Thread by @AlamedaTrabucco

What Alameda is trying to do still astounds me, to some degree. A tiny team -- ten people, at some points, not even triple that now -- trying to build the world's best crypto quant trading firm, and OTC desk, and MM service, all 24/7. It sounds impossible.

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1422422964557942786

Even more astounding is that we actually do it. Day in, day out, our models are still (almost) always fantastic, our quotes (almost) always live, our trades (almost???) always good. I've never seen a team as talented and dedicated as ours -- I'm not sure I've heard of one.

I was mostly expecting the team to be impressive in the typical ways -- everyone who pre-dated me and everyone we've hired since has been super smart, clearly talented, etc.

I'm blown away by how far we've pushed ourselves.

We've had months with 3 (sometimes 2) traders handling 24/7 coverage -- all on the same time zone, including weekends and Christmas. The term "10x engineer" no longer means anything to me, @nateparke was doing 10 engineers' jobs alone for a while because, hey, it had to get done.

Rather than make our lives easier as we've grown, we've taken on more -- spent countless hours optimizing models and latency, put in the hard, thankless work earning OTC business, figured out how to actually do accounting for the world's most complex balance sheet.

We made something like the world's third best 2020 election models. We launched one of the biggest yield farming operations in the world -- overnight, if I recall correctly. We've learned to navigate news regardless of language and regardless of which billionaire said it.

United by the common goal of following the money, we put in the work and tail it wherever it goes -- no matter if that means not sleeping, canceling occasional plans, or consuming a lot of coffee*.

https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco/status/1314551649323479040?s=20

This is all grueling and it's only possible for me because I genuinely love being around Alameda.

Our main trading slack channel is called #trading-floor. Our shitposting channel is called #trading-ceiling, and it's easily my favorite social media platform.

They're some of the best people I've been lucky enough to know, we're working hard on the coolest problems I've ever seen, and this space is the most dynamic and interesting in the world. Every day feels like a dream, and I'm so proud to be a part of it.