My Work
📊 Professional Career
I work at the intersection of data, markets, and technology. Here are a few things I’ve done:
🚀 Founded Quandl, a SaaS-enabled B2B marketplace for data. We pioneered the category of alternative data for finance, changing the industry along the way. Quandl was acquired by Nasdaq in 2018 in a successful and substantial exit.
📈 Early employee at Simplex Asset Management, a quant hedge fund. I built one of the bond market’s first algorithmic trading systems, and headed US investing and operations for Simplex before retiring in 2007.
🎓 Studied Engineering Physics at IIT Bombay, India’s top technology school. While there, I helped set up India’s first campus data network, and won a bunch of awards, mostly for extra-curriculars and leadership.
🗞 Media
My work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, Quartz, the Globe and Mail (Canada) and many others. You can see a full list of articles here.
🎯 Board Roles
I have served on and continue to serve on startup and private company boards. Typically, these roles leverage my deep knowledge of data businesses; my expertise in capital markets; my experience as a successful generalist founder; or some combination thereof.
I’m availabe for additional board roles if the fit is right.
🧭 Consulting
I am an expert consultant on the topic of data, especially as it pertains to capital markets and financial services. Topics I regularly advise on include:
💱 Data advantages and using data to generate alpha
👩💻 Designing, building and scaling effective data organizations
🏗️ Modern data infrastructure and technical approaches
🤖 LLMs and the ML-AI-Data stack.
🏭 Managing data teams, processes, platforms and operations
🚚 Specific datasets, commercials, usage and opportunities
☑️ Expert evaluations and diligence on data-related ventures
🏛️ Best practices in quantitative and quantamental investing
🛰️ Alternative data and untapped sources of edge
🛠 Transitioning from qualitative to quantitative methods
⛷ Staying agile at scale via people, processes and technology
🔢 Data and API business models and the data ecosystem
My clients are typically institutional investors: hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, venture capital firms and private equity firms. Read more on my consulting page.
🎤 Speaking
I’m an experienced public speaker; my talks range from high-level keynotes for generalist audiences, to extremely concrete, actionable seminars on specific topics in data, markets and technology.
Recent seminar venues include asset managers Winton, OTPP, CPPIB, UBS and Franklin Templeton; conferences include Strata, AI Trading, Princeton Quant, and Montgomery; and tech events include Toronto City Hall, TechTO, SaaStock, and the Toronto Stock Exchange. You can see a full list of talks here.
I welcome opportunities to speak at your organization or event, and have a number of (original, unique) presentations I can give, on a wide range of topics.
📧 Contact
The best way to contact me, about board and advisory roles or about speaking engagements, is to email me: at@abrahamthomas.info.