Rudy · 2020–2024
Rudy was a regulated investment platform for private investors. Customers completed onboarding and suitability, deposited money and invested into managed portfolios combining digital assets and DeFi strategies.
I co-founded the company and led the product across the customer experience, investment logic and the financial infrastructure underneath it.
The product
What customers could do
What the product connected
My scope
I connected what we sold to the customer journey, investment logic, provider choices, pricing, economics and the transaction behaviour underneath it.
Business and product
Led the product and connected the proposition to the customer journey, provider choices, pricing and economics.
Investment logic
Built much of the Python behind suitability and portfolio recommendations, including automated rebalancing from portfolio rules through execution.
Transaction behaviour
Investigated transaction behaviour in SQL and, where useful, implemented and tested production changes with engineering review.
Engineering boundary
Engineering owned production architecture and code quality across the platform. My production contributions were selected and reviewed.
Financial correctness
01
Reservation
Once money had been committed to an investment, we reserved it immediately rather than letting the rest of the product behave as though the customer could spend it again.
The interface state and the economic state had to agree.
02
Reconciliation
Estimates made the journey legible. The customer’s balance still had to be derived from what executed and settled.
Expected
Actual
I worked directly on production changes for settlement matching, allocation differences and invested balances.
03
Traceability
Evidence
Internal state · provider ID · raw webhook · transaction hash
Question
What definitely happened, what are we still waiting for, and what can safely happen next?
Recovery
Retry · replay a webhook · repair state · compensate
Some of these problems were easier to understand with the database or codebase open. I investigated them in SQL and, where useful, implemented and tested production changes with engineering review.
Earlier chapter
Rudy began with a DeFi product for professional investors. It reached the market, but distribution depended on other people and we had limited direct customer access.
We stopped investing in that model and used the remaining runway to build the regulated retail product instead.
Boundaries
I led the product and many of the major business decisions. I designed substantial parts of the underlying behaviour and contributed selected production code.
Engineering owned the production architecture and code quality. The platform was the work of a team.