Had a Jane Street interview in 2014
Round 7. Interviewer says 'meet me at Washington Square Park, southwest corner, 2 PM.'
I show up. He's playing chess with a guy who's clearly hustling tourists. Interviewer's losing badly.
Without looking up he says, 'Take my position.'
I sit down. The chess hustler looks at me and grins. 'Your boy owes me $40. You covering his position?'
I look at the interviewer. He nods.
'Assume the debt,' he says. 'Now optimize.'
I study the board. I'm down a queen and two rooks. Completely hopeless.
'This position is unwinnable,' I say.
'Correct. Now make it profitable.'
'What?'
The chess hustler is getting impatient. 'You playing or what, kid?'
The interviewer slides me a $20. 'Market make this game.'
I'm confused. 'How do I market make chess?'
'Bid-ask on the number of moves until checkmate. Hustler takes the under, you take the over. Spread is your edge.'
I look at the position again. Maybe 8 moves max until I'm mated.
'I bid 12 moves, offer 15,' I announce.
The hustler laughs. 'I'll take the under on 12 all day.'
'Done,' says the interviewer. 'You're now short volatility on a deterministic outcome.'
Three moves later I'm checkmated. I owe the hustler $40 plus my $20 bet.
'How confident were you in that 12-move bid?' the interviewer asks.
'0.95,' I say, because that's what you always say.
'0.95 huh?' He chuckles. 'You just sold insurance on the Titanic.'
He stands up. 'The real trade was shorting your confidence and going long on the hustler's experience. You missed the obvious hedge: offering chess lessons to tourists at $25/hour while the game played out.'
'But I don't know how to play chess well enough to teach.'
'Exactly. That's called selling vol you don't have. Very Jane Street.'
Offer rescinded. Reason: 'Failed to recognize that the park itself was the market and the pigeons were the only rational actors.'"
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before.
At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000 ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine.
I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed.
Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are
- Tether ($90M profit/emp)
- Hyperliquid ($80M profit/emp)
and on revenue:
- Valve ($50M/emp)
- OnlyFans ($37M/emp)
- Craigslist ($14M/emp)
- Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate)
- OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate)
For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.