About Time Seventeen
We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events.
The world contains a large class of risks that determine where capital flows yet have no price today. Global supply chains are being reconfigured, while the geopolitical discount rates that inform consequential decisions remain difficult to quantify. Time Seventeen is building tradable synthetic indices and term structures for these risks.
Time Seventeen is infrastructure for geopolitical risk and catastrophe risk. We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events. Our ambition is to turn fragmented judgments about individual events into continuous risk prices, then bring those prices into institutional valuation, trading, and risk-transfer workflows.
Our work connects event definitions, probabilistic forecasting, market data, index methodology, and execution infrastructure. We explore how prediction markets, actuarial models, insurance and reinsurance structures, and blockchain-based DeFi can contribute to a common language for uncertain outcomes. The challenge is to make risk legible across different horizons, exposures, and market participants, while keeping assumptions and limitations explicit.
Building this infrastructure requires more than a compelling forecast. Data must be traceable, events must have defensible resolution rules, methodologies must survive scrutiny, and products must account for liquidity, basis risk, operational resilience, and applicable legal constraints. We want institutions to be able to understand a risk price, challenge its construction, and assess how it relates to the exposure they actually hold.
We are building a focused team across research, engineering, markets, and risk. We value people who can move between deep specialist work and the practical decisions needed to build a company: identifying the important question, testing an approach, communicating the evidence, and carrying the result into a usable system.
About the role
Build the index, actuarial, insurance, and reinsurance foundations of Time Seventeen as a hands-on co-founder with company-wide responsibility.
This is a founder role for someone who wants to build a business around pricing risks that conventional markets struggle to express. You will lead the connection between event probabilities, synthetic index methodologies, term structures, and the exposures institutions want to understand or transfer.
Your primary focus will be indices and risk transfer, including actuarial modeling, insurance and reinsurance use cases, exposure mapping, and institutional adoption. You will also share responsibility for prediction markets and DeFi strategy with the other founders. We expect a builder who can move from methodology and partner conversations to hiring, operating decisions, and implementation.
What you'll do
- Act as a company builder: shape strategy, recruit strong colleagues, and turn priorities into accountable execution.
- Coordinate across indices, reinsurance, prediction markets, actuarial research, insurance, and blockchain-based DeFi, understanding how decisions in one area affect the others.
- Build relationships with institutions and domain experts, validate use cases, and translate feedback into the product roadmap.
- Work with legal and risk specialists to assess product feasibility, distribution constraints, operating dependencies, and governance requirements.
- Participate in fundraising, strategic partnerships, and leadership decisions with clear evidence and explicit tradeoffs.
- Lead index methodology and product design, including event definitions, data provenance, resolution rules, horizon selection, and change governance.
- Evaluate insurance and reinsurance structures, including loss modeling, capital efficiency, basis risk, and the distinction between an event price and a loss estimate.
- Develop a pathway from validated research to institutional pilots and repeatable risk-transfer workflows.
What we're looking for
- Deep experience in insurance, reinsurance, actuarial science, quantitative markets, index products, or a closely related field.
- Evidence of building a business, product, research program, or significant institutional partnership from an ambiguous starting point.
- Strong understanding of probability, tail risk, exposure modeling, and the commercial constraints of risk-transfer markets.
- Ability to lead specialists while remaining close to analytical and operational details.
- A willingness to share broad founder responsibilities beyond a single function.
- Intellectual honesty, clear communication, and a sustained commitment to building Time Seventeen.
What success looks like
- Establish a defensible index and risk-transfer roadmap grounded in institutional needs.
- Develop transparent methodologies and partner feedback that support credible product decisions.
- Build the team and operating practices needed to deliver the roadmap.
Location & working arrangement
This role is based in Hong Kong. Please share your availability, current location, and any academic or scheduling requirements.
How to apply
Share your background and a concrete example of building, leading, or delivering relevant work. Describe your ownership, the key decisions, and the results. Founder candidates should also explain which part of Time Seventeen they want to build and why.
How we work
Time Seventeen is a focused, high-ownership team. We value clear thinking, direct communication, careful execution, and people who carry important work through to a result. We expect colleagues to surface inconvenient evidence, ask precise questions, and make the limits of their work explicit. Strong specialist judgment matters, as does the willingness to understand how your work affects research, markets, engineering, and risk. We prefer useful documentation and clear decisions to unnecessary process.