< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

When Neil Katz graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a BS in electrical engineering and a BA in quantitative economics, he had every intention of going for a master’s in computer science and then applying to a Ph.D. program. Then he got a letter from D.E. Shaw & Co. inviting him to New York for an interview. Katz didn’t know much about the hedge fund firm, which had been founded by computer scientist and Stanford alum David Shaw six years earlier, but he couldn’t pass up a free trip to the Big Apple. “All these senior people met with me, and I was really impressed because they were clearly very smart,” says Katz, who learned to hack as a kid on an Atari 400 home computer. “As a double major I was interested in both finance and technology, and this was a firm that was at the intersection of both, so that was attractive to me.” Katz joined the then-$350 million-in-assets D.E. Shaw as a junior programmer and operations person in its U.S. equities trading group. Two decades later, at 43, he is still with the firm — which now manages $36 billion in alternative and long-only investment strategies — and oversees the hardware and software at the heart of its trading systems and information technology infrastructure. A key to D.E. Shaw’s success is its culture, which emphasizes creativity and values the contributions of technologists, quants and traders alike, Katz says. By working closely with the investment staff, Katz’s team of more than 250 technologists focuses on “building transformative tools” that enable the firm’s researchers to test their investment ideas and trading algorithms using the trillion data events that D.E. Shaw collects daily. “Our commitment to building these tools — which have transformed the way we provide, process and visualize large volumes of data — means that our researchers have been able to run experiments more quickly and get forecasts into production faster than ever,” he adds.

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The 2015 Tech 50

1. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. Finding, Applying for, and Winning Grant Funding: Tips for Nonprofits Sponsored by Fidelity Investments April 28, 2025 3. Phupinder Gill CME Group 4. Lance Uggla Markit 5. Robert Goldstein BlackRock

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group 8. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 9. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 10. Adena Friedman Nasdaq OMX Group

11. David Craig Thomson Reuters 12. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 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. Christopher Perretta State Street Corp. 18. Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group 19. Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co. 20. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.

21. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 22. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 23. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 24. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 25. Frank Bisignano First Data Corp.

26. John Marcante Vanguard Group 27. Joseph Squeri Citadel 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Claude Honegger Credit Suisse 30. Chris Corrado MSCI

31. David Gledhill DBS Bank 32. John Bates Software AG 33. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 34. Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group 35. Sunil Hirani trueEX Group

36. Hauke Stars Deutsche BÖrse 37. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 38. Jim Minnick eVestment 39. Lars Seier Christensen & Kim Fournais 40. Tyler Kim MaplesFS

41. Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp. 42. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 43. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 44. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 45. Stephane Dubois Xignite

46. Mazy Dar OpenFin 47. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 48. Mas Nakachi OpenGamma 49. John Lehner BNY Mellon Technology Solutions Group 50. Jock Percy Perseus