Adena Friedman started at Nasdaq in 1993 as an MBA intern. Outside of a three-year stint as the chief financial officer at Carlyle Group, Friedman has spent nearly 20 years at Nasdaq. In 2017, she became the first woman to lead a global exchange.
Friedman has pushed the exchange to use technology to democratize the capital markets. As a result, Nasdaq has moved from a stock exchange into a powerhouse of technology, data and analytics driving 130 global markets.
"Online trading changed everything about the industry," she told Fortune last year.
By the late 1990s, Nasdaq struggled to keep up with the startups that were quick to adopt new technological innovations. "I was there at the time, watching our market share go from 97 percent to 14 percent in trading," she told a CEO summit a few years ago. "We didn't weather that well."
The company, under her leadership and that of her predecessor, pivoted by reinventing itself as a pure-play technology company. Today, Nasdaq provides technology trading to more than 100 markets around the world.
"Complacency is the killer of every great company," she said. "In the blink of an eye, things can change around you. Be ready for the change and embrace it."
At the same time, Friedman said it is okay for women leaders to sometimes feel risk averse. Women, she wrote in Fortune several years ago, tend to spend more time gathering facts when assessing opportunities and risks. "We research more thoroughly, including probing how the business can extricate itself if failure occurs," she observed. That natural instinct, she said, "should be something to be celebrated and replicated."
Finance has always been in Friedman's blood. She grew up spending time at the trading desk of T. Rowe Price, where her father worked. That helped turn her into being a "big believer in capitalism." Still, she said, it is apparent that investing and making money off of the stock market isn't always accessible to everyone. Nasdaq, she said, can help play a role in making capitalism more accessible.
During her career, Friedman has acquired a few key life lessons: live in reality.; don't place all your bets on one killer app; and regulation is not the answer.
The killer app principal, she said, was particularly relevant when Nasdaq had to reinvent itself. "Instead of being incremental and solving problems one at a time, we had this big project that we thought would solve everything. Don't assume there is one panacea," she cautioned.
Nasdaq also learned that they couldn't ask regulators to solve their problems for them. Freidman discovered that the only way forward was to compete, and prove that Nasdaq was the best at what it did. "As a country, we value competition and the idea of allowing free markets to force everyone to up their game," she said.
Friedman also believes that the financial services industry, when managed responsibly and with the long-term interests of clients in mind, serves as a critical component to building a stable and prosperous economy. Speaking at the UN several years ago, Friedman laid out her vision. "Properly addressing climate change will take multiple political cycles, and many of our politicians do not exhibit patience as a virtue," she said. "But the capital markets can see past the politics, and use the catalysts that are available to work together to create new incentives and disclosures."
Diversity and inclusion is also top of mind for Friedman. In 2020, Nasdaq asked the SEC to require companies listed on its exchange to publish board diversity data. Companies without at least two "diverse" directors – one who identifies as a woman, and one who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LBGTQ+—will have to explain the lack of diversity on their boards. "Capitalism, by its nature, gives the greatest opportunity to unlock human potential," she said. "But you have to make sure the system is available to everyone."
Ultimately, Friedman says has learned about the importance of women and minority leaders by the way young people have expressed admiration for her own role at the helm of Nasdaq. "I wasn't at all aware of the levels of influence that this appointment would have on people as they were looking up," she told Forbes in 2019. "I had a lot of young women come to me and say, 'I can achieve anything now because I can see my way to the top'."
But in the end, it is performance, not identity, that defines one's job, she said. "My job is predicated on making Nasdaq an incredibly successful business for the long term. And whether I'm male or female, that's what I'm going to be measured on."
