Fintech startup career advice from Quantopian’s CEO John Fawcett

By on August 19, 2013 in Career Advice
John Fawcett (a.k.a. Fawce) is the founder and CEO of Quantopian, a fintech startup backed by Spark Capital and GETCO that’s democratizing the world of quantitative trading. Below, John shares his hiring philosophy and a pro tip on why you should never use “I’m not technical” as a crutch in an interview. –John

Fintech startup Quantopian

This is the second fintech startup you’ve been involved with. What do you think you did really well in terms of hiring and recruiting at your first company and what are you doing differently this time around?

Even though I had not started a company before I was fortunate to have friends who were programmers that I could recruit onto the team. Perhaps not surprisingly my first two hires were friends from college that I knew very well and that I trusted to do a great job.
At Quantopian we have followed that same strategy. We’ve been able to fill all our open positions through people we know and with whom we have worked previously. We always knew that this method would only scale to a point, however, since we needed to hire people with specialized quantitative finance expertise. So, we did some work early on to establish relationships with people who might fit – getting to know them well before we needed to make a hire.
Along those lines, two things that have worked well for us in terms of generating inbound interest in working at our company have been our monthly meetups in NYC and Boston as well as our Quant-in-Residence program.

What’s your favorite interview question for non-developer candidates (e.g. sales, marketing, business development) at your fintech startup and why?

It isn’t a question per se, but I always try to find a way to introduce a new concept to any candidate.

For non-developers at a fintech startup, or any startup for that matter, I think it is important that they be able to absorb and interpret technology concepts, especially constraints and limitations. Asking them to teach me about a prior project or product, especially “how it works”, is usually revealing – you can tell pretty quickly how they perceive technology and how they communicate about it.

Sometimes, I’ll try to teach them some technical concepts on the fly and then ask them a brain teaser based on whatever I just taught them. For example, at my last fintech startup I once interviewed an HR manager candidate who asked a lot of questions about the technical aspects of our work. We got to talking about databases and how to query them and she seemed to have a great grasp on the ideas. So, on the spur of the moment I decided to teach her SQL and asked her to write a query based on a simple schema I made up on the spot.

She got the query right but what made her stand out – and positioned her as a ‘must hire’ candidate – was her attitude about the question itself. Technologists like me hate it when people say “Oh I’m not technical” and politely refuse to hear about our work. The HR manager candidate said “Well, I’ve never done this before but if you explain it to me I can probably figure it out.” That response revealed a lot about how she would interact with our team.

Do you read resumes and cover letters that are sent your way? What’s the best way to get your attention as a potential hire and/or applicant for an open position at Quantopian?

We have a policy to read all cover letters and resumes at this stage. We’re such a young company so it is hugely flattering to have inbound interest. That being said a cover letter and resume is not my favorite way to meet a new candidate.
The best candidates are typically people who attend or speak at our meetups, avid users who connect with us on the Quantopian forums, and people who contribute to our open source project (zipline.io).
Even people who don’t code can use Quantopian to clone and then improve algorithms created by others in the community, so there’s no reason why someone without a software development background can’t dive in and at least try out the service.

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