This content is from: Portfolio
The 2016 Tech 50: Deborah Hopkins
The CEO of Citi Ventures is No. 9 on this year’s Tech 50 ranking.
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.”
 1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  3. Lance Uggla Markit  4. Phupinder Gill CME Group  5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg  6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group |
 7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock  8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq  9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures  10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings  11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments  12. David Craig Thomson Reuters |
 13. Michael Spencer ICAP  14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.  15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing  16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets  17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings  18. David Rutter R3CEV |
 19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co.  20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets  21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings  22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings  23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp.  24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group |
 25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp.  26. David Gledhill DBS Bank  27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group  28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse  29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings  30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co. |
 31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence  32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp.  33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services  34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix  35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma  36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz |
 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS  38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management  39. David Harding Winton Capital Management  40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group  41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives  42. Jim Minnick eVestment |
 43. Stephane Dubois Xignite  44. Mazy Dar OpenFin  45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America  46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank  47. Jock Percy Perseus  48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions |
 49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software  50. Pieter van der Does Adyen |