Camille Fournier on Building Tech at Two Sigma

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

So Tracy, we've had a number of episodes, not that many, but certainly a handful of them. One of our themes is like quantitative finance, quant stuff, but we always sort of talk about it from a sort of very big theoretical level, like what's happening with different factors, alpha decay, stuff like that. Always sort of like tends to be at the sort of big picture abstraction level, I would say.

Tracy Alloway (0:46)

Yeah, I think that's right. We talk a lot about the future of quantitative finance, what's most important, I guess, when it comes to running a successful quant strategy, like whether it's the actual formula or program that you're using or whether it's something like the data set that you're using, we've discussed all of those now.

Joe Weisenthal (1:08)

Yeah, absolutely, and so we talk about it theoretically, we talk about it academically, but one thing that we haven't really discussed is when you think about quantitative finance, you think about lots of really smart people, mathematicians, people using computers to find data, to analyze huge amounts of data. We've never really talked about it from the bottoms up, like the actual process of using computers, using technology to perform all these calculations to in theory beat the market.

Tracy Alloway (1:41)

Yeah, I think that's right. And I'm gonna go ahead and admit that I don't know that much about engineering in the financial industry. We can talk a lot about what gives a competitive edge when it comes to quant strategies, but a competitive edge when it comes to engineering, when it comes to installing particular products or systems, I really have no idea what that looks like nowadays.

Joe Weisenthal (2:06)

No, I literally have no idea, but it's kind of, you know, it's this huge whole component of it and every financial firm, whether it's a major bank, whether it's a fund, wants to advertise their tech stack, their tech advantage, so to speak. But I really, I don't really know much about the actual process of like building that tech and how you build a competitive edge from that tech.

And yeah, it's a whole sort of facet of this that I don't think most people know very much about.

Tracy Alloway (2:39)

Yeah, and I'm also interested in knowing whether the culture of being an engineer at a financial company is different to the culture of being, say, a trader or a banker at a financial company. And I'm definitely interested in knowing whether or not the culture of being an engineer at a financial company is different to being an engineer at, say, Google or Apple or something like that.

Joe Weisenthal (3:04)

Right, I'm extremely curious about this as well, because again, it's like one of these things where in theory more and more financial institutions would like to be competitive for talent against the likes of Google and Facebook and other startups and so on. But it raises the question of how similar differences and how the two compare.

Tracy Alloway (3:26)

Yeah, absolutely. This is gonna be a fun episode, I can tell.

Joe Weisenthal (3:29)

Yeah, I'm super excited about this one. This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. Today our guest is Camille Fournier. She is the managing director or a managing director, head of platform engineering at Two Sigma, which is a big financial services company. It has a hedge fund. It also does VC stuff, very sort of well-known famous firm in the space. Camille was previously the CTO at Rent the Runway, the popular fashion. I don't know how you describe it, but I guess you like people rent dresses on a temporary basis or rent clothes on a temporary basis. And prior to that, Camille was at Goldman Sachs, so has seen all of this from both sides, the tech hemisphere of all these services. So Camille, thank you very much for joining us.

Camille Fournier (4:19)

Excited to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (4:20)

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. So before we get going, why don't you sort of give us the quick summary of your career? How did you get to be your path to being the head of platform engineering at Two Sigma?

Camille Fournier (4:34)

Sure. I have something, I guess I have a fairly standard educational background. So I have a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon for my undergraduate degree. I worked at Microsoft for a hot second, went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, decided I didn't want to get a PhD. I did want to live in New York City. And so ended up getting a job at this company that I had literally never heard of until I interviewed there called Goldman Sachs, which I'm sure will be very amusing to your listeners.