This January, I left my job as a trader at Jane Street (most recently in Hong Kong) to take a role leading a project at the FTX Foundation. I have positive things to say about Jane Street as an excellent place for many of my friends to work, and my open offer of thoughts and advice to anyone hoping to work there remains, well, open.

Looking forward, I'm thrilled to be working with the Foundation because I want to help build a better future. I've been interested in thoughtful, rigorous, altruistic attempts to improve the world since 2013, and pledged in 2016 to donate at least a tenth of my income to the most effective organizations I can find. I am beyond excited to find an opportunity where I estimate I'll do even more good than I could by earning and donating a quant trader's salary (which I still think was really, really good for the world, on any objective scale).

It's still early days here, and we don't yet know all that the things the Foundation's work will cover. To start, colleagues of mine just launched the Future Fund, a grantmaking initiative with the goal of improving the lives of future generations in highly levered ways. The launch blog post, Areas of Interest, and Project Ideas pages give a taste of where the Future Fund has set their sights, and I'm extremely excited about the possible ways their work can go from here.

For my own work, I'm not working on grantmaking or the Future Fund directly. Rather, I'm currently heads-down on an in-house skunkworks moonshot to make the world safer against catastrophic pandemics. (More on that later.

I've finally left the environs of Cambridge to do...whatever comes next...in New York City. I really enjoyed my time at Harvard and was truly sad to see the community of friends that I'd come to love go their assorted and separate ways, but on a personal level, it was time. So I'm glad to be moving on to the next thing.

One piece of "the next thing" is that I'm beginning work as an trader at Jane Street. It's an amazing company that I'm incredibly excited to be returning to full-time -- one of the most intellectually stimulating environments I've found anywhere, with a double helping of diverse and varied day-to-day projects and a culture of social trust, intellectual humility, and collaborative truth-seeking.

In many (great) ways, I feel like I'm starting college again -- my days are long and full, all of my work is interesting and new, and once again I feel like I'm out of my depth and running flat-out to keep up. Coming from the place of comfort I had reached at the end of college, it's certainly a pleasant change.

Incidentally, we're already hiring summer interns for both trader and dev roles, so if you want to work with some of the most clever, intellectually curious, and deeply thoughtful people I know (plus me), do drop me a line, and I'll be happy to chat, answer questions, or just point you at the application.

(1)

However, my employer is emphatically not the reason that I've been negligent about writing in the last month. The only explanation for that is