3,800 PROGRAMMERS WORLDWIDE PARTICIPATE IN HACKATHON DESIGNED BY WORLD’S TOP COMPETITIVE CODERS. ADDEPAR SOFTWARE ENGINEER AND HACKATHON CO-DESIGNER SCOTT WU WINS TOP “ABSOLUTE FIRST PLACE” PRICE FOR UNESCO-SPONSORED INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIAD IN INFORMATICS (IOI).
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – August 19, 2014 – Addepar, a technology company innovating at the core of the $120 trillion investment management industry, recently paired with HackerRank to co-host an 8-hour global Hackathon. The contest, held June 27th-28th, had a record-breaking 3,800 programmers compete from around the globe, with former world champions Johnny Ho and Gennady Korotkevich among the top participants.
A team of internationally ranked competitive programmers at Addepar —
including VP of Engineering Vladimir Novakovski, and software engineers
Sreenath Are, Eugene Chen, Alexandr Wang, and Scott Wu — crafted the
eight contest challenges in advance. Of the eight challenges, six had exact
answers, while the remaining two had no perfect answer, which required
contestants to create the best possible solution they could imagine.
A competitor from Latvia, Alexey Zayakin, won first prize by scoring a total 786 points. Zayakin will travel to Mountain View this month to visit the Addepar team and have dinner with Joe Lonsdale, Addepar’s co-Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. Over 40 top-ranking programmers, including Zayakin, are in talks with Addepar about software engineering roles in connection with this contest.
“Addepar is proud to challenge some of the world’s best coders to solve the most foundational technology problems in finance,” said Addepar CEO Eric Poirier. “Our entire team shares a passion for bringing Silicon Valley innovation to this critically important market. We empower the smartest and most demanding investors to make informed, data-driven decisions at scale using technology that just works. This HackerRank contest helped us share our mission globally, and connect with many gifted engineers who have what it takes to make a huge impact.”
Immediately following the HackerRank contest, Addepar’s own Scott Wu traveled to Taiwan, where he won “Absolute First Place” in the 26th International Olympiad in Informatics. Wu achieved full marks in record time, completing the challenges in a total of five hours. Wu is also notably ranked #1 in the United States in TopCoder and Codeforces, other top competitive programming venues. He joined Addepar and its list of internationally recognized programmers in May 2014 because of the “tough challenges to work on and a strong, friendly community.”
The International Olympiad, officially sponsored by UNESCO, is the academic counterpart to the Olympic Games, and is hosted once a year for informatics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other fields. IOI has over 80 countries participating, with each country selecting a team of four pre-college students. Incountry competitions are extraordinarily fierce; for example, over 100,000 students compete for the spots in China alone.
Vladimir Novakovski, Addepar VP of Engineering, said, “given our ambitious mission of transforming finance, Addepar’s extraordinary engineers do some
of the most exciting and best work of their careers here. We made a point to
include finance-specific challenges in the HackerRank contest to give
participants a sense for the problems we solve. The resulting level of interest
has been remarkable.” Addepar’s world-class engineering team has
experienced developers from companies like Facebook, Quora, Palantir, Adobe, Box, EMC, VMware, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, as well as
some of the best and brightest up-and-coming engineers.
About Addepar
Addepar is the financial operating system designed to bring common sense and ethical, data-driven investing to our financial world. Addepar handles all types of assets in any currency so investors and advisors have a clearer financial picture at every level, all in one place. With customizable reporting, financial advisors can visualize and communicate relevant information to anyone who needs it. Secure, scalable, and fast, Addepar is purpose-built to power the global financial system. With offices in Silicon Valley, New York, Chicago and Salt Lake City, Addepar works with more than 200 single and multi-family offices, wealth advisors, large financial institutions, endowments and foundations representing more than $500 billion assets under management. Learn more at addepar.com