Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. Maybe there's a non-compete or something. Nicholas Lovejoy and another Princeton grad joined the firm, MacKenzie Scott Tuttle. That's what we were referring to of Jeff falling in love at D. E. Shaw in more ways than one. Jeff and MacKenzie would get married. I think technically, MacKenzie was the first Amazon employee. Yes, it's interesting. I don't know technically in terms of literally, was she the first person to become a W-2 employee, but certainly, she was already doing work, particularly in accounting, working with legal, and setting up the operations of the business before Jeff hired Shel Kaphan who was the first engineer, the first full-time hire other than he and MacKenzie. Yup. MacKenzie was definitely an employee doing work on the business. Within D. E. Shaw, like you said, they're this quant trading firm—that's how they make their money—but they view themselves as being entrepreneurial, starting these other businesses, and doing stuff. David has Jeff working on a bunch of this stuff. The first project he leads is building out what they call the third market business. It was an idea to create a separate market from the exchanges where retail investors could trade without paying. At that time, you're paying a lot in commissions to your brokerage house. It's super cool.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.