Interview with the founder team of Ephod
It’s FUN!
It’s fun to learn new information and face different challenges everyday. What else could be more fun than working in a startup?
I love to work with top talents with diversity and be fun together. I dream to create that working environment.
— Peter Zhou
Q1.What does Ephod Technology do?
Ephod Technology takes advantages of both quantitative analysis and fundamental research to bring in the best result. We use multiple automation strategies to deliver trading signals from daily big data analytical pipeline. Ephod Intelligence is our first product. It is a quantitative research platform for money managers.
Q2. Can you introduce yourself a bit? What did you do before establishing the company?
Peter Zhou
To form a world-class team with talents and to create a multi-national business have always been my dream. I built my first startup in Hong Kong providing music streaming on app during 2009–2012.
I joined KKBOX as an engineer and led a full function product team of 50+ people providing B2B platform service when I left. Brian, Ava and I discussed about starting a new company in the future when we joined NTT Data together in 2020. Our motivation was to look for customer demands in the 2B market at that time. We took actions and started Ephod in 2021/2.
Brian Huang
I’m a problem solver, a software builder, and a passionate retail investor. I helped my teams to generate efficient code and products. I blindly invested in US stock market at night as a hobby. Now I apply quantitative investment methodology in my Asia stock portfolio.
Ava Chen
I worked engineering jobs in various fields. Software engineering has always been mysteriously attractive to me from day one to this day. I love to be involved in mind-blowing ideas although it could be painful in the beginning. Constant context change grants a sense of achievement to me. As the only engineering major student taking literature class back in college, I always find it enjoyable in observing conflicts and coherences among multiple professional areas.
Q3. What’s your role in the company? What do you do?
Ava Chen:
I am the head of Data. I build cloud infrastructure for the company as well as data sourcing and purchasing. I make sure our software runs with the best efficiency and the lowest cost.
Brian Huang:
I work with analysts, traders and engineers to design the next generation of quantitative analysis product which could automatically generate trading signals. As a problem solver, I help the team to break down big challenges into small pieces. And I help everyone focus on the most important things.
Peter Zhou:
I generate ideas: ideas of product, ideas of business, and ideas of new opportunities. I read news, talk to people, and try all the ideas that is beneficial to the business. I facilitated the team to do whatever it takes to make the ideas work.
Q4. What’s the feeling of working together in the past 2 jobs and start up a new company together?
Ava Chen:
We came from very distinct backgrounds. When I look at us, it was a weird thing because there was absolutely no similarity in place. We all have multiple identities. But the set of our identity groups does not overlap. Because there was not much to chat about on the dinner table, so we work the work as our togetherness. We would conduct in rather fierce conversations on different aspects on our work and conclude with logic means as the end of our conversations. Like or dislike does not seem important in the conversations. We talked about facts. For the past two years Peter has thousands of mind-blowing ideas on daily basis. Brian has an argument for everything. I mend and build. It amazingly worked out. Everything is mind-blowing and explosive these days. Directions are being altered for the best solution constantly. I saw an eye-opening future ahead of us.
Brian Huang:
Although we co-worked for a long time, there are still plenty of fights. With enough trusts, the fights always lead to something meaningful. The directions are constantly changing but we always try to work towards the best resolution.
Q5. What’s the biggest challenges you are facing?
Brian Huang:
The hardest thing is to translate qualitative views into quantitative languages. I need to understand how traditional analysts work that I could transform real-world problems into engineering todo-list. I also need to make sure our ideas could be automated and are scalable. It is truly challenging and interesting to me. We have a talented engineering team. I trust our team to generate the best analytical results if quantitative goals are clearly defined.
Ava Chen:
Data not being static is the biggest challenge. Data can be periodically altered and corrected without notice. Data could be different among different vendors even though it is claimed to be the same. It is due to distinct formulas and timeframes used by distinct vendors; they have different translation of data. ETL should be smarter than a process to retrieve data in fintech. Financial statement, for example, is subject to change without prior notice. Stock price could be corrected much later than the day of it report. The best solution would be to keep multiple data source for cross-reference purpose and to adjust our automation according to the nature of the data. Our infrastructure is designed to respond to small changes quickly since it is a constant improving process.
Peter Zhou:
The biggest challenge is to attract top talents to catch up with our growing speed. Quantitative finance is not new. However, with advancement of cloud computing and machine learning technologies, we need to attract talents who embrace modern technologies to build great products.
We bring almost infinite computing power to money managers and make data more accessible to our users by providing automated analytics tools.
In 5–10 years, I expect not only fund managers, but ordinary people will utilize Ephod’s tools to analyze complex big data to interpret the financial world.
— Peter Zhou
