Jamming Out to AfroTech

A lot can be built from behind a desk. Nowadays, entire businesses can operate without anyone ever occupying the same room. A band can even record an album that way, but a recording session and a jam session are not quite the same thing—and that distinction is a large part of why I’m getting on a plane to Houston for AfroTech this year.

Technical coordination can happen almost anywhere but chemistry hits different in person, and this is coming from someone who has worked remotely since the pandemic. Some of the most useful conversations I’ve had at work were never sheduled. A question in a hallway, a conversation over lunch, or someone mentioning something from their field that unexpectedly changed how I thought about mine. So, for a few days, I’m leaving the desk at BRIG in search of the kind of intellectual chemistry that still seems to require people to be in the same room together. Apparently, at least in my experience, progress still benefits from a little serendipity.

AfroTech offers something different from just another place to see and be seen. It brings together people working on model evaluation, data infrastructure, and distributed systems, all of which are problems that intersect at the corner of what BRIG is working on. In fact, some of the people most relevant to what BRIG is building may not think of their work in the FinTech space at all. An engineer studying turbine failure patterns may see signal, noise, and system stress differently than a financial analyst. And that’s precisely the point; for a firm being built around questions that sit between disciplines, AfroTech seems like a particularly useful room to be in if we want to “build what’s next.”

The timing matters too, as BRIG has crossed a Rubicon of sorts. The research has matured enough that the bottleneck has shifted toward engineering, pushing us across a threshold where ideas increasingly have to become working systems. That means translating models into infrastructure, connecting independently designed components, and deciding where automation should end and human judgment should begin.

We’ve now reached the stage where getting on a plan for that kind of intellectual chemistry has become less of an indulgence and more par for course. As for who I hope to meet, titles are probably the least interesting way for me to answer that question. I’m on the lookout for people who think laterally, and those comfortable holding competing ideas at the same time. More generally, I’m interested in speaking with anyone who has gone deep enough into a subject matter to develop a genuine point of view and who can defend that point of view without requiring everyone else in the room to agree.

For builders, BRIG has increasingly strange engineering problems. If making systems do things they were not originally designed to do sounds fun, I suspect we would have something to discuss. For the quants, BRIG has no shortage of assumptions worth challenging, models worth pulling apart, and problems that demand more than a clever equation. And for those who think about institutional design, I’m particularly interested in how an investment business built around proprietary capital should be structured today without constraining what it may need to become tomorrow.

As for what I’m bringing to the cookout, it’s probably the way I evaluate and build systems, a lot of cross-domain thinking, with a side of technical expertise in econometrics. I’m also coming to Houston with actual questions. One that has occupied a disproportionate amount of my attention lately is deceptively simple: When does a shock stop being a shock? Markets are constantly absorbing wars, policy changes, technological shifts, resource constraints, and the lot. Any one of them can move price. What interests me about disruptive markets is the point at which a disturbance stops being temporary and begins changing the market that absorbed it.

So, if you’re going to be in Houston and any of this sounds like your kind of conversation, come find me. Bring an idea, a question, a problem, or, probably best of all, a point of contention. Let’s compare notes and see where the conversation goes.

Résumés optional.