Keeping Kids off the Street: Wall St. vs. Startups
New York is now the #2 startup hub in the country and rapidly rising; however, single most consistent reason given for NYC’s failure to nurture a culture of innovation is Wall Street: it sucks engineers in, drains them of their creativity, and stuffs them with so much cash they can never be “lean” again. This panel includes people arguing against Wall Street as a force for good, people arguing for Wall Street as a natural career path to startups, and people working to “keep kids off the Street” (i.e., keep engineering students from joining Wall Street hedge funds and I-banks).
Presenters
Chris Wiggins is co-organizer of hackNY and an associate professor of
applied mathematics at Columbia University. His research focuses on
applications of machine learning to real-world data. This includes
inference, analysis, and organization of naturally-occurring networks;
statistical inference applied to time-series data; and large-scale
sequence informatics in computational biology. Prior to joining the
faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU and earned his
PhD at Princeton University. He originally moved to NYC in 1989 to
attend Columbia. Since 2001 he has also held appointments as a
visiting scientist at Institut Curie (Paris), the Hahn-Meitner
Institut (Berlin), and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
(Santa Barbara). At Columbia he serves as the faculty advisor for the
Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) as well as the
Application Development Initiative (ADI). He was awarded the
Avanessians Diversity Award in recognition of his work enhancing
diversity in departmental, school, and university programs at Columbia
in 2007. He has served as a mentor during each of the Techstars NYC
programs.
Associate at OATV.
Managing Partner of IA Ventures. Invest in businesses that create, leverage and extract value from massive amounts of data. I love my start-up. Blog at Information Arbitrage. Baseball coach. Indie music fan.
Zach Sims is the cofounder and CEO of Codecademy, the easiest way to learn to code. The startup, which launched in August of 2011, has taught more than a million people the fundamentals of JavaScript. Codecademy is backed by venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and more.
Zach dropped out of Columbia University to start Codecademy and has previously worked at drop.io (sold to Facebook), AOL Ventures, and GroupMe (sold to Skype).
Saturday, March 10
