John Henry "Fawce" Fawcett Jr. (born 1977) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded

Tamale Software SS&C Advent (formerly Advent Software) is a business unit of SS&C Technologies. Advent Software was founded in 1983 by Steve Strand and Stephanie DiMarco. DiMarco served as president and CEO until June 2012, at which point she stepped down and w ...

and Quantopian. He was the CEO of the latter.

Early life and education

Fawcett was born in 1977 to Ann Fawcett (née Fuller), a nurse, and John H. Fawcett, Sr., a carpenter, business owner, and math teacher. He grew up in

Lowell, Massachusetts Lowell () is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of ...

, in the Pawtucketville neighborhood, with his parents and elder brother, Todd Fawcett. Fawcett and his brother worked at the family business, John H. Fawcett & Sons, until graduating from college. He attended the Ste. Jeanne d'Arc School through the 8th grade, before graduating high school at Phillips Academy. He graduated ''cum laude'' with an AB in Materials Science at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 1999, and married Caitlin Jones Madera in 2001.

Career

After college he was a programmer for Scient, on a video coding project, and an analyst and programmer for 033 Asset Management, a

hedge fund A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as s ...

. In 2002 he co-founded Tamale Software, which developed software for fundamental stock analysis. In 2008, Advent Software acquired Tamale for $28 million and shares in the company. He founded Quantopian in August 2011. It aims to create a

crowd-sourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

hedge fund using a two-sided market for freelance

quantitative analyst Quantitative may refer to: * Quantitative research, scientific investigation of quantitative properties * Quantitative analysis (disambiguation) * Quantitative verse, a metrical system in poetry * Statistics, also known as quantitative analysis ...

s (algorithm developers) and investors (algorithm users). By 2015, Quantopian had raised about $24 million in investments from

Spark Capital Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. Hi ...

Global Electronic Trading Company The Global Electronic Trading Company (GETCO), or Getco LLC, is an American proprietary algorithmic trading and electronic market making firm based in Chicago, Illinois. In December 2012, the firm agreed to acquire Knight Capital Group; this me ...

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successf ...

, Wicklow Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and others. Quantopian stopped operations unexpectedly at the start of 2020, and Fawcett and his cofounder Jean Bredeche joined Robinhood.

Publications

Writing for ''Wired'' magazine, Fawcett posits that Quantopian can also be used as a MOOC-like platform for higher education.

References

External links

Fawcett's blog postings
American technology chief executives Living people 1977 births Harvard University alumni Phillips Academy alumni 21st-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1970s-stub