Stockfighter

» see stockfighter.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Stockfighter gave you an API key and a stock exchange. Not a quiz about stock exchanges and not a simulation with a progress bar, but a matching engine with a live order book your program placed orders into and got filled against. The first level asked you to buy a single block of stock. A few levels later the job was to work out from the tape alone which participant was trading on information nobody else had, and then to trade against them. There was no leaderboard of right answers. You wrote a program, pointed it at the exchange, and either the balance went up or it did not.

The company behind it was Starfighter, announced by Patrick McKenzie on 9 March 2015 in a post that took 932 points on Hacker News, and run with Thomas and Erin Ptacek under the registered name Ketchup Salt, LLC. The business idea was the interesting part. Hiring screens out most good engineers because the screen measures interviewing, so Starfighter would build games hard enough that finishing one was evidence, then sell introductions to companies who wanted whoever had finished. The games were free. The employers paid.

Stockfighter went public on 11 December 2015, after a summer of building both an exchange and an AVR microcontroller emulator for the second track. The launch page said, in the house style, "We're live! Howdy Internets!" It took 549 points. By the following May around forty thousand people had signed up, and roughly ninety percent of the client roster was software companies with the rest in finance. On 2 September 2016 Thomas Ptacek tweeted that they were winding Starfighter down.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the exchange that was not there ~

What made the game unusual was the refusal to fake anything. The documentation was an API reference. The errors were the errors a real venue returns. People who had never worked in finance wrote blog posts about discovering slippage by losing money to it, and people who did work in finance played it at their desks. The second track, Jailbreak, was a capture-the-flag against emulated embedded hardware and went live on 16 June 2016, so the same company was running a trading simulator and a hardware security trainer at the same time with three people.

I was in the audience for this one and never in the pipeline. Anyone could play from anywhere and the levels did not care where you were sitting, but the introductions at the other end went to companies hiring in the United States. For an engineer in Ankara the game was a game and the business model was somebody else's.

~ what it cost to build ~

McKenzie wrote in May 2016, while the company was still alive, that if he had a do-over he would run a plain recruiting company for two or three months on personal networks and zero lines of code before building anything. Instead they went into what he called hard-core dev mode for about ten months. He was explicit in the same thread about the two numbers he would not share, placements and revenue.

The year-end post that December filled in the rest. The business side never started humming in time. He had taken on around a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of debt, much of it on credit cards, at roughly three thousand dollars a month in interest, to keep going through August. He also wrote that Stockfighter was the coolest and hardest engineering he had ever been part of, and that he felt very sad when it vanished from the internet.

~ the order of the dying ~

The servers went before the announcement did. The last archived capture of a working stockfighter.io is 9 August 2016, with a few static pages answering until the 22nd, and the wind-down tweet came on 2 September. People spent months afterwards opening threads asking what had happened, in October 2016, in February 2017, in March 2017. Meanwhile the company's own homepage at starfighters.io froze on 3 September, byte for byte, and kept telling visitors until May 2018 that great developers are hard to find and that Starfighter knew how to find them.

~ nobody ever wrote the postmortem ~

In October 2023, seven years later, somebody asked on Hacker News whether a Starfighter postmortem had ever been published. Ptacek answered: "Nope. There's a lot of stuff I've meant to write!" He and Erin Ptacek had gone on to found Latacora, and McKenzie joined Stripe a week after the wind-down to work on Atlas. What survives of Stockfighter is a scatter of player write-ups and an idea that keeps coming back every few years without ever quite paying rent.

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