The 2017 Tech 40: Seth Merrin

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< The 2017 Tech 40

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25. Seth Merrin
Chief Executive Officer
Liquidnet Holdings
Last year: 22

“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.”


The 2017 Tech 40

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1. Adena Friedman
NASDAQ

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2. Catherine Bessant
Bank of
America Corp.

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3. Robert Goldstein
BlackRock

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4. Jeffrey Sprecher
Intercontinental Exchange

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5. Lance Uggla
IHS Markit

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6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko
Bloomberg

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7. David Craig
Thomson Reuters

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8. Michael Spencer
NEX Group

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9. Don Callahan
Citigroup

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10. Elisha Wiesel
Goldman Sachs Group

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11. Michael Bodson
Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.

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12. Terrence Duffy
CME Group

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13. Charles Li
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing

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14. Sean Belka
Fidelity Investments

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15. Chris Concannon
CBOE Holdings

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16. Guy Chiarello
First Data Corp.

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17. Steven Lieblich
Citadel

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18. David Rutter
R3CEV

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19. Blythe Masters
Digital Asset Holdings

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20. Alfred Spector
Two Sigma Investments

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21. Neil Katz
D.E. Shaw Group

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22. Lee Olesky
Tradeweb Markets

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23. Richard McVey
MarketAxess Holdings

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24. David Gledhill
DBS Bank

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25. Seth Merrin
Liquidnet Holdings

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26. Antoine Shagoury
State Street Corp.

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27. Peter Brown &
Robert Mercer

Renaissance Technologies

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28. Lou Eccleston
TMX Group

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29. Peter Cherecwich
Northern Trust Corp.

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30. Mike Chinn
S&P Global Market Intelligence

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31. Chris Corrado
London Stock Exchange Group

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32. Neal Pawar
AQR Capital Management

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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. Brian Conlon
First Derivatives and Kx Systems

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37. Tyler Kim
MaplesFS

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38. Michael Cooper
BT Radianz

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39. Robert Schifellite
Broadridge Financial Solutions

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40. Jim Minnick
eVestment


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