We would like to introduce ourselves, so you can get to know the people behind this platform. Why did we create this platform? What is our background? Has trading always been a passion of ours? Have we been through trading interviews? Read about our personal stories below.
Tolga Celebi
It was the year 2013 in which Douwe and I met each other. At that time, we were both pursuing a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology. We met at the study association, where we organised social- and educational events. We often discussed to start on various projects together, which also laid the foundation for us to collaborate and create this platform.
While finishing my bachelor’s degree, I realised that the aerospace industry wasn’t the industry in which I wanted to grow further. I love numbers and maths, but something was missing. That was the moment that I decided to start with a pre-master programme in econometrics and working at the Rabobank as a quantitative credit risk modeller. I wanted to learn more about the financial industry. It was also the year in which I started trading with cryptocurrencies, which laid the foundation for a new hobby of mine. I realised that this was something that gave me a lot of energy, so I became passioned about trading.
During my final year for a master’s degree in econometrics, I started preparing for the upcoming trading interviews. I had no idea where to start, so I started to look all over the internet for more information on how to prepare for the interviews. This took a lot of time, because I wanted to be very well prepared. After having a clear overview of all the relevant topics, it again took a lot of time in order to find exercise material of good quality. There were tens of different websites that all contained a small amount of content that helped to prepare. That was also the first time when I realised how nice it would have been if there was one central platform that got everything that I needed.
After landing multiple final round interviews, I found a great match with a trading firm in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It was a company that is currently going through a growth process, which I was keen to witness from close-up. While waiting for the kick-off of the trading class with the new junior traders, Douwe and I decided that it was time to work on this platform. This platform will especially be helpful to students with a technical background, since they have the least of an idea what they would have to face and what the trading industry is about. These days, trading firms are more focussing on recruiting technical students. We want this platform to become a main hub for both students and companies – which will save a lot of time and effort for both the students and companies.
Douwe ten Brink
Trading Interview was the perfect opportunity for me to combine two things that I’ve always liked to do during my time as a student: building websites and building new stuff. My passion for building websites started at the secondary school and continued during my time at the university. I created several try-outs, and eventually I started building websites for work.
After secondary school I pursued a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, where I met Tolga. We had a lot of common interests and trading was one of them. I got in touch with cryptocurrencies in 2016, which is where my passion for trading started. This led to developing several trading algorithms, for example using Twitter sentiment analysis.
After graduating with a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, specialising in control and simulation, I started as a Data Scientist at Adyen. Adyen is a payment service provider from The Netherlands with key customers such as Ebay, Uber, Netflix and Spotify. I learned a lot about payments, software development and got to see first-hand how Adyen grew to one of the unicorn companies of The Netherlands.
After a couple of years, an old passion of mine grew up. I’ve always wanted to work on something new. It could be a start-up or a scale-up, but I really wanted to witness and work on the growth of a starting company. Even though I had a really great time at Adyen, I needed to change my scenery. This was when I had a chat with Tolga, which played the foundation for this platform. It was exactly what I wanted, because we had to build this from the bottom up.
From the point that the website was online and operating well, I also started at Delft Offshore Turbine (DOT), a start-up innovating in the wind turbine sector. I still have more than enough time to work on the website and I am happy to witness the growth of both my own company with Tolga and the developments of DOT. This platform is meant to be the main hub for both students and companies and we will work hard to achieve our goal.