What keeps you up at night about our financial system?
There are times that I feel as though we don't move fast enough or we haven't moved fast enough. I'd say it's everything we're doing around tokenization, for example. The fact that money can move and settle instantaneously, that's a good thing. We probably should have done that many years ago.
Where would you say as students are looking to go to college or not go to college? What would your recommendation be to someone who is, I would say, better words like a top recruiter for all these companies?
We're going to learn how to use AI to enhance what we do and continue to evolve. It's going to displace some jobs, but I think it's really important to upskill people so that they become AI literate, for lack of a better description.
Do you find that our schools are preparing kids for the world ahead in terms of math, science, English, or do you think that they've kind of veered away from just what they should be teaching in classroom?
I think they had veered away from the core math, science, and even English curriculums. We left New York City during COVID because it became a challenging place to raise children.
Hi everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller podcast. We're so excited to be in New York City today at the New York Stock Exchange with Lynn Martin. Thanks for joining us today. So glad to have you here.
We just came off the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, an incredibly historic place. How do you think the stock exchange has truly shaped the course of American history and left its imprint on the fabric of our society?
The way I think about NYSE is we are the plumbing that has really enabled America to achieve the greatness that it has. And when I say the plumbing, it is because of the financial markets and the uniqueness of our financial markets. The depth, the breadth, the liquidity that only occurs in our financial markets. That is the fuel oil that fuels that next great innovation. The innovators in America time and time again prove that they're able to get funding for that next great idea and turn it into those transformational technologies and services that we all relied on. We've been doing that for 233 years.
What do you think are some of the traditions that have permeated beyond the New York Stock Exchange American culture as it relates to this historic building? As you walk in and you see the school kids outside and you see all the tour groups, right? It's such an American institution. How do you help preserve and protect something like that?
It's a great responsibility and one that I certainly don't take lightly. I think it all comes down to we're a symbol of freedom when you think about it. We're where this symbol of freedom in that freedom of investment, freedom of opinion, freedom of discourse. Even if you look at the market, someone's got a buy order, someone else has a sell order. Those are two completely different opinions. And we allow them to meet in the middle. And by meeting in the middle, that's how they form wealth. That's how they form the basis for what's going to plan for their retirement, send their kids to school, buy their first home, all of the great things that are part of the American dream.
Many famous American corporations are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. So, all the blue chip companies you can possibly think of. And since Donald Trump has taken office, he's done and made it a priority of his to reshape corporate culture and how corporations have been behaving in the preceding four years that relates to wokeness and DEI in the workplace. How did the New York Stock Exchange handle those type of policies DEI and how have you chosen to change or stay the same since his election?
Yeah. So, since President Trump has taken office, the market's done incredibly well. Now, markets don't just go in one direction. Sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, but if you look at the wealth that has been accumulated over the last 18 months of his tenure, I say 18 months because it was really election night that you started to see that bump in the market. I think if I take a step back, the way corporations have adapted to it for years prior, there were very prescriptive rules on diversity and inclusion and things of that nature. And I think you actually saw it really come to a head with some of the proposals that the SEC under the previous administration had put out around disclosure around what it means to be diverse. From our perspective, we've always taken the view that these are the greatest leaders of corporations that the world has ever known. They know how to run their business. It's not our place to say in order to make your business better or drive outsized returns, you need to have X number of whatever group on your management team, on your board, whatever the case may be. Now, coincidentally though, diverse opinions are good for companies, but every CEO should have the tools and the ability to shape their own journey and what diversity means to them. Should that be something like diversity of experience? Should it be something a diversity of where you've grown up? But that's up to a CEO. That's not for us to describe.
In 2023, I saw that you guys hosted an event for equality for women. Do you think by hosting events that single out certain groups, it creates less equality by saying we're different?
So, I think that the worst thing you can do is just ring fence what diversity is. I actually think in the long term, it hinders the progress that women, for example, have made in the boardroom. We tend to be more focused on meritocracy as opposed to bureaucracy.
You guys still have a group that I think it's called the board for diversity or some type of something launched in 2019 that was supposed to tell and help companies create such diversity. Where does that stand now?
So, we've actually pivoted it. It became such a popular service. It's called board advisory services. Initially it was focused on one specific area to really meet the needs that corporations were asking us for. When a company comes to us and asks us for I would like to enhance my boardroom using these different demographics, we tend to respond. Now if I look at our board advisory services, it's got more than a thousand candidates, men, women, variety of different backgrounds. And that's because we've had a continuous evolution on what our companies have requested for us.
When companies though come to you and say, 'We're trying to hire these specific groups of people,' wouldn't you say it's in violation of the president's executive orders and that those therefore can be subject to EEOC complaints and EEOC investigations?
You know, we've actually had less of those types of requests. We've had more skill set requests than anything in the last couple of years. So I need a former CFO that has scaled a SaaS company or that has scaled an energy company and we'll say is there a specific type of background or even...
Have you found that like the specific racial based requests or ethnic based requests have definitely decreased in the last I would say 18, 20 months?
I think the specific the demographic specific requests have decreased over the last year and a half, call it. And again it's back to skills base which is what it should always be. And by the way if you have a killer CFO that has scaled a SaaS company and that company is now worth half a trillion or a trillion dollars happens to be female that person should probably have a board seat but again that comes back to meritocracy and everything that someone has achieved in the past as opposed to just being a woman.
Last fall, I interviewed Adena Friedman, the CEO of the NASDAQ. Why do you think it is that both stock exchanges are run by women?
I don't know. It's a good question. Perhaps it's that women are good at finding the middle ground and matching those buyers and sellers together.
You studied computer science. You're one of the rare people who don't have a political science, anthropology, philosophy degree. How have you transformed a technical degree and I would say an actually skills-based degree into a real life business setting?
Yeah, it's interesting because when I graduated with my degree in comp sci, as you pointed out, I started as a coder, right? I very rapidly though learned that me talking to a machine is not my pinnacle of joy. I actually need to talk to people in addition to machines. I do like talking to machines, but I like talking to people as well. I always thought that I was going to go on for a business degree after I graduated and while I was working in my first job coding, I wound up getting a math degree, which is not exactly a business degree, but it's just the way my brain works. I tend to have a more quantitative brain as opposed to one that's focused more on the arts. Quantitative things just make more sense to me. So when I went on for my masters, it wound up getting finance as a concentration but approaching it from the purely technical perspective. And then I've kind of been in the right place, right time that the digital age really formed in my post-college years.
Do you think kids graduating college today or choosing not to go to college, right? They say the new college is the kids who leave high school and build their own businesses. Do you think that master's degrees like the one you got are just as important today, especially in being hired into some of these corporations?
Yeah, it's something that I'm actually trying to think about as a mom too. Like what do I want my kids one day to study? I think there are certain parts of the arts, math is actually considered most times an art and not just technical, that teach critical thinking, critical reasoning. And I think those skill sets are going to continue to be incredibly important even in light of the fact that we're going to have artificial intelligence as part of our lives and agents as part of the way we operate.
Will you be an early adopter of robots or a late adopter?
I think I'm going to be an early to mid adopter. Probably not the first person because I don't know what a robot's going to do to my house, my kids. But I will probably be an earlier to mid because I could use some organization in my house. And as a fellow mom, I'm sure you're thinking the same way. Like, here's the task list that's not getting done.
When can you unload my dishwasher?
Exactly. Can you unload my dishwasher, clean up after dinner, make dinner?
Yeah. Your dad was an electrical engineer. What age did you get into coding?
I got into coding in the... I started fiddling around with computers in the mid 80s. So I was about 10.
Is that how you absorb information now as a leader of a company? When your subordinates or your employees come to you to present information, is it more qualitative in nature, quantitative in nature? How would you define how you receive information, how you expect it from others?
It's got to be quantitative in nature because I feel as if it's just qualitative, that's a spin. And I need data before I get a spin. Every time I've had a qualitative person just approach me with flowers and platitudes, I'm like, 'Okay, where's the data behind that?' And I will never represent something publicly unless it's data-based.
So, you've been here for how many years at the company?
So, I've been in this role for four years, but I've had a 25 year career at different parts of the organization. Been through a lot of mergers.
At what point in your career did you have children?
I had children when I was chief operating officer of a startup we were doing. So I'd say that was probably about 13 years into my career. But I was still very much climbing the corporate ladder.
And I'm going to do some personal questions so please don't mind but how old were you when you had your kids?
My first was 36 and my second was 39. I met my husband when I was almost 30.
We met in a bar in the Hamptons. Such a boring story. I'd love to give you a great story around we solved a mathematical proof together, but we met the old-fashioned way.
What does he do and how do you guys make it work raising kids while you have a pretty demanding career?
He's also in the financial services industry, but he has a far less demanding, less time-intensive job than I do, which is fortunate because and I always tell people that you got to find a good partner. Because he doesn't travel for his job and I spend a lot of time on the road.
How old are your two sons, right?
One is about to turn 14, which is an interesting age, and 11.
And so do they... have you gotten them into coding or what are the primary skills that you're trying to teach them in your job where you come across a multitude of different businesses and see the skill sets that you're hiring? What are you teaching your son?
So I've tried to teach them coding. I've tried to get them into coding. They have been in every coding camp after school program possible and the coding bug has not bit either of them. I have them both doing math, and focusing on math. And my oldest in particular is quite good at math. My youngest is actually more of an actor. He's gotten really into performing and doing plays and things of that nature. So, he's been more on the communications side than anything else.
Do you find that our schools are preparing kids for the world ahead in terms of math, science, English, or do you think that they've kind of veered away from just what they should be teaching in a classroom?
I think they had veered away from the core math, science, and even English curriculums. It's interesting because I've got two different kids, two different schools. One, my oldest's school is very much focused on sort of the math and science track but English has been behind and then my other one, English, social studies, you know, the more the liberal arts has been very much front of mind for them but the math curriculum is watered down. So I'm like, can I take all the good of this school and all the good of that school and kind of smash it together so that way they would get the well-rounded...
And you're raising your kids in New York which has kind of been the ground zero for this woke education, woke school of thought where the teachers are proud to say that they're indoctrinating children or teaching the children other things that maybe the parents wouldn't want. How are you navigating that?
Yeah, my favorite story on this, which is not a great story, is so during COVID we were living, I was raising both kids in New York City and they were in the New York City public system and they were actually fortunate in that they both tested into quite a good school. We left New York City during COVID because it became a challenging place to raise children.
Is this when gifted and talented kind of fell off?
Yeah. Yeah. We moved to a suburb just outside of the city. And my third grader, his first couple of days of school, came home. He was third grader at the time. And said, I said, 'How's school?' He's like, 'Oh, the kids are nice. You know, some of the stuff we're doing is pretty similar to what I was doing in the city.' He's like, 'But they stand up every morning and say this thing.' And I don't know what it is. And I said, my husband and I are like, 'What do you mean?' He's like, 'I don't know. We all stand up and we look at the flag and say something and then we sit down.' And I said, and my husband's like, 'The pledge of allegiance.' And he said, 'Oh, how does it go?' And my husband and I both started reciting it. And he said, 'Yeah, what is that?' So, he had never learned that in the New York City school system, but he learned that outside of New York City. And I just found that to be so instructive about where we had gone a bit wrong as a country that it doesn't matter what background you're from. It doesn't matter what religion you're from. It's we all live in America. We should be proud to be Americans.
In the age of moving forward into AI and how the technology boom has really arrived again right in this country and you have a computer science degree. How has that benefited you and how you as a leader are looking at companies and you're looking at how you're going to use AI here?
Yeah, it's enabled me to go back to my coding roots in that I know the most important thing when you're coding or using technology is what you're putting into the system. In the case of AI, that's data. So where is the source of truth? And then when you're putting that data into a model, how do you protect the most sensitive data so that it doesn't wind up in the wrong hands? So I'd say in terms of our own implementation of AI, it's more responsible implementation of AI that make sure that data privacy is maintained while still getting the good results that you expect and also ensuring that it's the source of truth as opposed to another biased area.
Which model do you think is going to be the best by the end of summer?
They're all moving so darn quickly. I don't know. I find that Grok has actually really progressed in a much quicker fashion than I normally would have expected it. I also...
There's many different Polymarket lines on this right now. Which model is going to be best? So what says you?
I don't know. I don't know because there was just one that Jensen talked about yesterday as going to become the next version of Claude or Gemini or Grok or whatever. So, it just feels like there could be one that none of us have heard of that winds up taking the lead.
You're not just running a business here. You're also a global ambassador. You have a lot of foreign leaders come through the doors.
Which country or ambassador has surprised you or have you taken a thing and you're like, 'Wow, I did not know that about that nation,' especially someone who's as well traveled and studied as you.
Yeah. In terms of the leaders that have come through recently, I mean, if I think about some of the most iconic bells we've done, we did a bell in... I'm going to date this one, but it actually meant a lot. We had President Zelensky ring the bell from the bunker right after Labor Day in 2022, right after doing a round table with a bunch of CEOs. It was a very different time, but it was the fact that a world leader would take the time to do that really put a mark. President Milei was a trip. That's probably a good way to put him. I mean, I really respect what he's doing and the way he's delivered on what he's delivered on for Argentina. Hosting him was a tremendous amount of fun. Not only because of the energy he brings, but because he was just so business focused. Even the president of South Korea that we hosted last year, it was very much a please come do business with us. We would love to welcome your business. So those world leaders that come in with more of the open mind on business are the ones that impress me the most.
What are they normally most curious about about the United States?
A lot of times they're curious about how our capital markets have formed, what has influenced our capital markets and why they've become the envy of the world. Many times someone will say how do we replicate? It's like well we've been doing this for 233 years. It's really tough to replicate. But a lot of them also seek guidance. You tell them the moves you made more recently on regulation are allowing American businesses to further flourish. And some of the countries I hear that are imposing more regulation as opposed to less regulation on their countries.
As we talk about AI, there's tons of headlines. There's no shortage about how AI is going to take all of our jobs and create doom and spiral for all of these college graduates, right? As you look at your kids and the future and you have these interactions with CEOs, what would your advice be to young people in terms of what should they be studying? Obviously you have a coding computer science degree which is so almost fortuitous for where... fortuitous but also the job that's also the job that AI is theoretically to replace. Replacing you could technically be an AI programmer I guess. But so where would you say as students are looking to go to college or not go to college what would your recommendation be as someone who is I would say better worse like a top recruiter for all these companies?
What I always... well first on the AI taking everyone's jobs, this is the next great technology evolution, revolution. 1950s, given that I was a coder, I remember people used to walk around with punch cards or I had learned that people walked around with punch cards and getting those moved to actually operate these mainframe computers. There was a guy doing that. That guy got a different job as technology advanced. This is going to be the same evolution. We're going to learn how to use AI to enhance what we do and continue to evolve. So, I don't know that it's going... it's going to displace some jobs, but I think it's really important to upskill people so that they become AI literate for lack of a better description.
So you see at the working level a lot of these companies whether you look at Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, any of these companies right a lot of their engineers are not women. That it is just not something that women are intuitive at doing. Yet you've done it. Why would you say that it is a genetic difference that women are not destined to be engineers? And is that something that you think more women should go into or is there an alternate path as this new age is among us?
I think it's actually an opportunity. This technology age is an opportunity for women to become more comfortable with technology and what the technology jobs of the future are going to be because we're all going to be using technology. Technology and maths in general has been this big scary thing for women. And even when you think about how universities in the past had recruiting, they had recruited their students, they would tend to see a woman and say, 'Okay, got a great English program, art history.'
Do you think it's genetic though that women inherently aren't wired to think the same way as a man in terms of sitting at a computer and needing maybe more social interaction?
I think that in the past, and I think it's gotten better, but I think in the past, the curriculum wasn't made interesting to a woman. It didn't match a female's natural interest. It more matched a male's interest. So, playing with robots, building cars, that's, you know, the more traditional things that a boy growing up, that's my boys played with. You know, they wanted to build the robot to beat another robot or they wanted to build a car to go faster or things of that nature.
Yeah, my boys are driving cars and my daughter is sitting there playing dress up with her Barbies, right? But virtual. How to build a program to allow for fashion design or allow for a Barbie to interact with other Barbies. That's something that would have been much more interesting for your daughter. So I do think that the way the education, the extra education, not what's being taught in schools necessarily, but the clubs, things of that nature are more targeting female interests are going to enable more women to get into these.
Are you working with any of these companies to replace the coding that they currently have as their infrastructure? Much of our financial infrastructure is built on COBOL, especially as all these AI companies are moving to Python. And so how do you expect to replace what is aging code to come up to where we need it to be in order to protect our grid infrastructure, our security infrastructure and others?
Yeah.
That's an area that at least we at NYSE are seeing a tremendous amount of benefit from AI because you can't find the Cobol coders. You can't find a Fortran programmer. You can't find a Pascal programmer. But there is still that legacy code out there. How do you take a machine, for lack of a better description, with some oversight because the machine will make errors, and allow for a much speedier replacement of technical debt.
What do you think is the greatest challenge facing companies in the next 5 to 10 years? I would say let's go five years.
Yeah, let's go five. Five years. I would say the biggest challenge is that they don't develop strong use cases for AI and instead they just deploy AI for the sake of deploying AI and don't see the expected results.
Do you think it's much to do about nothing or do you think it is something the fact that the Pentagon wants to pull Anthropic out of their system for them pushing back on how the Pentagon intended to use it?
I think it's going to be an interesting debate as to how AI gets deployed for national security and infrastructure. I don't know where it will wind up but it's sparking an interesting debate. It also I think is sparking an interesting debate just on AI use cases and how companies wind up using AI and deploying AI. The other I would say I don't call it controversy among social media is you know use cases among kids and how they intend and use social media whether that be TikTok or Instagram.
What do you do personally for your children?
Yeah, this is the big debate with my 14-year-old. First debate number one was when do you get the iPhone.
And what's your determination on that?
So I wait till seventh grade and I had it locked down. My 11-year-old uses a watch to keep in touch with me. But the lockdown aspects of the phone is no social media. I think there's a responsible way to roll out social media. I think social media has a tremendous amount of benefits, but put into the hands of someone whose brain is still developing and still figuring out right and wrong and the power of certain tools such as our children, I think it's really important to go a little bit slower.
Do you agree with Australia's ban on 16-year-olds not having social media and under?
Again, that comes back to what we were talking about earlier, like why 16? Why 15? Why 13? Why 18? I don't know what the right number is because every 16-year-old is going to have a different level of maturity. But I am a fan of delaying a little bit until you as a parent know that your kid is mature enough to be able to understand the power of social media. Power for good, power for bad.
When a new founder comes here presumably and they're launching or having conversations, they're very excited about where they've gotten to. Is there anyone that's come in, we don't have to name names, I guess, but we can be less specific and you're just like they didn't treat other people the way you expected and you don't know how they got to where they were.
I think there are times that people come in with just an idea and they've not yet done the work to refine the strategy. A lot of times those companies haven't gone public yet though and I actually think that's a benefit of the private markets that those companies who haven't yet developed the maturity, the emotional intelligence to be a public company in addition to their strategy, they're allowed to stay private for a bit longer.
What's the biggest misconception people have on how the markets actually work?
The biggest misconception that people have is that first that the exchange can influence a price of a stock. You really can't. It's that the exchange doesn't spend a tremendous amount of time focusing on technology. Technology is table stakes. And when you think about the amount of messaging that goes through this building alone, we process on peak days 1.2 trillion incoming order messages a day. You have to be thinking about your underlying technology, not just from an efficiency standpoint, but from a reliability and resiliency standpoint and a protection of the data coming through here.
If you could teach every American one lesson about investing, what would it be?
Do it for the long term. Don't focus on the moves in the market in any one given day.
Do you ever recommend a specific stock to people?
I don't. I tend to look at broad market indices.
Do you ever ask AI which stocks you should be investing in and then do it?
No, but that's actually an area of opportunity I see for certain parts of AI and for certain models. The more retail-facing models for example, like I think a Grok or an OpenAI and some of their models, they could actually be a great enabler for the retail audiences to get smarter about the market.
What keeps you up at night about our financial system?
There are times that I feel as though we don't move fast enough or we haven't moved fast enough. I'd say I changed the way I phrase that because I think in the last year and a half, you've seen the market starting to move to really use the technology that exists to address the inefficiencies. The blockchain technology, stablecoin, the digitization of certain items that will enable much more efficient market moves. Everything we're doing around tokenization, for example, the fact that money can move and settle instantaneously, that's a good thing. We probably should have done that many years ago.
You've seen a lot of companies succeed from the moment they decide to go public and some struggle. What separates the ones that succeed from struggle?
The ones that succeed are the ones that have a durable strategy and are not trying to be everything to everyone.
I think you can tell pretty well during their testing the waters process and on the run to IPO.
What's one technology that's transforming the way Wall Street works that people aren't thinking of today?
I think AI is transforming the way Wall Street works because it is putting more thought through analytics at the hands of the individual investor in a very rapid period of time. You're enabling a human to distill everything that has gone into a stock from a fundamental standpoint, recent earnings transcripts, if they've had an investor day, what the CEO has said publicly, you're doing that in a matter of seconds and minutes, which is enabling you, my parents, to make investment decisions very quickly. And I don't think we fully understand the power that that's having on the end investor.
Do you think the SEC's recent proposal to remove quarterly earnings is a good or bad thing?
I think it is good in many cases. My one area where I just have a question mark is what is that going to mean for disclosures in the short to medium term for a company? Like will a company still put out a quarterly financial statement? I think that's going to be really dictated by their investors. But I think the premise that you want companies to focus on building and less time prepping for short-term dealing with regulatory burdens is a good thing as long as there's some permanence to it, too. I would hate to see something as transformational as this, provided there's the transparency, the financial transparency element still there. I would hate to see that get pulled back if there's any changes in administration in the future.
What's a typical day for you like?
It is manic. And, you know, I always tell people I have a schedule and eight days out of 10, I don't follow the schedule because something pops up. It is an absolutely tremendous job and an honor to have this job, but it does mean you're pivoting all throughout the course of the day.
Are you working Saturdays and Sundays?
