Vishal Talasani

Vishal Talasani

Founder, engineer, quant.

Quant Finance

  • Global Equity Quant Fund (2020 - 2022)

    Started a small quant fund that was acquired by a larger fund, Dark Forest Tech. Designed and implemented the full tech stack. Was responsible for 5 bps of US equity volume.

  • Bridgewater (2019 - 2020)

    Was a Quant on Bridgewater's ML Investment team, called the "Disruption Lab". Worked on a variety of asset classes.

  • Daily Fantasy Hockey (2019)

    Was briefly one of the best in the world at DFS Hockey. Built a discrete optimization that exploited top-heavy prizes.

Distributed Systems

  • Stride (2022 - 2025)

    Raised $15m+ to build infrastructure for blockchains. Stride is the primary liquid staking protocol in the Cosmos ecosystem. At peak, had $200m+ in TVL.

  • Basis (2018 - 2019)

    Was employee #9 at Basis, one of the first decentralized stablecoins ($135m raised). I worked on modeling a distributed Federal Reserve.

Reinforcement Learning

  • AlphaGammon

    Trained an RL model to play backgammon, inspired by AlphaZero. This model is substantially different than existing BG models (which are all TD-Gammon variants). Achieved PR of ~20.

  • BluffArena

    Eval framework for testing models' ability to play bluffing games, like poker.

For Fun

About Me

  • General

    Married to my high school sweetheart, Nisha. Have a cute puppy named Hobbes. Based in NYC.

  • Favorites

    Books: LBJ Series by Caro, Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Dinniman.
    Movies: Good Will Hunting, Remember the Titans, The Social Network.
    Games: Poker (2-7 NL SD), Backgammon, Dune.

  • Education

    UChicago 2018 (BS Math, BS Stat, BA Econ). TJHSST 2014.