Enron story
Enron was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 in Houston, Texas. It started in energy, commodities and services. The company filed for bankruptcy on Dec 2, 2001 while employing about 20,600 staff with a revenue of $100B in 2000. Enron scandal was the biggest audit failure.
John Arnold was born in 1974 and growed up in Dallas Texas. He graduated in 1995 from Vanderbilt University with a degree in math and economics. He was former Enron executive. He made three quarters of a billion dollars for Enron in 2001 and was awarded a bonus of $8 million. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012.
When Enron filed for bankruptcy, Citadel interviewed seemingly everyone in the trading operation, all functions at all levels. Their intent was to reverse engineer the business and I (John Arnold) wasn’t going to help them. They knew that people looking for a job, particularly if they didn’t have a fiduciary responsibility to a current employer, would be very free with info. Interview everyone and you get a 360 perspective of the industry, how the business makes money, its competitive edge, who the best employees are, etc. Citadel probably interviewed several hundred Enron employees. In the end, they maybe hired 5. Much more importantly, they built the framework for how to enter the energy business, which, as Ken notes below, has been an enormous success.
I (John Arnold) ended up building my own firm starting with traders and hiring deep fundamentals expertise. Citadel started with the research (as is their DNA) and built up a trading operation around it. Both models worked fabulously well. I came away from the experience with an even deeper respect for both Ken and Citadel and remain friends with him to this day. I started with a niche, gas trading, built a niche fund and burnt out after 17 years. Ken started with a niche, convert arb, and built one of the most successful financial firms ever and has never tired.
Ken Griffin from Citadel hired the entire leadership of the quantitative research effort at Enron. UBS bought the business except for the research team. They had made $30 billion in commodities since then. UBS shut the business down.
Kenneth Griffin was born in 1968 and is a hedge-fund manager and investor. He is the founder, CEO, co-Chief investment officer, and 80% owner of Citadel LLC. Citadel was founded in 1990 with assets under management of $4.6 million.
bloated software
Ken Thompson: Software slows down at the same rate that hardware speeds up.
more code means more vulnerabilities. what causes bloat? generally a lack of vigilance and discipline. layering. dependencies. bloat is inevitable, but can be costly, even dangerous. It is a fact of life in the software world. Avoid unnecessary dependencies and verify the ones you do have.
Rob Pike: It has become infeasible to understand how our software is constructed, and how to maintain it safely. This is a consequence of how code is built today.
nazis
A. R. Moxon: Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. ** That word is “Nazi.” Nobody cares about their motives anymore. ** They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?
travel
在更少的地方待更长的时间，远比把时间花在一堆地方好得多。你更应该放慢旅行的速度，多休息。旅行最难忘的时刻 —— 与陌生人的交谈、被邀请参观、发现隐藏的地点 —— 通常发生在你停下来的时候。
Youth is wasted on the young
Why pretend to be smart and play it safe? True understanding is rare and hard-won, so why claim it before you are sure of it? Isn’t it more advantageous to embrace your stupidity/ignorance and be underestimated? In research and academia, success often goes not to the one who understands first, but to the one who understands best. Even when speed matters, the real advantage comes from the deep, foundational insights that lead there.
When you approach work with humility and curiosity, you learn more and participate more fully. Good collaborators value these qualities. A beginner’s mind is an asset. Staying close to your authentic self helps you find your true calling.