Who is Victory Lap?

At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, Victory Lap is just me, Scott Rich.

Why "Victory Lap"? It's a reference to the final lap of a race, where one is celebrating their victory. I've been in the technology industry for over 40 years, built some cool stuff, made a lot of good friends, and I'm going to enjoy my victory lap. GPT 4 and I came up with this early one morning last January, along with the logo.

I thought you retired?!?!?

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in..." (Thanks Nano Banana!)

I did retire from Two Sigma at the end of 2024, after ten years at Two Sigma and a previous 27 at IBM. But I found myself spending more time than ever reading AI and ML papers and playing around with AI tools and frameworks. I realized I didn't want to be on the sidelines for this exciting stage of our industry.

So I created Victory Lap, with vague intentions of finding fun work to keep my fingers in it, while also padding the retirement funds.

It took about two weeks before I was having lunch with what became my first and so far only client: KX Systems.

What do we do?

I spent the last 25 years working on platforms of various sorts, from Eclipse to IBM's Jazz Platform to Two Sigma's alpha research and trading platform. In my role as Head of Architecture at Two Sigma, I was responsible for technology selection across the firm, and for our overall approach to Architecture. Along the way, I led the activities to extend the platform to the Cloud (first Amazon and later Google) and their embrace of generative AI capabilities. This led to detours helping define our Individual contributor career path, as well as our approach to TCO and how it drives technology choices.

I've really enjoyed the change of scenery, applying this experience and perspective to KX's technology portfolio. I'm not actively seeking additional engagements, but am open to interesting problems, especially applying AI to them.