Disqus - Latest Comments for KirkWylie

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 05:49:16 -0000

And if this was something where the dominant memes out there were of gay and straight-but-supporting employees saying "This person doesn't represent us and we don't want to work for him" that's a serious issue that should definitely rise to board level.

But petty crap by people like okcupid just make this a public mob spectacle. And that doesn't help anyone, least of all gay people who are still fighting for similar rights and recognition elsewhere in America, much less the world.

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 05:47:39 -0000

Ding ding ding. A private belief, never exhibited in the workplace, is the type of separation of public from private realm critical to any minority being able to be fully integrated into society.

Again, do I agree with Eich? No. But so long as he has those beliefs privately and acts basically contrary to those as the CEO of an organization he should have the rights to have them.

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 05:45:26 -0000

I'm not sure where you're living, and while I agree that it does happen too often everywhere, but I'm writing from a country (England and Wales) where that is illegal. And Mozilla is incorporated in a state (California) where that is illegal. And that's precisely what we fought so hard for: legal recognition of our rights as human beings.

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 11:56:01 -0000

And not all Christians share the same beliefs. My parents are extremely devout Christians, and passionate supporters of same-sex marriage. Religion is too personal to paint everybody with one brush. So I prefer to deal with individuals rather than stereotypes.

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 11:35:49 -0000

Personally, I believe that church marriage and civil marriage should be completely separate. One is a sacred act that matters to ones religious belief and relationship with one's higher power(s), and the other is a contract between citizens that the state deems it appropriate to respect. I don't think the two require any connection with each other, and why I support the UK's law on this: individual churches are permitted but not required to perform same-sex marriages, if it fits in with their religious beliefs. No church can (or in my opinion should) be required to sanctify a same-sex union against its belief.

I also have no problems with people who have a sincere religious belief in the context in which such a religious belief is appropriate in a secular society: in a private context.

Problems inevitably arise from situations in which people bring behavior that should be private into a situation that is public. A corporation, of any form, for example, is a public enterprise. A quiet, non-proselytizing expression of faith (for example, someone wearing a cross or a headscarf, or requiring a quiet space to pray) is an entirely reasonable thing to have in a public space. An expression that goes against the rights of other people (a boss handing out invitations to a prayer session, or a company having a policy that pictures of opposite-sex but not same-sex spouses isn't appropriate as desk decorations, or running a B&B that doesn't allow non-married couples to share a bed) isn't.

The problem that I've found is that all too often in the US, there is a certain subset of Christians who believe wholeheartedly that this approach is not permissible: that the free expression of their religion must come through imposing their religion on those who don't share it (whether atheists or people of other religious traditions).

To me? I'm fine keeping what happens in my bedroom in my bedroom. I just want my workplace and public space run like a public space, and to me, that means that in a secular society we keep those places secular.

But that's just my opinion. I actually think that much like it's important that gay people be out, so to religious people. Until and unless people can say "I know people with religious beliefs that run contrary to mine, but they're not all raving crazies" it will be similarly viewed as The Other. But don't expect me to go to church with you. ;)

Re: I'm Sad Brendan Eich Had to Step Down as Mozilla CEO

KirkWylie — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 11:18:18 -0000

Hi, Peter, I think that's a very interesting point, and one that I hadn't heard. I encourage people to think about that.

But two things are still troubling if this is true. The first is that right now the narrative is that it was the gays that did him in. I think it's important to counter that with the perspective of someone who is gay who wouldn't support it.

Second, I'm somewhat troubled by a recent trend that the only way to get to a public and important role is to be a blank slate. It's already the case in American politics that every part of your history will be dragged up to smear you by some side or the other. Is that happening in the corporate realm as well? That troubles me, particularly as the Facebook generation grows up.

Re:

KirkWylie — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:37:38 -0000

Thanks a lot! We definitely see that as alpha opportunities decrease industry wide, the scope to spend a fortune custom building an infrastructure that only meets peer firms standards just isn't optional. Hence OpenGamma as the best of both worlds: you get a customized system that's state of the art, without having to build from scratch.

We also definitely see a wide variety of adopters and potential customers, from hedge funds through to investment banks, market infrastructure firms like CCPs and exchange operators, all the way through to insurance firms and corporate treasury desks.

We set about to build a pretty horizontal technology component and I think we've succeeded!

Re: Spotlight on: the OpenGamma Platform

KirkWylie — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:21:50 -0000

Absolutely the Open Source components are production-grade. We actually have a customer who is in production without using any of the proprietary components (for which customers typically receive a royalty-free perpetual source code license as well). We also strongly support our open source community and want there to be a strong and viable ecosystem.

Our revenue model is based primarily around support services. That can be as simple as making sure there's someone you CAN call if something goes wrong, or as proactive as providing code review services for in-house developed software targetting the Platform. This isn't a one-size-fits-all market, and our services aren't one-size-fits-all as a result.

As for commercial viability, we (and our investors, such as Accel Partners, FirstMark Capital, and ICAP plc) are extremely confident that this is a commercially viable venture.

Re: Building a Next-Generation Risk Analytics User Interface

KirkWylie — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:10:36 -0000

"What is the risk" is entirely down to the end user and the use case. What a trader on a equity derivatives desk views as risk will be different than what a risk manager for a Global Macro Fixed Income hedge fund needs to see. This is a generic tablet, which forms the basis for detailed investigation of computed analytics for any trading or risk management system.

Is there something in particular that's needlessly complex? We'd love to make it simpler if that helps users work with the system better!

Re: Building a Next-Generation Risk Analytics User Interface

KirkWylie — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:09:09 -0000

I'm not entirely sure what you're suggesting. We've been working with customers and Open Source users of our current web analytics viewer for over a year now and all the features that we've highlighted are ones that have been asked for, or refined with, our existing customer base. Whether it's better visualization of volatility surfaces, Explain Value drill-down, historical time series ties to existing risk numbers, or the ability to copy-and-paste to Excel, our end-users use these features on a daily basis.

Yes, the functionality is ahead of our competitors, but our users are quite able (and eager!) to use the additional functionality and usability.

Is there something in particular you find overly complicated? We're always eager to know how we can improve our user interfaces, which is one reason why we've put out screen shots of the work in progress!

Re: Public Appearances: 26/27 June, 2012

KirkWylie — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:11:57 -0000

Done! http://kirkwylie.blogspot.c...

Re: Public Appearances: 26/27 June, 2012

KirkWylie — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:11:21 -0000

Sorry it took so long everybody, but slides and video of both events are finally up here: http://kirkwylie.blogspot.c...

Re: Algorithmic Differentiation: A Quantitative Finance Library Implementation

KirkWylie — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 06:34:03 -0000

Hi, Stathi,

We definitely find that there are tradeoffs in working with Java, much like there are with any programming language not specifically designed for its domain. Internally we have people who are partial to Java, C++, Fortran, Clojure, Haskell, and MatLab. Each of them has its benefits in certain domains.

However, what we find is that Java hits a sweet spot for what we're doing if we write it carefully and have appropriate libraries available (part of the reason why we're writing so much low-level numerical code):
* It runs on the JVM, which is a fantastic runtime environment for large distributed systems.
* It's fast enough (not as fast as hand-tuned Fortran or Assembler, but we get performance pretty close to C++ for most cases our customers come across).
* It's easily understood by the types of developers we run into in the open source and commercial communities.
* The verbosity and lack of things like operator overloading and templates makes it very easy to maintain, which is key for an open source project nearing 1mm lines of code.

Certainly some tasks might be easier in some languages (our quants love doing initial work in MatLab/Octave), but we've not changed our minds about Java.

Kirk

Re: OpenGamma OpenHouse - May 2012 - OpenGamma

KirkWylie — Wed, 30 May 2012 13:31:52 -0000

We'd definitely love to, but as we don't have any bodies on the ground in Asia-Pac, it might take a little bit of time.

What about a Webinar and/or screencast until we can arrange an Asian tour?

Re: Conventions, Bloody Conventions! - OpenGamma

KirkWylie — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:30:27 -0000

The download is definitely an excellent place to start. Our Getting Started Guide (http://docs.opengamma.com/d... is a great place to start, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask on forums.opengamma.com (where the developers hang out on a pretty much continual basis)!

Re: OpenGamma OpenHouse - May 2012 - OpenGamma

KirkWylie — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:00:10 -0000

That's a great idea. We'll see if we can get the camera going and post something the next day (though if there are enough people in the room it might be tough to get a good sound feed). Worst case is we're working on getting some real screen casts setup on our website and those should be ready in the next month or so!

Re: The JSR-310 Experience

KirkWylie — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:35:14 -0000

I don't know of a way to determine Easter Sunday using only JSR-310. At OpenGamma, we take the notion of holiday determination as an AI-complete problem (as it's based on governments that change their mind on a regular basis) and support holiday calendars provided by specialist firms (or manually input by users). We particularly like Copp Clark data (http://www.coppclark.com/) for this purpose.

Re: Location Sensitive Posts: Do It Right, Or Don't Do It At All

KirkWylie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:53:02 -0000

Yep, that works _IFF_ you then force the Facebook app to close and then restart it. But what a messed up location for such a simple setting. What if I want Facebook to be able to selectively broadcast where I am? What if I want it to select posts I'm interested in based on my location? Who in the world chose that as the only place for this setting?

Re: Location Sensitive Posts: Do It Right, Or Don't Do It At All

KirkWylie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:25:46 -0000

Funnily, I was thinking of linking to this: http://www.youtube.com/watc... for that link.

Re: Multi-Device Sync in iMessage

KirkWylie — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:16:00 -0000

Sure. Just set your Caller ID to your phone number (which is the default) and they won't sync. I had the exact opposite problem.

Re: OpenGamma Maths Library Development Kicks Off In Earnest - OpenGamma

KirkWylie — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:36:22 -0000

Hi, Mike,

We were noticing some sporadic 404s on that link, but we can't reproduce that now. Would you mind trying again?

Kirk

Re: How to handle a VC who flies First

KirkWylie — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:02:35 -0000

Even better is an iPad. I used to loathe transatlantic Economy in no small part because the seats are now so closely spaced that you can barely open a netbook, much less my 15" MBP. The iPad has made this far more bearable, as it's easy to stay entertained and/or productive in the constraints of the Economy flying experience.

But completely agreed: it's all about the percentage of the company, as well as the air of frugality. Even at the fundraising level we've done, and our current run rate, I'd far rather be paying that money to save another month of burn, or hire an additional employee, than spend 10 hours each way in more comfort.

Re: Good VCs Don't Charge Their Companies For Flying First

KirkWylie — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:59:17 -0000

For OpenGamma travel *IS* a significant enough part of our cost structure that it's always in our cashflow projections, and it ends up being about 4th in our expense structure (after salaries and offices). Investors knew about this in advance, and agree with me that there's nothing as useful as a face-to-face meeting to lubricate the sales process.

Our travel policies were in place very early, *BEFORE* we started travelling extensively for sales (as opposed to fundraising reasons). We pay for fully discounted economy flights, and encourage employees to stay Saturday Night if it doesn't impact their family situation as the flight discount more than pays for the additional lodging (the fact that often we're flying developers to New York City doesn't hurt, as it's not a terrible place to have a free weekend). We stay in comfortable business-class hotels, and usually our lodging costs in New York are far more than the airfare. Employees can choose their own airline.

People have upgraded themselves in the past (I did it on my last trip to New York as it was a promo £115 upgrade to World Traveller Plus on BA and it was worth it to me), but that's not reimbursable.

Re: Good VCs Don't Charge Their Companies For Flying First

KirkWylie — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:54:28 -0000

Hi, Cliff,

I've had similar situations and choices. For example, since the beginning of August I've done two round-trips between London and New York, and will be doing at least 5 more this year that I know of thus far (although two of these are personal, I'm hoping to combine one with work trips). And yes, it's very difficult to maintain a good work/life balance.

I'm hoping that when we (meaning me mostly) start having to incorporate trips to East Asia into the travel regime we'll be doing enough business that I'll feel better about paying for something better than Economy in the air. Until then, though, the hustle is part of being a startup entrepreneur, and motivation to work even harder on those sales and maximize the time that I'm there on the ground!

Re: How to handle a VC who flies First

KirkWylie — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 06:14:54 -0000

Hi, Dan,

Great post. We've faced a similar issue (though not with someone trying to charge us for first class travel). The FirstMark Capital approach is great, and I've blogged about it here in response to your article: http://kirkwylie.blogspot.c...