Quartz hires professional in residence

Quartz co-presidents Kevin Delaney and Jay Lauf sent out the following announcement on Wednesday morning:

Hello Quartz –

TL;DR: we have an entrepreneur in residence and he’s awesome

We’d like to welcome Khemaridh Hy as Quartz’s first professional in residence. Khe spent eight years working as a managing director at BlackRock. Last year he quit his job without a plan. He’s spent much of the past year working on his newsletter RadReads, experimenting with media (he sent RadReads followers a motivational text every day for 30 days), and thinking about the nature of work (see his viral piece for Time). He advises startups Gigameet and Odin River. By nature, Khe is a connector and he has an remarkably deep network in finance, media, and startups. He is a dual French/US citizen, speaks French, and has a computer science degree from Yale.

Some of what Khe will do Quartz will be structured: Over the next six months he’ll be writing about productivity and the nature of work; he’ll also be working on producing an event. He’ll be in the New York office four days a week, will attend some edit meetings, and work in the daily flow. He’ll also serve as a resource for reporters on finance and ideas for sources. Khe is the person who connected us with the co-founder of Sir Kensington’s ketchup, which yielded this story from Chase.

And other pieces of it are less structured. Khe might set up office hours to meet with reporters or members of the marketing team.

Overall, the Quartz-in-residence (QIR) program is an experiment designed to build strategic relationships and encourage idea sharing between Quartz employees and individuals doing interesting work. Cross-disciplinary exchange has been built into the fabric of Quartz since it was conceived and this is a logical next step. We’re looking to have more QIR’s from various disciplines: artists, developers, architects, scientists, designers, engineers, researchers, educators, mathematicians, economists, entrepreneurs, etc.

We have Lauren to thank for this initiative, as she has both pushed forward the concept and nominated Khe to be our pioneering QIR. Please reach out to her if you have further thoughts on how this program can evolve, want to be involved directly in shaping it, or have names of anyone who would be great for this role.

It’s worth noting that we expect any professional in residence to respect the integrity of our editorial work and its separation from sales concerns, and we contractually require commitments around confidentiality and noncompetition.

Khe will be sitting next to Marc. You can follow him on Twitter and on Snapchat at RadReads and sign up for his newsletter here.

Please join us in welcoming him.