YC Root AccessThe Startup Powering Billions In Trades Every Day
CHAPTERS
OneChronos explained: atomic multi-stock trades on a new exchange
Jared introduces OneChronos as a new stock exchange already handling a meaningful slice of U.S. equities volume. The core promise is letting institutions execute complex, multi-leg strategies as a single “all-or-nothing” trade to reduce risk and slippage.
Co-founders’ early bond: tinkering, hacking, and long-term trust
Kelly Littlepage and Steven Johnson describe meeting in middle school and staying close through high school and beyond. Their shared curiosity about computers (and occasional trouble) built the trust that later made co-founding easier.
Auction theory roots: engineering better economic outcomes
Kelly traces a key intellectual seed to studying economics under auction theorist Preston McAfee at Caltech. That experience reframed markets as computational design problems where mechanisms can be engineered for better outcomes.
From hedge funds & cybersecurity to a market-structure insight
Their professional paths—Kelly in trading/hedge funds and Steven in cybersecurity—converged on a shared diagnosis: modern electronic markets resemble distributed databases with latency-driven anomalies. This led to the early goal of designing an exchange resistant to “latency race” conditions.
The long road to commitment: 2011 ideas → 2016 full-time → 2022 launch
The founders outline a timeline that looks like an overnight success but wasn’t: early conceptual work began around 2011, they went full-time in 2016, and launched in mid-2022. They also discuss an early YC rejection that forced sharper MVP thinking while still aiming for a “do it right” launch.
Two deep-tech problems: fast optimization + making combinatorial auctions usable
What started as a single hard engineering challenge became two: scaling optimization to real-time market constraints, and translating a foreign mechanism (combinatorial auctions) into something traders could adopt. The second problem—productizing and explaining the model—was as critical as the math.
How trading works today vs. OneChronos: beyond price-time priority
Steven contrasts the standard limit order book model (price-time priority) with OneChronos’ approach, which emphasizes price and volume while deprioritizing time except for auction admission. This difference required extensive regulator education and a rethinking of “fairness” and matching logic.
Regulatory gauntlet and operational reality: mission-critical details
Building a regulated exchange meant navigating a large set of non-obvious operational constraints alongside the core technology. The founders describe everything from formal approvals to mundane requirements (like proving they could print in-office), plus cost-saving automation choices.
Cold start: winning early liquidity when there’s no volume
Even with approvals and tech in place, the exchange had to solve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem. Early participants connected despite no liquidity because they believed in the mechanism’s advantage and valued being first movers with clients.
Launch story: from ~200 shares to a real growth curve
They recount the first production trades in late June 2022, which were mostly connectivity and pipeline validation. Meaningful commercial activity began to accelerate toward late August/September, forming the early “hockey stick” adoption pattern.
Staying power: “people said we were right, just impossible”
During six years before real traction, skepticism wasn’t about correctness but feasibility—printing a trade and bootstrapping liquidity. Their motivation came from conviction in the mechanism, repeated validation from experts, and a commitment to solving the problem rather than “starting a startup.”
Combinatorial auctions 101: exposure problem and “ships passing in the night”
Kelly explains why combinatorial auctions emerged (e.g., FCC spectrum auctions) and how complements/substitutes create inefficient outcomes in sequential auctions. Applying this to finance, OneChronos lets traders express true portfolio intent, reducing exposure risk and improving trade discovery.
A new trading ‘API’: multi-symbol orders with constraints, built by a small team
The founders describe OneChronos as changing the fundamental interface of trading from single-symbol orders to portfolio and constraint-based instructions. They also share the company’s engineering-led culture, a small-team philosophy, and a talent mix from non-finance engineers to veteran market-structure builders.
Future scope: beyond equities—any market with complements, substitutes, and constraints
They argue smart/combinatorial markets generalize to many asset classes and even real-economy markets where current exchanges can’t express non-price factors. The conversation ends with GPUs/compute as a vivid example of a fragmented market that fits the same mechanism-design toolkit.
Career decision: leaving high-paying paths, minimizing regret, and building for Wall Street
Jared prompts a discussion on the opportunity cost of leaving lucrative quant/tech roles. The founders emphasize preparing financially, choosing a problem you deeply care about, minimizing regret, and adopting a “critical systems” engineering mindset where you can’t ‘move fast and break things.’
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