One of the six managing directors who have comprised the executive committee of D.E. Shaw since 2002 is retiring.
Stuart Steckler, a managing director of D. E. Shaw & Co. who oversees the group’s finance and operations activities as chief administrative officer, will leave the firm at the end of June, according to a spokesperson at the firm.
The firm has no plans to replace the 54 year-old. Rather, the other five managing directors will divide up his functions.
The departure will not impact the firm’s investing functions.
The quantitative-driven hedge fund firm was founded in 1988 by David Shaw, who taught computer science at Columbia University after receiving his Ph.D from Stanford. Shaw envisioned the hedge fund firm “as essentially a research lab that happened to invest and not as a financial firm that happened to have a few people playing with equations.”
In 2002, he handed responsibility for day-to-day activities to a group of six managing directors who comprise the executive committee — Steckler, Anne Dinning, Julius Gaudio, Louis Salkind, Max Stone and Eric Wepsic.
D.E. Shaw currently manages $26 billion and has about 1,100 employees.
Steckler joined D.E. Shaw in 1989 from the New York accounting firm of Oppenheim, Appel, Dixon & Co., where he was a partner. At the time the Brooklyn native, who has a degree in accounting from the City University of New York’s Queens College, had gotten a call from a friend who had seen a job posting for a CFO with a then-fledgling hedge fund. It seems the newly married Steckler had told his wife about the job but said he was too busy to consider it. She urged him to go on the interview anyway, figuring it would be good practice, and Steckler wound up chatting with David Shaw for about three and a half hours.
“I was wiped out at the end,” Steckler told Alpha magazine in 2009. “David laid out the foundation for how he was thinking of building this company. While it might not necessarily be in my nature to take big career risks, generally, it seemed like I had no choice but to roll the dice and join this start-up.”
Steckler has been a member of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s Capital Committee, and has developed and taught courses on stock brokerage accounting, auditing and regulatory topics for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and other industry organizations. He is president of the board of trustees of the Saddle River Day School.
