Why Culture is Key
Typically, entrepreneurs seek three things: changing the world, financial success and creating a unique organization that will last for decades. The opportunity to shape a company’s culture, values and treatment of its customers is one of the most exciting elements of joining a startup early. When I decided to join Wealthfront in 2007, I saw… Read more
Wealthfront Lean Startup talks: Why Fighter Pilots Run Startups by Steve Blank
We’re excited to have Steve Blank in our next Wealthfront Lean Startup event on February 18 at Wealthfront HQ in Palo alto. Steve’s talk “Why Fighter Pilots Run Startups” will be about why startups are not small versions of large companies. Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, founding and/or part of 8 startup companies… Read more
Test-driving your Javascript for fun and profit
With web-based UIs growing more complicated everyday, testing your Javascript code is just as vital as testing any other part of your stack. At Wealthfront we use jsTestDriver to provide test-coverage of our javascript code. We like its similarity to JUnit and the ease with which it integrates with Hudson. In this article we’ll drum… Read more
Quantifying Investing Skill: The Information Ratio
Quick, which manager is better? Manager A who consistently beats her benchmark by a full percentage point, or Manager B who sometimes beats the benchmark by as much as five percent, but who also can underperform the same benchmark by that same five percent? It’s not an easy question to answer. The difficulty lies in… Read more
The Amazing FunctionMap!
FunctionMap is a handy class that allows a set of object transformations to be mapped at run time without having to define a bunch of extra interfaces and without having to evaluate the transformations at the time the mapping is created. Suppose we have an object: class NumberPair { double a; double b; } and… Read more
Ruby Modules
There are two common usages for modules in Ruby: namespacing and mixing in. An example of namespacing can be seen in the Math module: Math::PI # 3.14159…. Math.log10(100) # 2.0 Mixing in a module will extend that class with additional constants and methods. Here’s an example where we’ll create our own module and mix it… Read more