulling this huge event together and yet being so responsive! Can’t wait to be in Singapore 💫
Can AI and finance be private by default?
@ilblackdragon of @NEARProtocol takes the BingX Labs Stage to make the case.
Wed 7 Oct, 11:20 AM
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Crypto pushing TradFi.
(crypto will win)
🇺🇸BREAKING: U.S. stock markets will begin trading 23 hours a day, 5 days a week from December 6
The planned trading week will run from Sunday evening through Friday evening, with a one-hour daily maintenance break.
Nasdaq and NYSE Arca are among the venues preparing for expanded hours, while the regular 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. session remains unchanged.
The SEC is upgrading market infrastructure for 23/5 trading, with full 24/7 trading potentially coming later.
Brokers will decide which securities and overnight services customers can access, while thinner liquidity could mean wider spreads and greater volatility.
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