David Siegel

Siegel has spoken about encouraging employees to branch out from their daily work at Two Sigma, taking on outside engineering challenges and coding competitions. In May of 2019, a Two Sigma team competed in the inaugural New York City FIRST robotics corporate challenge after setting up a temporary robotics lab in its New York office.

Siegel supports employees contributing to the company’s Data Clinic, which uses the pro bono model to connect Two Sigma data scientists on a project basis with the social sector. In a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund, the Data Clinic data scientists used public data on inspections of oil and gas wells to develop predictive models that could be used to send inspectors to higher risk sites.

Siegel received Institutional Investor’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.

In 2017, Siegel Family Endowment made a total of 50 grants to organizations including the New York Hall of Science, Mozilla Science Lab, and Jobs for the Future. More recently, Siegel Family Endowment has made commitments to CSforALL, and the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing and the Aspen Institute.

In 2017, Siegel received the Golden Plate Award by the Academy of Achievement for his pioneering work in technology and investment management. The same year, Siegel was named to “The Bloomberg 50: The People Who Defined Global Business in 2017.”

In 2016, Siegel received the FIRST organization's John C. Whitehead Leadership Award in honor of his service and support for the science and technology education charity's New York chapter.

In 2014, Siegel co-founded the Scratch Foundation to ensure that Scratch, a free online coding community that helps children learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively, remains free and accessible to kids all over the world. As of October 2018, the organization's official website showed more than 40 million projects shared. He is Vice Chairman of the Scratch Foundation.

In 2011, he founded the Siegel Family Endowment, which supports organizations that help prepare society for the impact of technology. The endowment funds organizations including the Center on Rural Innovation - which brings digital job training, computer science education and entrepreneurship centers to rural areas — and Data and Society – a research institute that examines the social issues that can arise from pervasive technology.

In 2001, Siegel co-founded Two Sigma, a New York City-based company that applies data science and technology to financial services. Siegel has stated that he believes investment managers that take a scientific approach to investing – by using machines, data, and artificial intelligence – have a distinct advantage. Two Sigma now manages $60B assets globally, and has offices in New York, Houston, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai. It employs approximately 1,600 people — two thirds in research and development roles, with science and math backgrounds, including about 250 people with Ph.D.s.

After leaving MIT, Siegel worked alongside Jeff Bezos at D.E. Shaw & Co and became the company's first Chief Information Officer. During this time he founded FarSight Financial Services, the first integrated personal financial services website. FarSight performed the first retail stock trade on the Internet and was acquired by Merrill Lynch. He later served as Chief Technology Officer and Managing Director at Tudor Investment Corporation. In 1999, Siegel founded Blink.com, a web-based browser bookmark storage, organization, and sharing service that automatically searched for new sites related to users' existing bookmarks.

David Mark Siegel (born 1961) is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He co-founded Two Sigma, where he currently serves as co-chairman. Siegel has written for Business Insider, The New York Times, Financial Times and similar publications on topics including machine learning, the future of work, and the impact of algorithms used by search and social media companies.

Siegel was born in 1961 and spent his early childhood in the Bronx, New York and focused on computer science at a young age. By 12 years old, he had built memory and logic boards and learned to program a supercomputer at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. As a freshman in high school, he taught a programming course to high school students at an NYU summer program.