The 2016 Trading Technology 40: Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky

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< The 2016 Trading Technology 40

22
Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky
Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer
Broadway Technology
Last year: 27

For a technology start-up, not to mention the software it produces, life expectancy is short. As a 13-year-old company averaging 35 percent revenue growth in recent years, Broadway Technology has decidedly beaten the odds. When then-20-somethings Tyler Moeller and Joshua Walsky set up shop in New York, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch. Their TOC system had proved its mettle in proprietary trading, and some big Wall Street names, including eventual investor Goldman Sachs Group, were interested in its fixed-income capabilities. “We have people happy using 15-year-old systems,” notes CTO Walsky, 39, whose working relationship with CEO Moeller began in the 1990s at CarOrder.com, which did not survive the dot-com bubble. The durability is a testament to TOC’s architecture, which was ahead of its time in being multi-asset-ready and therefore extendable into derivatives and currencies. “The world moved in the direction of our platform,” says Moeller, 40. Things did get complicated. Broadway had to keep pace in the low-latency race, but the 100-employee company — heavily populated with computer science graduates like Moeller (BS and master’s in engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Walsky (BA and master’s in engineering from Cornell University) — was built for speed. On that point, however, Moeller says the industry has evolved to where “it’s more cost-effective to be smarter in the way you trade than throwing money” at speed. Business intelligence and analytics become key; in another stroke of prescience, TOC was designed as a “data-oriented system,” Walsky explains, with flexibility and scalability to meet such trading and support needs as risk management, surveillance and compliance. “It is a dynamic compute engine,” he says. “We are still inventing on top of the platform,” which is a year and a half into a substantial rewrite dubbed TOC 4.