

"Business is just a set of problems to solve," Seth Merrin writes in The Power of Positive Destruction, a combination personal memoir and entrepreneurial how-to manual published in December. "It's really the book of Liquidnet," that is, the company he founded and went live with in 2001 with a trading platform for institutions whose large stock orders had become too difficult to transact on traditional exchanges. A lot of sweat went into growing the network from 38 buy-side firms at the start to more than 850 today, trading in 44 markets around the globe. That's not to mention the bumps along Merrin's career path and in multiple startups, including Merrin Financial, which pioneered the buy-side trade order management system. "I made tons of mistakes," he admits, now hoping others can learn from his experiences. As the title of the book, co-written with Carlye Adler, suggests, the Liquidnet Holdings CEO, 57, remains every bit the entrepreneur scoping out opportunities for disruption. "We are in institutional fintech," he says, noting that about a third of Liquidnet's 400-plus employees are technologists. "That is our core competency," he adds. In the book he urges that technology be embraced as a competitive advantage, but adds: "Understand that with the pace of technological change, the disrupter can easily become the disrupted. Positive destruction must be constant."
![]() 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. ![]() 3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock ![]() 4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange ![]() 5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit |
![]() 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg ![]() 7. David Craig Thomson Reuters ![]() 8. Michael Spencer NEX Group ![]() 9. Don Callahan Citigroup ![]() 10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group |
![]() 11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. ![]() 12. Terrence Duffy CME Group ![]() 13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing ![]() 14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments ![]() 15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings |
![]() 16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp. ![]() 17. Steven Lieblich Citadel ![]() 18. David Rutter R3CEV ![]() 19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings ![]() 20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments |
![]() 21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group ![]() 22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets ![]() 23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings ![]() 24. David Gledhill DBS Bank ![]() 25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings |
![]() 26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. ![]() 27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies ![]() 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group ![]() 29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp. ![]() 30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence |
![]() 31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group ![]() 32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management ![]() 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services ![]() 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix ![]() 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma |
![]() 36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems ![]() 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS ![]() 38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz ![]() 39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions ![]() 40. Jim Minnick eVestment |