Ask HN: Why is there no buzz about Kensho?

7 points by v3gas 9y ago ↗ HN

I've read several interesting articles about Kensho, e.g https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html.

Fortune has deemed Kensho as one of the top 5 most interesting Fintech companies. Yet every time a link has been submitted here there has been almost no activity.

They seem to be doing some interesting work, replacing a lot of the researchers on Wall Street.

Any thoughts? Anyone here work there?

4 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] thread

miguelrochefort 9y ago ↗

- What they're doing is the norm.

- Nobody knows about Kensho.

JPLeRouzic 9y ago ↗

Maybe because --at the moment-- automatizing jobs is only profitable for very costly jobs, like those of traders.

Or maybe because companies are worry of those "glitches" that we see in financial industry (like yesterday) where hundreds of billions may disappear in a fraction of second.

Or maybe because it is easy to replace an employee that does not fit the job, but it is very difficult and costly to quickly find an alternative to a subpar automatized process costing hundred of millions.

lucozade 9y ago ↗

Hard to get excited about puff pieces. If they released some detailed info about their tech (seems unlikely) then that would probably draw some interest here.

I'd also take the "replacing a lot of researchers" with a pinch of salt. It's currently very wise to sell tech to Wall Street as a cost saver in addition to being a revenue generator. Flogging nebulous headcount reductions in N years where N is greater than the budget cycle is not exactly a novel technique.

As this article was written 18 months ago, I'd expect to be seeing significant reductions by now if their predictions are accurate. Unless Kensho is claiming credit for Brexit, the evidence seems to be lacking.

whvv 9y ago ↗

Hi! Happy to answer any questions. We are also starting to ramp up our public technology presence by contributing more of our tools to open source and starting an engineering blog. https://blog.kensho.com/latest

Stay tuned for more updates over the summer.

Additionally, Kensho recently closed a $50m Series B from a consortium of the six largest global banks, as well as Google. We are growing rapidly (in Harvard Square, NYC and DC) and are looking for exceptional engineers to complete our team.