Everyone is talking about San Francisco as the epicentre of everything in crypto. Well, I wanted to shed lights on Europe and how exciting the ecosystem is. This section aims to give the opportunity to present some of the best 🇪🇺 founders. Most people love their products but don’t know who are behind them.
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Background: Emmanuel and Tim are the most savvy crypto traders based in London that I know. I’ve followed them long time before they were featured in and launched one of the most recognised source of data and . Enjoy.
Hi Emmanuel and Tim, you launched earlier this year Skew which has become the go-to website for anyone interested in data on options and derivatives in crypto. However, only few people know who is behind this brand, Can you share a bit about your background?
We actually first met in 2009 during an interview for an internship at UBS. Back then it was quite difficult to even get an internship as the Lehman crisis was hitting everyone very hard — we both managed to get the job though!
We both graduated from the French business school HEC in 2011 and started our career in equity derivatives that year — Tim worked at UBS and Citi and Emmanuel at JP Morgan.
We were also flatmates for two years — all in all, we know each other quite well!
How did you get into the and industry?
We both felt it was time for a new challenge after a number of years on the floors. We thought the last cycle was really all about the rise of the technology sector and surprisingly we haven’t seen much of that feeding into finance. It’s really with the speculative mania of 2017 that we got interested in what is and realised technology had the potential to disrupt finance.
Emmanuel was first to pull the trigger and joined to help the company setting up their operations. Tim left Citi last summer and this resulted in starting skew. at the end of last year.
What is the vision of Skew? What makes it special compared to your peers?
We see cryptos as this incredibly open and sometimes chaotic environment which gives us an unprecedented opportunity to build and bootstrap very robust capital markets infrastructure. We want to use the full force of technology — the latest cloud technologies and open source softwares — to revisit most of the very outdated process we had to deal with in our previous jobs! Cherry on the cake, we believe as an asset class has tremendous potential.
On competition, a lot of people are much better than us when it comes to cryptos or derivatives taken separately. We are trying to develop unique expertise when it comes to cryptos and derivatives taken together!
Who is your target audience?
We plan to work with funds and corporates by bringing them the right derivatives instruments to navigate the volatility of markets. This process starts with a comprehensive venue to monitor derivatives markets which you can now access on our website —
What are you thoughts on the crypto European ecosystem?
We feel great about building our company in London — there are many great companies out there in Europe, from early stage projects like us — Quanterium, Argent, Copper — to more established businesses like B2C2, Deribit or Bitstamp.
Anything to add?
Thanks for having us
Published at Mon, 20 May 2019 12:05:24 +0000
