< The 2016 Tech 50

19
Neil Katz
Managing Director
D.E. Shaw & Co.
Last year: 20

Neil Katz took his first programming class at the age of ten and has loved playing with computers ever since. Today, as managing director of D.E. Shaw & Co., overseeing more than 250 technologists at the $37 billion alternative-investment firm, Katz indulges his fondness for hacking on Friday evenings. “I’ll find a little piece of our software that has a rough edge to it, and I’ll polish that edge because writing code remains one of my great pleasures,” the 44-year-old says. “As we’ve replaced our older technology with newer, more efficient software, we’ve saved time and generated happiness among the team,” he adds. To that end, D.E. Shaw’s developers are embedded alongside the quantitative researchers in the multistrategy firm’s various investment units rather than working as part of a central information technology group. “We get huge benefits from that,” says Katz, who joined New York–based D.E. Shaw in 1994 after graduating from Stanford University with a BS in electrical engineering and a BA in quantitative economics. During the past year Katz’s developers have been working on ways to process enormous amounts of data chronologically after it has been collected. “We’ve been developing systems to allow us to process this chronological data at scale, which has allowed us to go beyond standard modeling to explore the data for patterns,” he explains. Although D.E. Shaw historically has avoided cloud computing because it can do things more cheaply using its own data centers and proprietary technology, Katz says the firm is starting to look at how it could transform its systems to efficiently use cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services as they come down in price: “The idea is to get this to the point where if our quants want to use 100,000 machines right now to deal with a data set that is astronomically large, they can do that and it will be an advantage.”

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 3. Lance Uggla Markit Fireside Chat: Fixed Income Market Structure Evolution Sponsored by Jane Street May 15, 2025 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen