Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Nasdaq Inc
Adena T. Friedman, Chair and CEO of Nasdaq, Inc.
David Rubenstein interviewed Adena T. Friedman, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Nasdaq, Inc. on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.
About Adena Friedman
At the All-In Summit 2025, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman announced that the exchange would begin offering tokenized securities, integrating tokenization into its core markets rather than as a separate product. She described this move as a way to bring crypto assets and tokenization into the mainstream securities ecosystem. Friedman also discussed the potential for changes to the IPO process to allow companies to go public more quickly. Friedman commented on the state of the markets, stating that while risks exist in areas like commercial real estate and private credit, she believes banks have been managing these issues well and that lower interest rates could ease pressure. She also expressed support for Federal Reserve independence, stating that the Fed benefits from being able to think long term and remain data dependent, separate from political cycles.
Transcript (158 segments)
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David Rubenstein0:12
Thank you all for coming and thank you, Adena, for giving us this evening of your time.
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Adena Friedman0:17
It's great to be here.
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David Rubenstein0:18
Let's talk about what NASDAQ is. What does NASDAQ stand for? Why do you have a Q without a U after?
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Adena Friedman0:28
Okay. Well, what NASDAQ is and what we stand for are two very different things. So, NASDAQ was started in 1971 and we were a subsidiary of the National Association of Securities Dealers, NASD. And we were formed to be the first electronic market to drive automated quotes. So, NASDAQ is the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System.
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David Rubenstein0:54
Okay. And you have been the CEO for roughly 10 years. Almost 10 years.
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Adena Friedman1:00
Yeah. So I'm in my 10th year.
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David Rubenstein1:03
So when you took over the market cap was roughly 11 billion. Today the market cap is roughly $48 billion. You've gone up almost five times. But the NASDAQ index has gone up less than NASDAQ. So I mean shouldn't your companies be going up more than you are going up? You're going up more than they are.
A
Adena Friedman1:22
We're just glad to be keeping pace. So, you know, NASDAQ as a company, we've really transformed the business and today we really are a technology company that serves the broader financial system, but including our markets. So, we provide great markets and love to talk about them. We also provide technology to 130 other markets and regulators around the world. We provide technology that underpins 3,800 banks. And then we also provide this great index business that you just mentioned that has about $850 billion of assets under management and that is really kind of tied to the fact that we really do work hard to connect corporates with investors and the companies that choose to list on NASDAQ are the greatest innovators of our day. So we're really proud of that.
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David Rubenstein2:09
Well, historically I always thought NASDAQ did the small tech companies and that was the image that I had for many years. But now you have on your exchange Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Alphabet, Nvidia. So, what's left for the New York Stock Exchange? What do they have?
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Adena Friedman2:33
And now Walmart. So, we have the top eight companies in the world listed on NASDAQ and we're really proud of that, too.
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David Rubenstein2:42
But explain this to me for people who aren't really familiar with it. Does NASDAQ really do anything that's different than New York Stock Exchange? I mean, you serve these companies that are listed on your exchange, but what is the real difference between the two of you? Really?
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Adena Friedman2:55
Yeah. I mean, there are some differences. And I think the first thing is that we do... there's some soft stuff and some hard stuff. So, I'm going to start a little bit with the soft stuff. So, the first thing is everyone at NASDAQ works for listings. No matter what you do in your job, whether you're in the software business, the data business, the exchange business, we all work for our listed companies. And that really means that we come to work every single day and say, how do we make the markets better? How do we make them perform better? We invest in our technology. We invest in our relationships. We invest in products like indexes and all the needs that public companies have to be great public companies. And then we invest in the foundations of the entire financial system with core technology that manages risk and tries to root criminals out of the system. But we do care about it because at the end of the day we really focus on the liquidity, transparency and the integrity we bring to those companies. And for a listed company, if I'm going to go in and pitch a listed company and maybe I'll talk about the fact that we did actually have Walmart switch from New York to NASDAQ last year. And when we look at underpinning...
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David Rubenstein4:01
Did that happen by luck or how did that happen?
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Adena Friedman4:03
No, luckily no. So we... first is that we have the NASDAQ 100 index and that for the top 100 companies is actually a sizable investment that we make in the company through the NASDAQ 100 index products. So we are essentially kind of a 3 to 4% owner of the companies that sit in the NASDAQ 100. So for them that was a very large investment that was going to come into their stock and the NASDAQ 100 is the only index in the United States that's tied to where you list. We have companies that are in the Dow 30. We have many many companies in the S&P 500. But the NASDAQ is the only one that is tied to the listing. And then we also have better markets and they really did do a deep dive on the quality of trading at NASDAQ. We've invested a lot in our technology, modernizing it, making it cloud ready and driving performance. And we can show that if you list on NASDAQ, you have a better trading outcome, which means that your investors have a better outcome. And that lowers your cost of capital. And then we also provide a whole suite of IR services, governance solutions that really help you navigate the public markets really successfully. And New York doesn't own any of those.
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David Rubenstein5:11
So suppose I want to buy a stock tomorrow. And I pick a stock, whatever it might be, Walmart or whatever it might be, why do I care as a buyer of the stock, whether it's listed on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange, what's the advantage for me of a company being on NASDAQ, and what do you actually do when I call up and say, I want to buy Walmart, what does NASDAQ actually do?
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Adena Friedman5:34
Yeah. So, first I would say that most investors, you know, it's a pretty ubiquitous experience for investors when they come and choose to list in or trade in any company because we all trade each other's stocks. So, we trade all stocks in the United States and the New York Stock Exchange trades all stocks in the United States. There are in fact 40 venues that trade all stocks in the United States. So, as an investor, you have a very good experience all the time. We can actually demonstrate they have a slightly better experience in that listed companies. And it's measurable. But the fact is that it's really you have to choose your investment thesis and you go and you can have instantaneous execution of any order you put in any system at or better than the best bid and offer. And that's a great experience for investors and that's created through a whole series of players in the markets not just us but we do play a big role in making sure that everyone has equal access to information about what is the best bid and offer in the stock, what was the last trade in the stock, how do you want to think about managing your positions. We give a whole suite of intelligent solutions to support investors. How do you want to allocate your assets especially as an institutional investor? How do you make sure that you're getting that information instantaneously with no delay like 20 microseconds of latency? That's what we do and that's the experience we create.
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David Rubenstein6:52
Let's suppose I call up and say I want to buy Walmart but I actually want to buy Walmart tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange. Has anybody ever called up and said I want it on a certain exchange or nobody does that?
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Adena Friedman7:03
No, they don't. They don't do that. Not retail investors don't and even institutional investors, they might. So what we like to say is we always want to be the first venue of choice. So if you're coming into the stock market and you're trying to buy a stock and you go through any sort of retail broker, we want to work with that broker to be the first venue they choose to send it to. And that means that we have to be faster than anyone else and we have to be more deterministic than anyone else. And that's what we strive to be every day.
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David Rubenstein7:31
But today, most people probably heard of the New York Stock Exchange and they've heard of NASDAQ, but aren't there like 38 other people you can buy things through? Who are all these other people you can buy things through?
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Adena Friedman7:40
Well, there are 12 exchanges, but we own three of them. And then there are a whole bunch of single dealer platforms, what we call alternative trading systems.
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David Rubenstein7:51
What is Citadel Securities? So, what is Citadel Securities?
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Adena Friedman7:53
So, they're an internalizer. So they would basically work with the retail broker and the retail broker would send all their orders to Citadel and Citadel would internalize it and if they don't have the other side of the trade they'll then leg that order into NASDAQ or something.
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David Rubenstein8:11
So if somebody says I want to be listed on NASDAQ do you service them and you charge a fee for that or...?
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Adena Friedman8:18
We do. Yeah. So we make money in multiple ways. So I would say that we have three big business divisions. So I'll just start there. So our trading business, we get paid for every share traded and every option. What do you get paid? A little teeny teeny little bit. It's five hundredths of a penny per share traded. And so that's how much we kind of make in general. But it adds up. So about 23% of our revenue is from trading. And then we have what we call our capital access platforms division and that includes listings. And we do charge an annual listing fee. It maxes out at about $200,000 a year. So it's pretty good. New York maxes out at $500,000 a year. So we're much more efficient. And then we have our index business and as you know you get paid basis points on assets under management. And then we have other software solutions that serve those clients. And then we have our fintech division and that's all licensed software.
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David Rubenstein9:22
All right. So I have observed that a couple big companies are thinking about going public. You may have noticed one is called SpaceX and another is OpenAI and maybe Anthropic. Have you observed that they might be going public or you're...?
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Adena Friedman9:36
Yes. So we never comment on any company as they're going through the process but I can say that it is quite exciting to think that there are a lot of amazing companies looking to tap the public markets. It's wonderful to have them understand the power of the public markets as a way to help them drive their growth.
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David Rubenstein9:52
So, will that be a big fight between the various exchanges to get their listing?
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Adena Friedman9:56
We fight for every listing. We really do. It is all the time. It's like a constant.
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David Rubenstein10:03
And how can I be sure that I get the best price? I want to buy Walmart. How do I know I'm going to get the best price? I just call my broker and say, 'I want the best price.' How do I know I'm going to get it?
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Adena Friedman10:12
Yeah. Well, they have an obligation to give you the best price. And do they everybody? Yeah, they have... it's something called best execution. So it's a rule that says that that broker is responsible for getting you the best execution they can at any given moment of all day long and then they're measured on that. The firms have to do regulatory reporting on that and we provide the regulatory reporting tools that allow them to report on that.
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David Rubenstein10:34
But if I want to go public I can go to the New York Stock Exchange and ring the bell. And can... but there's nobody below anymore. Whatever happened to all the brokers that are running around? Where do they go?
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Adena Friedman10:45
Exactly. We're all electronic today. So, think about it. I would just say in the month of March, so far this month, across all of the venues that trade stocks, we are executing 22 billion shares a day, which is a record. So, that's a new record. Before COVID, it was averaging 10. So, if you think about it, the markets have doubled over the last six years in terms of volumes. But if you're trading 22 billion shares a day, you can't do that manually.
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David Rubenstein11:14
But if somebody says, 'I want to ring the bell if I'm going to do my IPO,' and you don't have to ring the bell.
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Adena Friedman11:21
Well, we have a great way. We have a bell ringing ceremony at the NASDAQ market site. And what's nice about ours is that everyone can be on the same level. So, like at New York, you stand on a podium and you look down on everyone and now it's like you're all with everyone. So we can have a hundred people up at the podium with you as you are celebrating your moment and we love it. It's really fun. We have a great time with that.
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David Rubenstein11:45
Now how do you deal with insider trading? Sometimes stocks trade when all of a sudden a piece of information comes out that might look like somebody knew something in advance. How do you pick up insider trading?
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Adena Friedman11:57
Yeah, it's a great question. So we actually do... we are the largest provider of what we call market surveillance technology, trade surveillance technology in the world. So we use our own solution. And it's a very sophisticated system that takes in every order, every trade that's done in our markets or if I'm a trading firm, every order and every trade that you do in your trading desk. And we compare it against the consolidated feed. We compare it against other known behaviors. We do a lot of work to make sure that we kind of know what we call the topology of bad behavior looks like. So if you're doing wash sales or if you're doing insider trading and then we send... if we see an alert like if we see something that looks suspicious, we generate an alert and we send it to the SEC. The SEC and FINRA then gather up all that information across all the markets and they're the ones who really go in and do the investigations. But it's a very sophisticated process and it requires a lot of coordination across the exchanges and with the regulator.
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David Rubenstein12:58
It may be sophisticated but I don't see that many people getting sued for insider trading anymore. Seems to be there sometimes a tariff announcement we made and seems like somebody knew it in advance but nobody seems to get sued anymore.
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Adena Friedman13:08
Well, it's actually kind of amazing at how well they do at rooting out insider trading. I'm very impressed and same across other countries too. Like in Europe, we've seen that.
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David Rubenstein13:20
I'm sure the SEC will be investigating me tomorrow.
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Adena Friedman13:22
There we go.
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David Rubenstein13:23
Okay. So, let's talk about how you got this position. Where were you born?
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Adena Friedman13:30
I was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, but I grew up in Baltimore.
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David Rubenstein13:34
Baltimore. Yeah. Okay. And your father was in the financial service world.
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Adena Friedman13:38
Yeah. My dad worked at T. Rowe Price for his whole career.
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David Rubenstein13:41
Okay. And so you went to college where?
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Adena Friedman13:44
I went to Williams College.
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David Rubenstein13:46
And how did you pick Williams? You wanted to be as far away from Baltimore on the east coast as you could.
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Adena Friedman13:50
Well, my father had gone to Williams, so that made a difference. And I loved it there. I thought it was just an amazing place.
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David Rubenstein13:55
So, when you graduated, what did you major in?
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Adena Friedman13:57
I majored in political science with a concentration in Soviet studies. So, of course, the Soviet Union...
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David Rubenstein14:03
Very useful.
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Adena Friedman14:04
It disappeared the year I graduated. So, the wall fell in 1990 and I graduated 1991. I'm like, I guess I have to find another.
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David Rubenstein14:12
What did you do after you graduated?
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Adena Friedman14:13
So, I went straight to business school because 1991 was a recession and so I said, you know, I'm ultimately going to want to go to business school. I might as well go now.
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David Rubenstein14:21
So, you went to Vanderbilt.
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Adena Friedman14:22
Vanderbilt business school.
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David Rubenstein14:23
Vanderbilt's an excellent school. But how did you happen to pick Vanderbilt?
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Adena Friedman14:26
Well, my husband was at the law school. Boyfriend at the time, but we had met at Williams and he had ended up at the law school there and so I applied to one school. And I was very lucky to get in.
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David Rubenstein14:37
All right. Once you got your MBA, what did you do next?
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Adena Friedman14:40
So, I came to NASDAQ. So we moved to Washington because at the time being a subsidiary of the NASD, NASDAQ was actually based here in Washington DC. So we moved to Washington. My husband took a job at Shaw Pittman and I took a job at NASDAQ. I was an intern and then I turned it into a full-time job.
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David Rubenstein15:01
Okay. But NASDAQ is headquartered in New York. How do you rise up if you're in Washington DC? How do you rise up? Everybody else is in New York.
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Adena Friedman15:07
Well, we were all in DC then and then we moved the headquarters to New York in 2000. And so by then I was already running the data division within NASDAQ. We had three business units and they just created the data business unit and they asked me to head that up. And so I actually went to my boss and I said great that we're moving to New York but I won't be moving. Because I had two kids, they were in a great school. My husband had a wonderful job and so we said, you know, I can commute when I need to. We actually... the data business is still largely run out of Washington. 25 years later.
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David Rubenstein15:44
But you left NASDAQ for a greater opportunity at one point.
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Adena Friedman15:48
Yes, I did.
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David Rubenstein15:49
What was that opportunity?
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Adena Friedman15:53
So, I got a call from a headhunter who asked me, 'What would you think about working for, you know, the best private equity firm in the country to help them go public?' And at the time, I was the CFO of NASDAQ, very happy in the job. And it was a cold call and I said, 'Well, did you know that I live in Washington DC?' And Clark Murphy, I don't know if you remember Clark Murphy, he was kind of taken aback. He's like, 'No, I didn't know that.' So anyway, so I interviewed for the job and I ended up at Carlyle as a CFO, our CFO. We went public and did a great job.
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David Rubenstein16:26
So thank you.
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Adena Friedman16:26
So we had a great time. It was a really cool time.
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David Rubenstein16:29
Somebody came along and took you back to NASDAQ.
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Adena Friedman16:33
Yeah. So I mean the first and the biggest thing was I'd run a business and I'd been doing all the deals for NASDAQ and then I became the CFO, which is much more of a risk manager job, right? And then I came to Carlyle and that was so amazing, you know, to be able to take this incredible firm and take it public. But I did realize I really liked risk-taking more than risk management. And Bob, the CEO was ready. He was getting ready to think about retiring. So they asked me to come back as president with at least the opportunity to become the CEO.
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David Rubenstein17:04
When Carlyle went public, how hard was it to give an unbiased view on whether we should be listing on NASDAQ or New York? Was that hard?
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Adena Friedman17:12
Do you remember the bake-off meetings?
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David Rubenstein17:14
I do remember we had that, but I don't know how fair it was. But okay.
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Adena Friedman17:18
Oh, no. It was very fair. But I have to tell you, NASDAQ honestly... I sat in both meetings and then they had to come back and do it again for Bill because he wasn't there that day. And I mean NASDAQ just did a better job. I have to say I did not make the decision. I let you guys make the decision. But however you judged that decision was up to you.
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David Rubenstein17:37
Right. Let's talk about... you recently put out a global task force on criminal activities. Can you talk about what that task force says?
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Adena Friedman17:46
Yeah, so five years ago, in fact five years ago, I think this week we bought a company called Verafin and Verafin is a very advanced solution that provides anti-financial crime technology to 2,750 banks. And so we started two years ago putting out a report on how much criminal activity happens across banks around the world. How big is this problem? What are the biggest impediments to solving the problem? And how should technology and frankly collaboration because we work with Rob Nichols, I know he's here, and others across the financial industry to figure out... it's a collective action problem. So if you have to size the problem, it's about a $4 trillion problem in terms of money laundering and fraud that occurs across the global banking system. And the banks are kind of put to the front line to solve this problem on behalf of governments. And it's hard if you're just looking at your own transactions in your own bank. It's kind of an impossible problem to solve. And most of the countries around the world do not allow banks to share information across banks for this purpose, but the United States does. So we solved the problem by bringing data together across the banks through something called a consortium data lake that allows us to look across the system to say what are the criminal behaviors, how are they manifesting themselves in wires or... we can see the payor and the payee so that we can flag things more effectively and we're able to take down false positives and find a lot more of the criminal activity as a result.
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David Rubenstein19:17
So let's talk about for a moment the software scare that people have been talking about that's affected the stocks that are software oriented down about 10 to 15% or so all because of AI theoretically. Are you convinced that AI is going to put a lot of these software businesses out of business or not?
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Adena Friedman19:35
No, I'm not. I think that we have to recognize that the software businesses including NASDAQ but I'll say more broadly the software businesses are all adapting to this technology and so while the technology is advancing the software businesses are integrating it into their technology and making it a core part of their offering and it is a huge empowerment tool. I mean it's an incredible thing and it's developing extremely quickly but it's certainly in our industry... if I'll just move now to the financial industry, our financial industry they need precision, they need complete accuracy, they need battle-tested systems that are highly secured and they need to have it integrated into a very complex workflow and they need to integrate it into some very embedded systems. And that's... so we are a provider of technology across that and I think that what we're doing is just integrating those new workflow capabilities into the tools. So, how do we make them more efficient and effective? How do we help them find criminal behaviors more effectively? How do we actually help them manage risk more effectively? We have this thing called settlement guard which helps them predict settlement failures so they can save billions of dollars and that's all through AI. So, I don't think any software business is going to sit still. Any business that sits still in the world of AI will ultimately fail.
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David Rubenstein20:54
What about your business? I mean NASDAQ, you're a software company to some extent.
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Adena Friedman20:57
So we're leaning in very hard on integrating software at an enterprise level and frankly an industrial strength secure level to bring that to the industry.
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David Rubenstein21:08
How many employees does NASDAQ have?
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Adena Friedman21:10
We have 10,000 employees.
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David Rubenstein21:12
10,000. It's a lot. And the market capitalization today is like about 48 billion. It was as high as 55 I think or something like that. So how many employees in the United States?
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Adena Friedman21:23
We have about 7,000 employees in the United States.
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David Rubenstein21:26
And how many men or how many women?
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Adena Friedman21:28
That's a good question. I think overall it's about... I want to say 60-40 men to women but it might be a little... maybe 65-35.
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David Rubenstein21:38
And if somebody wants to get a job at NASDAQ who might be even here today, what's the best way to get a job at NASDAQ?
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Adena Friedman21:46
Well we use LinkedIn a lot actually. But I mean first of all we have every type of role at NASDAQ. So 50% of our employees are in product and technology, about I would say 20% of our roles are in like client success and marketing and managing clients and sales maybe 25, and then the rest of them are all in what we call expert functions like finance and legal and you know other infrastructure parts of the business, market services, our trading business. And so you can really kind of come up through any skill and find a job at NASDAQ.
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David Rubenstein22:20
Now how is the Iranian... whatever we call it, skirmish, military action, something... how is that affecting your company?
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Adena Friedman22:27
Yeah. So it wouldn't affect our company directly. We obviously are very very vigilant on anything related to cybersecurity. So we're very focused on that. We do have employees in the region. So we're very focused on that. But I would say that beyond that it's really more a matter of how it affects the economy, how it affects the volatility of the markets, how we make sure we provide resilient markets to be able to weather the storm, and then of course ultimately how it will affect the overall economy. And that has an effect on every business but it's not as much a direct effect on us.
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David Rubenstein23:00
Suppose you say that you want to buy a company that is listed on your exchange. Are you allowed to go buy Apple stock?
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Adena Friedman23:09
Me personally? I am but I don't. I buy the NASDAQ 100.
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David Rubenstein23:14
Oh, you buy the index. Yeah. You should have bought the stock of...
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Adena Friedman23:18
Well, I have a lot of that.
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David Rubenstein23:21
Okay. So what about putting money in private equity? Ever thought of that?
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Adena Friedman23:25
I actually have.
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David Rubenstein23:25
Okay. There's a good return there, too.
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Adena Friedman23:28
It's a good return.
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David Rubenstein23:29
So, obviously, there aren't that many women running gigantic financial service companies. I can't think of too many running a company with your kind of market cap. So you would get a lot of attention because of that. Have you ever thought about being Secretary of Treasury?
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Adena Friedman23:48
Well, I do love my job and I love what I do. We have a lot of... and I love the country. I do in fact love the country. I admire the Secretary of Treasury, whoever takes that job. It's an enormous responsibility and I have to say I think we're fortunate to have had a lot of amazing people in that role. But I do love what I do.
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David Rubenstein24:08
All right. So, you're not a candidate right now, but would you ever go into government service at some point or...?
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Adena Friedman24:13
No, I again I love what I do. I think that it's... you know, you can't really predict a hypothetical.
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David Rubenstein24:19
Okay. So, what do you do when you're in your non-working mode? You were a black belt in taekwondo, right?
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Adena Friedman24:27
Yes.
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David Rubenstein24:28
So, do you still do taekwondo?
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Adena Friedman24:30
You know, when COVID hit, I was doing taekwondo and COVID hit and I had... you know, as time kind of went through COVID and it was time to go back to the studio and the one thing that kept coming to my mind was I really can't afford to get a concussion. And sparring is a big part of the sport. And so, I actually decided to focus more on just fitness and pickleball.
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David Rubenstein24:54
Well, that's...
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Adena Friedman24:55
So a slightly different end of the spectrum.
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David Rubenstein24:58
That's why I got out of taekwondo, too.
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Adena Friedman25:00
Yeah. You just can't afford it, right? Concussion. I didn't want to have a concussion.
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David Rubenstein25:03
We never got to spar, though. So, right. Okay. So, now you're an expert in pickleball.
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Adena Friedman25:07
I enjoy it a lot. Yeah.
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David Rubenstein25:08
But people tell me that that's the best thing that ever happened to orthopedic surgeons. Is that true?
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Adena Friedman25:14
I can say... I mean I am going to have to knock on wood somewhere but I don't think this is wood but you know so far so good.
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David Rubenstein25:20
Okay. So what do you want most people to take away this evening from what NASDAQ is all about? What your most important message would be?
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Adena Friedman25:31
You know I think that the thing that we really focus on is we want to be the trusted fabric of the world's financial system. And what does that mean? Trust is a huge word for us and we spend every single one of our days making sure that we deserve that term. And then the second thing is the word fabric. You know, we are the kind of the inner workings that... if you think about it, we're the core infrastructure that really powers markets. We power the financial system through critical infrastructure technology that really allows firms to get on the field and stay on the field as they're managing through a very complex world. And then we provide these amazing companies the ability and the smallest companies all the way to the largest companies the ability to find investors and raise capital. And it's what makes this country great. I mean it really is if you think about it, the innovation ecosystem and the financial ecosystem of the United States are the best in the world. We're a part of that as well.
D
David Rubenstein26:27
So you have companies on your exchange that are Apple, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg and so forth. Which of all these great CEOs is the smartest?
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Adena Friedman26:41
They're all amazing at what they do and I really mean that. And they all bring... they're very different people. If you meet the CEOs of all of the companies that we mentioned, they're just incredible at what they do, but they're very different. They're really, you know, you can see also how their culture is defined either around them or by them and I have to say they're amazing leaders. They really are.
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David Rubenstein27:04
And what percentage of your trades are outside the United States?
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Adena Friedman27:08
So in terms of trading coming into the NASDAQ, 20% of investment comes from outside the United States into the US markets in general. That's a huge number.
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David Rubenstein27:20
But for example, you operate exchanges in Europe or Asia.
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Adena Friedman27:25
Yeah, we operate almost all of the exchanges of the Nordics. So we have Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. So the Nordic and Baltic markets are NASDAQ Nordic actually. So NASDAQ Stockholm, NASDAQ Copenhagen. But they're called the Nordic Markets and NASDAQ Nordics and we have a very large headquarters in Stockholm with about 700 employees and we have another large presence in Lithuania.
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David Rubenstein27:56
So if somebody that's watching would say I want to be like Adena Friedman, let's suppose you have a young person in college or business school. What were the attributes that you think enabled you to rise to the top of this big company and what you would recommend to younger people that they do if they want to be the next Adena Friedman? So, I should ask you.
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Adena Friedman28:17
We worked together for a while. No, I would say that I was... I'm always very curious. I ask a lot of questions. I've got a lot of energy. That I wake up every single morning... I wake up happy. That I can tell you I wake up happy every day pretty much. And ready to take on whatever it is. I make sure that I really come to work with the right attitude every day. I have a lot of energy. I ask a lot of questions, a lot of curiosity.
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David Rubenstein28:43
But did you have siblings growing up?
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Adena Friedman28:45
And I also feel like... but the other thing is I get things done. Like I'm very much...
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David Rubenstein28:49
And where did you get that from? Your parents instilled this. Your siblings the same way?
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Adena Friedman28:53
Yeah, my brother's the same way for sure. I have an older brother. He ran a hedge fund. Well, he still runs... he's kind of winding it down, but he's run a hedge fund for 28 years.
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David Rubenstein29:02
What about your children? You have children?
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Adena Friedman29:04
Two boys. Yeah.
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David Rubenstein29:04
And are they interested in the securities work or...?
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Adena Friedman29:08
Well, the younger one does venture capital and the older one is at University of Chicago, that great university that David's familiar with, and he's doing data science and public policy, a joint degree as well. But neither one of them wants to be in like the markets business but they do like working in the private sector but I think our older one in particular really wants to focus on public service.
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David Rubenstein29:34
When you first started being the CEO 10 plus years ago, there weren't that many women running these big companies. Aren't that many now. Did you face a lot of discrimination when you walked in the room? People saying, 'How did she get this job?' Or you didn't ever have that problem?
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Adena Friedman29:49
I didn't... that was one thing I was actually quite intentional about. First of all, never at NASDAQ ever. I mean, it was incredible. When you went to some of the trading firms, it was a little different. And I remember I had to... I was the head of the OTC bulletin board when I was 28 years old, right? So, I'm this young woman running kind of the wild west of the markets and I was running this trading quality committee. So, how do we change the rules of the OTC bulletin board to introduce more guardrails? And so, of course, these head traders are like, who is this 28-year-old telling me what to do? And I remember thinking to myself, when I get in the room, within five minutes, I want them to forget I'm a woman and just focus on what I have to say. And that's what I focused on. And it worked. I mean, because you walk in with an attitude of like, I have something worth saying. I have expertise in this area. I want to make sure that they are willing and able to listen. And it did work. It worked really well, I have to say. And I think that's the most important thing you can realize is that you come with your own self. I've always projected my whole self, but I've focused on being super prepared for every meeting, demonstrating expertise and making sure that within five minutes we're just having a really substantive conversation.
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David Rubenstein31:06
Did you have any role models to follow when you were rising up?
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Adena Friedman31:10
Yeah, my mom. So my mom had been a stay-at-home mom until I was nine and then she decided to go back to law school. So she went to University of Maryland Law School and became a lawyer when I was 11. And so I got to see her rise up through her own firm and she became the first female partner of her law firm. And so she worked really hard and yet she made dinner almost every night and my father started making dinner occasionally. But you know it was... and watching her just have so much more confidence. You know she really came into herself and she became this incredibly confident woman who could take on anything and she always has. But I really saw her develop as a person through her career and I was really lucky to have that as a role model.
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David Rubenstein31:54
So when you go back to Williams reunions, did people say we always knew you were going to rise up to be the next...?
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Adena Friedman31:59
Definitely not. Definitely not. Even my mother-in-law said that once. So no.
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David Rubenstein32:07
So your husband is trained as a lawyer.
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Adena Friedman32:10
Yes.
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David Rubenstein32:10
But now he's doing something a higher calling, right?
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Adena Friedman32:13
Right. He's a potter. He does pottery, teaches pottery. So yeah, he was a lawyer for many years and then decided that as I was becoming, you know, higher up in the organization, he wanted to be more involved with the kids. So he became a potter and then now he teaches pottery. He's actually on the board of the Glen Echo pottery studio here in Maryland.
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David Rubenstein32:34
And so do you ever buy any of his great...?
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Adena Friedman32:37
Yeah. Well, luckily I don't have to buy it, but I do buy other people's work and then he sells it through Glen Echo.
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David Rubenstein32:42
Now your husband's last name is Friedman.
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Adena Friedman32:45
Yes. But he's not Jewish.
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David Rubenstein32:47
That's correct. Well, his father's Jewish.
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Adena Friedman32:49
Oh, his father was. Okay.
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David Rubenstein32:50
So, his mother was Catholic, his father was Jewish, and he was raised as a Christian. But really, frankly, they eloped, and he grew up in Africa. His parents were in the foreign service.
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Adena Friedman33:00
So, he kind of grew up in a secular world more than a religious world.
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David Rubenstein33:03
Okay. Yeah. All right. So, today, as a final question, if you could do your career all over again, would you stay at Carlyle? Would you have gone into government service? What would you like to do different than what you've already done or nothing different?
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Adena Friedman33:21
Yeah, I literally... I have thought about that question more than once and I literally wouldn't change a thing. I've loved everything I've ever done. I'm so lucky, you know, to have all these opportunities. I got so many opportunities early in my career. Every two years I was given a new job and new adventure and then I... you know, lots of people including you took great risks on me and I've been really really fortunate. So I would not change a thing.
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David Rubenstein33:47
You never... you're not a person with self-doubt.
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Adena Friedman33:50
Definitely. No I actually I'm not. No.
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David Rubenstein33:53
Well it's obviously worked well. So look, you're really nice to come here and if I have any more companies to list I know who I should be calling.
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Adena Friedman34:01
I appreciate that. That would be great.
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David Rubenstein34:03
You did a great job for us and no doubt for all the other people that you have been working for. So congratulations on a great career and please come back again. Okay.
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Adena Friedman34:11
Thank you David. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. Thank you.