Wes McKinney is a Nashville-based software developer and entrepreneur. After finishing his undergraduate degree in mathematics at MIT in 2007, he went on to do quantitative finance work at AQR Capital Management in Greenwich, CT. Frustrated by cumbersome data analysis tools, he learned Python and started building what would later become the pandas project. He's now an active member of the Python data community and is an advocate for the use of Python in data analysis, finance, and statistical computing applications.
Wes was later the cofounder and CEO of DataPad, whose technology assets and team were acquired by Cloudera in 2014. He has since become involved in big data technology, joining the Project Management Committees for the Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet projects in the Apache Software Foundation. In 2018, he founded Ursa Labs, a not-for-profit organization focused Apache Arrow development, in partnership with RStudio and Two Sigma Investments. In 2021, he cofounded technology startup Voltron Data, where he currently works as the Chief Technology Officer.
