The Hudson River Trading engineer who quit to build children's toys
Working in electronic trading opens up a lot of doors, but some are much more unusual than others. Ben Hansen spent six years in the sector, working across Headlands Technologies and Hudson River Trading (HRT). Latterly, he was a tech lead that helped set up HRT's credit trading business. Now, he spends his time developing toys for children.
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Hansen left HRT in 2022 to found Boppo, a screen-free tablet that provides 40 different games and activities using ten buttons. It was inspired by his experience working at home with a one-year-old child for HRT during COVID; "If I was on the computer working late, he'd come over and start clicking the keys with me," he said. Hansen, who was a manager at the time, missed being an individual contributor, so he learned electronics and circuitry to put Boppo together. He told us he "enjoyed being an absolute beginner again."
There are some surprising similarities between Hansen's work at HRT and his current work at Boppo. The tablet uses a microcontroller instead of a CPU to be price-competitive, which comes with "a lot of memory constraints." Boppo's software is written primarily in Rust, with "some C and C++" to address that issue. Hansen said that the focus with Boppo is more on performance than latency, as the tablet only needs to be as fast as human perception, but performs a lot of tasks simultaneously.
One of the biggest differences is user experience, which is "very different" for a child compared to a trader, who will often optimize their screen by a matter of pixels to deal with high information density. Boppo has a stripped back interface that guides children to certain tasks through sound and lighting.
Work-life balance is very different for Hansen today. He told us he's "working later nights here than I ever did for HRT... the peak stress is way more, but there are times when there's less stress." Working in a startup means, as the adage goes, that Hansen is wearing many more hats, which has been a challenge "because I found out like I'm really not good in a lot of other areas like marketing."
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