Kensho employees learn, share, pitch, compete and have fun at virtual KenshoKon event
In October, Kensho hosted our annual all-hands conference, but — like many things in 2020 — this year KenshoKon looked a bit different. Teams came together to host a conference with a focus on creativity, interactivity, team building, and inclusion. Read on to check out the highlights of the week.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) team:
We kicked off the week with a session from the DEI team. DEI at Kensho is led by a team of 9 people from across the company and is supported by a network of over 20 Active Allies.
The DEI team led a conversation about Kensho values of “Go Team!”, Inclusion, Empowerment, Open Communication, and Pursuit of Excellence, and addressed specific ways we can change our daily work habits to make Kensho a more diverse, equitable and inclusive place to work. With interactive polling throughout their presentation, the team asked audience members a series of questions, including what each of the Kensho values meant to us personally, which sparked thoughtful discussions and reactions from the team. The discussion ended with a call to action around commitments each of us can make to support diversity, equity, and inclusion at Kensho.
Fireside Chat with Martina Cheung
On Monday afternoon, Martina Cheung, the President of S&P Global Market Intelligence, sat down with Adam Broun, CEO of Kensho Technologies, for a fireside chat where they discussed a range of topics, including Martina’s background and role at S&P Global, challenges unique to 2020, collaboration between MI and Kensho, and several DEI subjects, including the impact of the pandemic on women and caregivers as well as plans for a increasingly global approach to S&P’s diversity initiatives.
Engineering Sessions
The technical team planned several engineering-focused events, including a lively game of “Kensho Bingo,” where small teams raced each other to solve technical issues and puzzles.
Imagine seeing the following challenge on our Kensho Bingo card. Would you dig right in to solve this, or try to get a different three in a row?
[Kubernetes] An application is deployed on the test cluster under kensho-kon namespace. It has a public ingress (which means your team can reach it when on the Kensho VPN). We notice that some requests to this web application are receiving errors (HTTP 502 error responses; try opening the link up a couple of times to see in your browser’s Console tab).
Your goal is to find out the underlying cause of the errors. We are seeing request logs on the ELB, so investigation should look into Service and Deployments on the Kubernetes cluster. The LinkerD dashboard shows traffic stats of the application and object can be seen with the command:
kubectl — context test.kube.kensho.com -n kensho-kon get po,deployment,service,httpproxyThe week also included a leadership panel discussion about how engineers and product managers can work together to manage a healthy tension to drive customer-centric product and service development.
Shark Tank
The week’s marquee event was Kensho Shark Tank, which featured 10 Kensho teams pitching new product ideas to an audience of employees and “Sharks,” who asked questions and provided constructive critiques for the teams’ ideas.
The Sharks included three executives from S&P Global, CFO Ewout Steenbergen, Chief Product Officer Warren Breakstone, and Chief Public and Government Affairs Officer Courtney Geduldig, as well as “Circling Sharks,” Kensho employees who rotated into the Shark position for each round. We even had two of the Circling Sharks perform their duties in actual shark costumes!
Each project had five minutes to pitch their idea, which was followed by a Q&A session with the Sharks. The projects received written feedback both from the Sharks and the audience members, and several of the pitches are already moving forward as R&D ideas.
All employees were invited to submit pitch ideas, and the 10 selected spanned a huge range of topics, including targeted ML features that could be added to existing services, completely new concepts, ideas based on serendipitous discoveries, and new visions and markets for Kensho’s technologies.
Several of the pitches were recognized with special awards, including:
- Kensho, but make it Bio, by Kalea Gore, which explored the idea of using Kensho products and services in the fields of science and medicine.
- CEO Lie Detector, by Yuliya Dovzhenko, which looked at anomalies in the speech patterns of executives in earnings calls when reading from scripts versus answering questions (shown in the above image).
- Data Extraction is Doomed, presented by Chester Curme, which looked at the future of data extraction.
- Question Answering, by Vadym Barda, which included a live demo with Shark participation, and focused on integrating question answering technology into longer documents.
Team building and fun
Company culture is important to Kensho, and we made an extra effort to find ways to connect employees throughout the KenshoKon week, despite being remote. We hosted a virtual game night with fast-paced mini games and rotating teams, held a group lunch with random “lunch table” assignments and Uber Eats credits for all employees, and a virtual Halloween costume party with families. All together, despite being separated physically, we came together as Kenshins to have fun, interact creatively, continue to build our company culture, and shape the direction of how we’ll move forward together.
