Tetragrammaton

Tetragrammaton

I was at this party in San Francisco in, I think it was early 2012, and this was still when we were running our second business, the software business selling the picks and shovels to hedge funds.

And I was explaining to this person at the party what we were doing.

In San Francisco, a lot of people are, you know, tell me about your startup sort of thing.

I was like, okay, well, we have this technology.

It's really fast.

Back then we weren't competing on cost, but it was all about latency.

Like, how quickly can you take a signal from the market, be able to interpret it and spit out a trade in response?

And we were talking microseconds here.

So you take the signal.

Michael Lewis wrote a book about this.

He did, yes.

And that book caused a lot of problems for me later on. Yeah, because that book was published right when Robin Hood was announced and launched. Effectively, I was telling this person about my business and, you know, we have these customers that are using our software. They're trading billions of dollars per day in volume with a small

team of people.

And it's really fast.

And by the way, it's very efficient.

They pay next to nothing, right?

And this guy was like, so you're telling me these customers, three or four of them that

you have, trade tens of billions of dollars a day, and they pay next

to nothing. Why can't I have that? You know, I have my Schwab account. They're charging me,

I don't know, $10, $20 a trade. Can I use your software? And at first I was kind of like,

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