Why They Changed My Password Mid-Bonus-Meeting (Young, Brilliant, and Wrong: Part 9)

Coming Up Together with Ash

Ash and I visited the Singapore office. In between going to the night zoo, drinking fancy tea, and repeatedly turning down crab due to being the only vegetarians, I saw that my assistant trader was doing great in our normal time zones without me. He reminded me of me when I started trading, and, in turn, I was beginning to see glimmers of how I was aging like my own mentor. I was 26 whereas my mentor had been in his thirties or maybe forties with several kids, but, like him, I longed for the olden days.

Markets were getting tougher, and bonuses were down across the board. The rest of the world had caught onto what we were doing, and there were random hit pieces and reporters writing erroneous, sensationalist articles about random individual traders. Although the normal world was still catching on to our existence, we were past our peak in terms of trading. Once heralded as the Google of high frequency trading amongst insiders, we were now just ok.

With our new CEO, our values eroded. Under our old founders, we barely had a website, and there were zero images of them online. The new CEO longed to be CEO of a public company, and pushed us in that direction. The old refrain of “externally opaque, internally transparent” was never discussed anymore, and new hires hadn’t heard of some values I still took for granted. Although we were still dominant in many markets, our models seemed to be losing sophistication relative to the competition. With a shrinking bonus pool and a top-heavy hiring plan, people were more obsessed with the zero-sum, political game of thrones than figuring out how to expand the pie.

As soon as I got back from the trip, I went to the Chicago office to resign to the remaining founder in person.

They exercised my non-compete, and part of me thought I might still go back to trading when it was over, but I ended up starting a mobile SDK B2B SaaS company. That’s a whole other era of my life that I’ve written about elsewhere. Here’s one of my first blog posts after moving to Silicon Valley: https://www.nancyhua.com/2013/10/07/ycombinator-summer-2013/.

Six months after I quit, Ash texted me, “I tried to quit today.”

It could take a few tries to quit. For me, it was because the people I worked with were my friends. There were a lot of uniquely amazing things about our company, we had a lot of history, and I’d keep hoping it could work out somehow. But people somehow knew before I knew.

After one of my last bonus meetings, our head ops guy came over and placed a slip of paper on my keyboard, eyes downcast, “This is your new password.”

Sometimes management thought you might rage-quit during a bonus conversation once you heard your insulting number. In case they couldn’t convince you that the bonus pool would bounce back to make up for it eventually, they’d change your password in the middle of the meeting. This was in case you tried to storm over to your desk afterwards and sabotage or steal IP. Supposedly Legal said that if management didn’t do this, an argument could be made that the company didn’t value its IP.

It seemed silly to me. Who would rage quit? People who wanted to leave had plenty of time to plot and get their teammates to interview as a team to get new offers in hand before leaving at the same time so their non-competes could expire simultaneously and they could start at their new firm together. Furthermore, our devs and operations teams were always shaving microseconds off message roundtrip times, and figuring out how to send messages without getting throttled. Without all that and the exchange relationships and trading infrastructure that allowed my trade blades to sit in the same rack as the exchange matching engines, most of the IP was worthless.

But there were random scandals in the industry with companies suing ex-employees for IP theft and violating non-solicits, one guy claiming he wiped his drives because of a porn addiction (and this after getting paid a 9-figure bonus), and less crafty, low level traders straight up going to jail. Two MIT classmates who’d graduated within a year of me had gone to jail for exactly this reason.

Although I doubted such a thing could ever happen in our company, I was relieved to leave that kind of thing behind. Looking back, I feel lucky I got out. Not everyone did. And some learned the hard way just how rare the magic of our company was, and that the rest of the trading world could be full of danger.

Next part here.

Beginning of series here.

[Thanks to Justis Mills, Alexander Wales, and Steve Hsu from Inkhaven for feedback on earlier versions of this post.]