Ah, Google Finance. Something close to my heart. In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after fini

Ah, Google Finance. Something close to my heart. In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after finishing a stint as Citigroup Investment Bank's Chief Architect. I used Google Finance to track my personal portfolio, and I had always wondered about using the scale of Google to make Google Finance a competitor to Bloomberg and Reuters. Someone reached out to me and asked me to interview for the position of "CTO of Google Finance", and I jumped at the chance. First interview was with Phillip Brittain, who was the new Head of Product of GF, having come from Bloomberg. The interview went great ... a complete meeting of the minds as far as where we wanted to take GF. Then I was invited in for the normal in-person Google interview process. I did well enough on my second round to be asked back to do the whole-day set of interviews. The interviews were really fascinated ... a lot of system design questions. But when I described some of the solutions in terms in terms of some of the platforms that financial companies use (ie: Tibco EMS for messaging), I was told by the interviewers to not bring them into my domain. Funny enough, ove rthe two days of interviews, not a single person asked me a question about Google Finance or what my vision was for GF. After several weeks, I heard that I did not have enough support of the Hiring Commitee to be hired. I was a bit puzzled, because I though that I knocked the interviews out of the park, but I went back to my job at Citadel and stayed there until they dissolved the investment bank a few months later. Google never hired anyone for that position. Several years later, a Googler that I knew confided to me that I did not get the job mostly for the reason that Google had quietly decided to sunset GF ... or, at least, reduce its capabilities. No desire for a Bloomberg killer. What a shame. I still think of what I could have done with GF given the scale of Google.