The 2016 Tech 50: Deborah Hopkins

The CEO of Citi Ventures is No. 9 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.

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< The 2016 Tech 50

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9
Deborah Hopkins
Chief Executive Officer
Citi Ventures
Last Year: 8

Demand for homes and offices in San Francisco has skyrocketed as trendsetters in that most trendy of technology clusters have shown a decided preference for the city over Silicon Valley to the south. Deborah Hopkins has gone with the flow, relocating to a San Francisco “satellite office” in May. She came to the Valley in 2010 to get close to the high-tech and venture financing communities, in keeping with her mission as chief innovation officer of Citigroup and CEO of its Citi Ventures investment vehicle. The latter, based in Palo Alto, is near such portfolio companies as Ayasdi, Pepperdata and Platfora (all in the big-data space). Downtown, Hopkins has Datameer (analytics), DocuSign (document management) and Square (remote payments) in closer proximity. The portfolio is a window on emerging innovation, which Hopkins, 61, has likened to surfing: “It looks easy, but it’s not,” and it’s all about being aware of coming, but unseen, waves. She believes technological change requires fresh management approaches and openness to experimentation and partnerships. “There is a lot of interesting debate going on around artificial intelligence and whether it’s creepy,” she says. “We were all scoffing at augmented reality, saying it was for games, but we’re actually playing around with that in our labs.” Citi partnered this year with virtual-reality design firm 8ninths, using Microsoft HoloLens headsets to, in the companies’ words, “reimagine financial trading in a mixed reality.” The idea is to augment common experience by overlaying digital tools on existing desktops. “That could be a highly effective way for our traders to operate,” says Hopkins, a former CFO of Boeing Co. and Lucent Technologies who since joining Citi in 2003 has been head of corporate strategy and M&A and chief operations and technology officer. In another partnership, with design firm IDEO, Citi has created collaborative environments to explore uses for new technology such as blockchain. “He who learns the most, wins,” Hopkins says. “Learning really comes from experimentation.”


The 2016 Tech 50

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1. Catherine
Bessant
Bank of America Corp.

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2. Jeffrey Sprecher
Intercontinental Exchange

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3. Lance Uggla
Markit

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4. Phupinder Gill
CME Group

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5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko
Bloomberg

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6. R. Martin Chavez
Goldman Sachs Group

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7. Robert Goldstein
BlackRock

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8. Adena Friedman
Nasdaq

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9. Deborah Hopkins
Citi Ventures

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10. Daniel Coleman
KCG Holdings

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11. Stephen Neff
Fidelity Investments

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12. David Craig
Thomson Reuters

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13. Michael Spencer
ICAP

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14. Michael Bodson
Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.

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15. Charles Li
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

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16. Chris Concannon
BATS Global Markets

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17. Blythe Masters
Digital Asset Holdings

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18. David Rutter
R3CEV

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19. Neil Katz
D.E. Shaw & Co.

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20. Lee Olesky
Tradeweb Markets

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21. Richard McVey
MarketAxess Holdings

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22. Seth Merrin
Liquidnet Holdings

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23. Robert Alexander
Capital One Financial Corp.

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24. Brad Katsuyama
IEX Group

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25. Antoine Shagoury
State Street Corp.

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26. David Gledhill
DBS Bank

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27. Lou Eccleston
TMX Group

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28. Andreas Preuss
Deutsche BÖrse

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29. Dan Schulman
PayPal Holdings

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30. Scott Dillon
Wells Fargo & Co.

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31. Mike Chinn
S&P Global Market Intelligence

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32. Craig Donohue
Options Clearing Corp.

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33. Gary Norcross
Fidelity National Information Services

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34. Steven O’Hanlon
Numerix

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35. Sebastián Ceria
Axioma

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36. Michael Cooper
BT Radianz

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37. Tyler Kim
MaplesFS

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38. Neal Pawar
AQR Capital Management

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39. David Harding
Winton Capital Management

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40. Chris Corrado
London Stock Exchange Group

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41. Brian Conlon
First Derivatives

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42. Jim Minnick
eVestment

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43. Stephane Dubois
Xignite

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44. Mazy Dar
OpenFin

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45. Yasuki Okai
NRI Holdings America

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46. Kim Fournais
Saxo Bank

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47. Jock Percy
Perseus

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48. Robert Schifellite
Broadridge Financial Solutions

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49. Brian Sentance
Xenomorph Software

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50. Pieter van der Does
Adyen

Jim Minnick Shawn Edwards Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures Brad Katsuyama
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