Happy 2019!
This time last year, Molecule had just moved into a new office, and our team was preparing for what promised to be another big year of company growth. 2018 did not fail to deliver. We did not fail to deliver. It’s always great to look back at the plans you had for a year and see how well you did. Here’s what we expected from 2018.
So what actually happened?
When 2018 began, we had been serving exchange-trading customers for several years, with some exposure to bilateral markets. Our team in Houston consisted of a handful of developers and a small support/implementation team.
In January, Paul Kaisharis joined our team as SVP Software Engineering. We also welcomed new hires to our dev and sales teams. Molecule now has a team of 16 – developers, project managers, implementation & support analysts, team leads, and more – supporting trading in bilateral crude, gas, chemicals, and electricity markets. Our deal volume has risen significantly, as has the diversity of our user count.
Our development team has stayed busy with many software updates, 24 in total. Here’s an overview of our software update process. We use this to push updates live approximately every two weeks -- with more stringent QA testing than typically seen in the industry.
- Connectivity to multiple ISOs for downloading a variety of products
- Custom fields on trades
- The ability to use an IR curve to mark options
- The ability to batch generate reports/invoices/etc.
- A new P&L feature, currently in Beta, for YTD/MTD/QTD leg-level P&Ls
- APIs for uploading trades, additional filters, and more
- Improvements for bilateral trading, such as better options support, strike interpolation, and VaR
- Lots of new FCM reconciliation functionality, including supporting new banks, multi-bank reconciliation, and the ability to generate trades from a statement
- Many performance improvements, such as our “fast lane” for exchange-trading customers, UI-related performance improvements, and chunking for large uploads.
The team (primarily Sameer and Dustin) attended several conferences. You may have spotted them at E-World (Germany), Platts Digital Commodities Summit (US), ComRisk (UK), ETOT (UK), or FIA (US). Sameer spoke at several of them, and the team led workshops at ComRisk and ETOT -- all focused on risk management and the cloud.
In Q4, we launched a new logo and website. If you follow Molecule on LinkedIn, you may have noticed the animated version of our logo. Please follow the Molecule LinkedIn page for industry news, company announcements, and tech tips.
Throughout our changes over the past year, we’ve remained committed to our core values. To that end, we were proud to have signed the Amicus Brief fighting against prejudicial immigration policy. This policy issue is a critical one to Molecule and our customers, because diversity is simply a given in our industry — and it’s core to what we believe about America, our home. We took a stand because it’s that important to us, and we hope to see a change for the better in the years to come.
We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on our product, and our roadmap, as well – and 2019 has lots more to come. We’ve had/are having many conversations with customers about our roadmap, but here are some highlights:
- A specific focus on boiling down common issues/requests – and fixing small usability issues, system-wide. First up are the Trade entry process and the Trades screen.
- Finishing our v2 API – which should allow for much faster, more granular interactions with Molecule.
- Reworking our Confirms workflow. We’ve received lots of feedback on our v1 features, and now have a good sense of what would work well for most companies.
- Clearer, more flexible decomposition of spreads & swaps, and less-noisy support for hourly power.
- Continuing work on our physical logistics features.
With that, we wish you and yours a happy, safe, healthy, and wonderful 2019!
P.S. By the way, another awesome highlight is that three(!!!) of us got engaged in 2018.