This content is from: Portfolio
The 2015 Tech 50: Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko
Bloomberg’s CTO Shawn Edwards and global head of research and development Vlad Kliatchko share the No. 6 spot on this year’s Tech 50.



After retaking the helm of the financial information empire that he founded in 1981, Michael Bloomberg formed an executive committee consisting of himself; Peter Grauer, the company’s chairman since Bloomberg’s first run for New York City mayor, in 2001; and co-founder and longtime global head of financial products and services Thomas Secunda (No. 1 the past three years). It is to them that CTO Shawn Edwards and global head of R&D Vlad Kliatchko report. They are both 46-year-old, 12-year Bloomberg veterans who fit the mold of a collaborative, agile, open-plan-office culture and finish each other’s sentences, though in different accents. The Russian-born Kliatchko has mathematics and computer science degrees from St. Petersburg State University; as head of R&D since 2012, he oversees the bulk of Bloomberg’s 4,000-plus technologists, who are dispersed globally, including in a San Francisco space that opened in May. “Ability to find talent is the only constraint” to adding staff faster, Kliatchko says. Edwards, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and headed R&D before the CTO office was formed in 2008, runs smaller teams focused on “advanced, exciting, forward-looking opportunities,” lately on the analytics frontier in machine learning and natural language processing. Their division of labor is “a traditional CIO/CTO split,” Edwards explains, but is “highly fluid,” as are movements of people between their teams. “Technology leadership is part of the culture,” Kliatchko says, as it has been since Bloomberg invented early network protocols and other systems that couldn’t be bought off the shelf. Today the company — even as it prototypes keyboard designs with 3-D printers — blends in-house innovation with participation in such open-source communities as Linux, OpenStack and Solr. “That’s a big change in our profile the past several years,” says Edwards. Secunda calls Edwards and Kliatchko "great technologists" and stresses "they are leading a team of more than 4,000 great technologists who epitomize our culture of constant innovation."
See the full story, “The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge.”
![]() 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. ![]() 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 |