Lipi Gandhi
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Lipi Gandhi, a student from Rice Business School and I will be your host today.

In this new series, we are presenting highlights from conversations with professionals from varied fields, discussing what they find and define as beautiful in the line of work. The examples and experiences they share are both inspiring and insightful, shedding light on the fascinating projects they have undertaken. Join us as we explore reflections on beauty that range from science and engineering to various other fields.

In this episode, we welcome Viren Desai, the founder of Opti Quant Analytics, a consultancy specializing in investment risk management for energy companies. Viren started his practice in Chicago after earning degrees in Mathematical Economic Analysis from Rice University and Financial Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

We asked him how his in finance have evolved and where he first discovered beauty in his work, and here’s what he had to say.

Viren Desai
I graduated from Rice in 2010, 14 years ago now, with a BA in mathematical economic analysis. I went to work in finance. I thought that I was studying finance when I was in college, but I wasn’t. I was studying economics. So, this is sort of how green I was to the whole area. I went to work in investment banking for a few years, and then did a couple of other things in finance. I worked in private debt investing for a little bit. And then I was on the management team of an energy company, a private equity backed energy company. That was a really interesting experience. I was the VP of Finance for the company, right through the COVID oil price crash, and I’m sure you probably heard of that event. For an oil company that’s the price of your product, the price of oil is the price of what you’re selling, you know, so when it goes down to zero or negative, it causes all kinds of problems for the company. We were a small company. We did not really have the budget to hire me as an analyst. So, I was the VP, but I was also the analyst and everything in between.

In that period, the COVID craziness basically, I essentially had to do a lot of work to try and help figure out where the company’s financials were going. My workload grew so high because there was no budget to hire an analyst. So eventually, I ended up having this sort of idea. It was like a spark sort of in the in the depths of just working super late hours and trying to get all my work done. I just had this idea that, I need to program this. The work that I’m doing, it’s a lot of numbers, if I could program some parts of this, you know, that’s going to make my life a lot easier. So, I took a $35 online Python course. Basically, just learned how to do some very basic programming. So, you know, just, hey, I know that there’s a file here, I just need this thing done with this file and that’s it. That sort of turned into a labor of love. I realized that I took to programming. I don’t want to say that I was good at programming, because you know, everyone starts from zero, and then you kind of have to learn, but I took to it. And when I started to see the effect of, hey, if I just type these commands into the computer, these various things that would sometimes take me a few hours to do suddenly get boiled down to maybe minutes. That was sort of when I realized, I think, and this was almost a decade into working that I loved the specific types of problems I was solving on the finance side, and I loved using programming tools along with Excel and other things to help solve some of these problems.

If I were to think about a moment of experiencing beauty in my work, it was sort of the first time I had a set of code that kind of did at least like five or six hours’ worth of my work on any given day, and all it took was the click of a button and I built it up from scratch, like literally block by block. This was sort of self-driven. It came out of a necessity. This just being constrained and not having anyone to help me and just my workload sort of going through the roof. But as it happened, that financial model, that system that I built, started to allow me to explore other things like, now that I can program, I can look at data sources from the internet. I can sort of start to think about like, oh, what does this data look like, which I really didn’t have a skill with before that I could do it in a small way.  This suddenly opened up the door to do it in a much larger way.

And that sort of possessed me, I would say, to googling things like, how do you predict commodity prices? Like a very simple question, nobody anticipated. I certainly didn’t anticipate that oil prices were going to crash first, how do I predict this? And that sort of led me down this road that dive into mathematics ultimately. A lot of the stuff that I had at one point known in college and subsequently completely forgotten, has suddenly started to come up in my work. Things like Monte Carlo simulation, working with statistical distributions, you know, like, what are the statistics of a given distribution, those kinds of things, and I was just kind of googling these on the fly, trying to find some way to apply it to my work to make it better. And to give the company some utility out of it some predictive value out of the work, because we had 26 people in the company, and in my mind getting the answer wrong on that was potentially putting a lot of people’s livelihoods at risk. We had a team there were a lot of us trying to work on this, but my component of it was the financial side and sort of figuring out should we spend money? Should we not spend money? You know, should we go out and try to buy something because everything’s cheap now? Should we just kind of hold on to what we have? There’re so many questions that needed to be answered somehow.

Lipi
It is true. One thing leads to another when you are following your curiosity. Viren’s searches prompted more questions, deepening his interest in the finance field.

Viren
I started to get advertised these Master of Science programs, in financial engineering, etc, on Instagram, that the program that I ultimately attended, popped up. And I thought, why don’t I just click on this website and see what they teach in this program? I found it to be essentially just an organized list of everything that I was trying to Google and had no idea how.

I was learning little components just sort of haphazardly, you know, in like Google searches, because I was learning just kind of little pieces of knowledge and everything that I learned opened up more questions. Oh, my God, I don’t know about all these other things, you know that this depends on right. So, I threw in an application to this master’s program at the University of Chicago. And then lo and behold, I got admitted with 70% Merit Scholarship, which I had never received a scholarship like that in my life. And I think that’s kind of where I really just entered a field that I find to be beautiful.

It is this area that sort of blends the markets with mathematics, programming, you know, and all of it to some degree. I’m a very visual person, I have sort of done some creative things, some artsy things when I was at Rice, one of the things I love about working in the field that I’m working in, is that visualizing data becomes very important. And, for me, that visualization of the data, being able to sort of work with this data, make informative charts, or graphics, or really kind of presentations that say, I’m just starting with a set of numbers. And then, you know, I would say, like the work that I do, even though it’s under many different banners, for products and stuff like that, at the bottom of it all, I’m just kind of going into a set of unstructured data that someone needs help figuring out what to do with and I, I bring structure to it. I read it into code. I make charts. I do some calculations. I try to connect datasets up and try to like weave some kind of story around it and then I go and present it.

That’s what my company right now, Opti Quan Analytics, does. We’re a finance and strategy consultancy. We build financial models, or machine learning prediction models, for companies in the energy space, and it’s been good so far, generating a decent amount of revenue. And that’s, that’s the circuitous pathway to beauty in the work and how I stumbled upon just kind of an area that I love.

Lipi
In his world it is all about giving order to chaos and setting up systems that ensure that the clients get the information they need.

Viren
I don’t know if it is that I have a skill in bringing structure to disorder, or it’s just that I love the process so much that I probably put in more time into that aspect. I think it’s more of the latter. You know, I can probably point to things in my career that I potentially missed out on, because I spend more time like, creating that structure than maybe just saying kind of thing, “Oh, this is good enough. Let me go and do something else.” But I think with my bachelor’s degree, and what I knew coming out my Bachelor’s, I know for sure, yeah, there’s no way I would have gotten into the master’s program that I eventually got into. It’s that I think I was in a position where I had to create some structure out of a lot of chaos and that search led me down this road.

Lipi
We wondered if the way people perceive beauty in their work shifts over time and across different roles. Viren shares how and where he finds beauty in his own journey.

Viren
I think that there’s a part of this, which has to do with sort of making these processes beautiful, but I think for me, in particular, it’s a little bit more of creating connections between things that are hard to see connections between. You know, where on the surface, you say, I’ve got this data on this market, and I’ve got this data on these other variables, you know, are they connected? Is there a way that I can connect them? Is there some sort of like relationship I can glean from these such that if I move variable A, a little bit, you know, I see with a good amount of certainty what variable B is going to do. It’s kind of an open-ended problem, because it forces what I love is that it forces me to sort of think about how could these things be connected? You know, and can I program that? Can I come up with a logical flow that connects these and know, hey, this is how accurate the connection is. And this is where it sort of breaks down.

So, I think for me, it’s a little bit more of creating those connections, and allowing people to see them through code through data visualization. And I guess it to some degree when I walk someone through it, and if I can, in a few sentences, explain something that they might have been struggling to understand or say like, oh, look, here’s a few charts that gives you insight into these things. That moment of sort of insight or clarity when someone says, ah, yes, that makes sense. That feels really good. It makes me feel like, you know, complicated world that we live in, and I added a little bit of simplicity to it.

Lipi
As we wrap up this episode Viren offers insights into his field that go unnoticed by most people.

Viren
I tend to think of finance as a field that not many people love. And most people sort of work in it, because it’s like, oh, you can make good money in, you know. I think finance in general has this perception or like people that work in finance, often there’s a perception of like, you’re the money guy. But there’s a lot of poor stereotypes around that, you know, you have sort of Wolf of Wall Street kind of things, right, which, in some circles are like, admired. And in some circles, they just kind of go reviled, right?

I think that finance is as strange and beautiful reflection of human desires around the world. I think about this a lot, because finance is a field about money. And the question often bounces around in my head, maybe because of my liberal arts undergrad background, it’s what is money? You know, what is it actually? A lot of the work that I do is, in a very simplistic, very basic way, it’s kind of just reclassifications of money. There’s money coming in, and there’s money going out at the end of the day. And you’re sort of like playing with those flows. You can do it on a spreadsheet but ultimately, what’s happening, that spreadsheet is also going on in a bank account. And what’s happening in a bank account, whether it’s your personal bank account, or the government’s bank account, in some ways, is driven by what some people that have control over that account want to do. So, there’s like a very human component to everything that we see in the markets and in the whole field of finance. And it’s probably why I think behavioral economics is like the hot new area of economics. I don’t think it’s new. But you know, it’s gotten more and more popular lately. But you know, I think about this a lot. And I think that’s something that maybe people outside of finance and I don’t know, maybe a lot of people in finance also, don’t necessarily think about day to day. You know, it’s just that, like, this is human needs around the world being represented in numbers.

And I think that’s kind of what keeps me interested in the industry also. It’s kind of like, the more you think about what’s driving these numbers, like when Warren Buffett buy shares in Occidental Petroleum, what is he actually doing? He’s giving money to, like an energy company that’s going out, and what are they doing? They are producing oil and gas from the ground that ultimately gets sold and turns on our lights and powers our cars. So you start to like, follow that chain. And it’s a big circle, like it’s a big web. At some point, you kind of have to stop once you’ve explored it enough. But if you actually start to think about all of those connections, just represented a number, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. It’s like these groups of people that are sort of moving money either towards themselves or away from themselves. Right, and we are one of them. We’re in the system. We are doing the same with our own bank accounts, what the big billion-dollar companies are doing with theirs and governments are doing with theirs. And it’s all the same money somehow going around the whole world.

Lipi
Looking at numbers from Viren’s eyes who went on the path of finance to programming, to applying mathematics to chaos makes us realize that beauty is a lot about finding simplicity in things that often seem complex, and diving deeper to understand the connections to transform the world for better.

[music]

Longitude
This podcast is part of a nonprofit program that engages students and graduates in leading interviews, narrating podcast episodes, and preparing library exhibitions. To view the episode transcript, please visit our website Longitude.site

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.