The Moon and Pandas: Wes McKinney's Legendary Story
Just as death and taxes are inevitable, so is pandas for quants — everyone has to deal with it eventually. And Wes McKinney is the creator of pandas. One of the most successful Python libraries of all time, pandas almost single-handedly carved out a space for Python to survive and thrive.
Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence tells the story of Charles Strickland, a wealthy London stockbroker who gives up his life and family in pursuit of art and beauty, moves to Paris, and lives a poor but defiantly fulfilled life as an artist, ultimately leaving behind countless paintings and winning worldwide renown.
The moral of the book is this: don't spend your life searching for sixpence on the ground and miss the moon overhead. Finance and the quant world are full of restlessness and vanity. Many chase fast money, but easy come, easy go — in the end they are left with nothing.
Strickland, a finance man of the early 20th century, saw through worldly vanity and devoted himself to art. Although his later life was materially less comfortable than before, being able to do what you love is happiness.
The story of Wes McKinney we are introducing today echoes Strickland's in many ways. Except that Wes McKinney went without income for only a very brief period before quickly finding professional success.
Wes McKinney graduated from MIT and later earned PhDs in both mathematics and statistics from Duke University.
He joined investment manager AQR in 2007. A giant with around 1,000 employees and more than $140 billion in assets under management, AQR provides alternative and traditional investment vehicles for institutional clients.
While at AQR, a huge amount of foundational data analysis and statistics was still done by hand in Microsoft Excel — extremely tedious and inefficient work. So starting in 2008, Wes McKinney began developing pandas, choosing Python as his implementation language.
Source: pandas logo
At the time, Python was not yet a popular language for data analysis and statistics, but Wes McKinney soon made it popular. In a sense, pandas played the role of kingmaker — although Python's rise to its current dominance would still need the tailwind of AI to truly soar.
Pandas was a huge success, but that created a problem: Wes McKinney's spare time was no longer enough to meet development needs. So, like Strickland, he left the finance industry (and dropped out of school — it seems every successful American entrepreneur needs a dropout story) to focus on pandas full-time.
Pandas is open source and initially brought in no revenue. Wes McKinney lived off his generous savings from his previous job plus consulting work. During this period, he also published a book called Python for Data Analysis, which earned him some royalties.
With the success of pandas, the following year Wes McKinney recruited two colleagues from AQR to explore startup opportunities for Python and pandas in finance. He and Chang then co-founded DataPad.
Today, pandas is jointly maintained by more than 2,500 contributors. Wes McKinney is no longer involved in day-to-day pandas development. But the community has granted him the honor of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL), with the final say over the future of pandas — just as Guido has for Python.
In 2016, Wes McKinney co-founded the Apache Arrow project, now the leading format for sharing scientific data across programming languages. Arrow is still an open-source project, but Wes McKinney proposed the idea of a non-profit industry consortium, successfully bringing in Two Sigma (the well-known quant investing giant) as a sponsor, followed by Nvidia, Intel, Bloomberg and other large companies, supporting a distributed team of six full-time developers.
From AQR to a career centered on promoting open-source data analysis and data science tools, Wes McKinney made a spectacular pivot. He now leads Ursa Labs, using his reputation to secure funding to keep open source and innovation moving forward.
Compared with sitting in an office counting greenbacks day after day, he clearly enjoys life in Nashville, Tennessee more, because his goal is to add something good to the world: do as much good in the world as I can.
Wes McKinney's story is a legend, and his success offers a model for newcomers looking to enter finance: you don't have to step into the arena yourself as a gladiator fighting for money. Solving the industry's software pain points may be an easier path to success. The world is not short of quant researchers, but there will only ever be one creator of pandas and Arrow.
If you keep your eyes on the moon, you will at least be bathed in its radiance — a light that far outshines sixpence.
Finally, a small bonus from Wes McKinney.
If you want a book on pandas, there is no doubt that no book is more authoritative than Python for Data Analysis! Because it was written by the creator of pandas himself, Wes McKinney! The book is now available as an open-access web edition. Readers can click here to read it. Updated in April 2023, it now covers pandas 2.0.
