How will the NYC quant community evolve?
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures put up a post suggesting that quants hit by the troubles on Wall Street should go to tech firms instead. What really caught my eye was (emphasis mine):
we too have been trying to hire from Wall Street in the past month. In particular, we are looking for “quant jocks”, people who have degrees in economics and/or advanced math who know how to code algorithms. These kinds of people have been very valuable on wall street in areas like program trading and risk management. But they are also incredibly valuable in areas like advertising optimization, search optimization, social media optimization, semantic analysis, auto tagging, etc, etc. We need such people in almost every single one of our companies, no matter where they are located.
Union Square’s portfolio consists almost, if not entirely, of web-based companies. I guess they decided that hard-core data mining is the key to monetization pretty much across the board.
There’s an incredible base of analytical talent on Wall Street; I’d guess it’s the strongest collection of such folks in the world, with London — the world financial co-capital — in second place. Mix that with the already vibrant NYC efforts in advertising-related analytics, and you could come up with a scary-smart brew.
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