Nasdaq's Adena Friedman On IPOs, Unicorns, And Roundhouse Kicks

Q&A with Nasdaq's Black Belt CEO

- Michael P. Regan and Joel Weber

THE ROLAND PARK COUNTRY SCHOOL is just a few miles—but worlds away—from the hardscrabble streets of Baltimore that The Wire made famous. Yet this all-girls prep school was where Adena Friedman learned a lesson that’s helped her thrive in the historically all-boys club located on one of the meanest streets there is for smart, ambitious women like her: Wall Street. “You can be anything,” she recalls her teachers telling her. And it was something about financial markets that captivated young Friedman’s imagination when she visited her dad at T. Rowe Price, long before Take Our Daughters to Work Day was a thing.

After business school, Friedman landed an internship at Nasdaq and, except for a two-year stint at Carlyle Group, she’s been there ever since. In January she became chief executive officer.

Meet America’s first female exchange boss. She takes over at Nasdaq at a time when, 46 years after the exchange became the world’s first electronic stock market, the technological makeover in markets shows no sign of abating and the listings business is more competitive than ever. As she steers the exchange into an uncertain future, she’s preparing for yet another round of the perpetual disruption she’s faced throughout her career in finance.

The history books will also show that Friedman, a black belt in taekwondo, was the one who finally kicked through the thick glass ceiling that hung over Wall Street since its days under a buttonwood tree in the 1700s. But excuse her for not dwelling on that: “I would like to be known as a great leader,” she says, “not as a great woman leader.”