The 2014 Tech 50: Gaurav Suri

< The 2014 Tech 50: Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Cloud

19
Gaurav Suri
Head of InformationTechnology andSoftware Development
D.E. Shaw Group
Last year: 21

Some firms are reluctant to centralize development for fear that it will slow innovation. “On the one hand, centralization is good because you don’t have people doing duplicate effort,” explains D.E. Shaw Group’s Gaurav Suri. “On the other hand, it in some ways increases your distance from the business.” As head of information technology and software development for the New York–based multistrategy hedge fund firm, Suri, 43, has sought to strike a balance by implementing a “federated structure.” His team of more than 450 technologists develops software and systems for middle- and back-office functions and trading infrastructure shared by all of D.E. Shaw’s investment businesses. Suri’s group speeds up the time it takes the businesses to get new ideas implemented by providing sophisticated quantitative research tools and prescrubbed data. “It is a lot faster for them to be able to plug in some of their forecast ideas and do all the research and backtesting they need to figure out whether the forecast is good,” says Suri, who worked at Bell Laboratories before being recruited to D.E. Shaw in 1996. “The fundamental guiding principle today is to increase the idea-to-implementation velocity.”

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The 2014 Tech 50

1 Dave Cross	1	3 IAN CURCIO 2011	4 FayFoto/Boston	5 Teri Pengilley
Thomas Secunda Bloomberg	Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange	Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.	Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments	Lance Uggla Markit
6	7	8 Photographer:Charlie Simokaitis	9	10 Mark McQueen
Robert Goldstein BlackRock	David Craig Thomson Reuters	Phupinder Gill CME Group	Anna Ewing NASDAQ OMX Group	R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group
11	12	13	14	15 Christopher Elston
Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures	Dan Mathisson Credit Suisse	Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings	Michael Spencer ICAP	Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
16	17	18 Todd Plitt	19	20
Joe Ratterman BATS Global Markets	Dominique Cerutti Euronext	Ron Levi GFI Group	Gaurav Suri D.E. Shaw Group	Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
21 Larry Lettera/ Camera 1	22	23	24 XT	25
Lou Eccleston S&P Capital IQ	Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets	Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings	Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings	Antoine Shagoury London Stock Exchange Group
26 Production	27 Wayne R. Martin	28	29 Thorsten Jansen	30 Adam B. Auel
Christopher Perretta State Street Corp.	Kevin Rhein Wells Fargo & Co.	Peter Carr Morgan Stanley	Hauke Stars Deutsche Börse	Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp.
31	32	33 Paul Elledge	34	35 Stephen Brashear
David Gershon SuperDerivatives	Chris Corrado MSCI	Joseph Squeri Citadel	Tanuja Randery BT Global Services	John Bates Software AG
36	37	38	39 Photo Credit: Kevin Irby	40
Gary Scholten Principal Financial Group	David Gledhill DBS Bank	Simon Garland Kx Systems	Cristóbal Conde FinTech Innovation Lab	Jeff Parker EidoSearch
41	42 Jeff Smith Photo	43	44	45
Kim Fournais & Lars Seier Christensen Saxo Bank	Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates	Tyler Kim MaplesFS	Jim McGuire Charles Schwab Corp.	Jim Minnick eVestment
46	47	48 tomohisa ichiki	49 David Poultney	50 A.E. Fletcher Photography
Steven O’Hanlon Numerix	Sebastián Ceria Axioma	Yasuki Okai Nomura Research Institute	Niki Beattie Market Structure Partners	Mas Nakachi OpenGamma