Got up super early to go to my old company offices to see a talk by their new(ish) CTO where he talked about disruptive technologies. As I thought, he is super cool and super smart, with Ph D in gravitational ohysics and Max Planck Institute on his resume. People like that who make you believe that anything is possible, and that you can be a part of making it happen. Somehow, I have yet to meet anyone like that in this company.
I feel for him, thinking about applying revolutionary ideas, but shackled by Dodd-Frank on one side, and besieged by having to respond to the exponentially-increasing attacks and security concerns on another.
One thing that I took away from it that I thought was interesting is Symphony – a social network for banks that’s reg-compliant and secure. And not Bloomberg. They acquired it and are fully backing it, but it’s not a part of them. And oh yes, they will roll it out to other banks and the data that will come out of there will certainly be interesting.
Also, an interesting and intriguing development that he thinks is important is blockchain . He thinks that it is already going beyond its Bitcoin origins, and in 5 years we all will be using it to move money around the world. Maybe I should stop ignoring it and hope that it goes away, and start reading about it.
I also learned that CD is 74min long because it was a hack to accommodate Bethoven’s 9th in D-minor.
But I didn’t meet anyone (except a few guys I had 5 minute chats with), or got anyone’s business card. And that was my main goal of being there. I suck at schmoozing.
tinfoilparachute 