< The 2017 Tech 40

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

1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ 2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange Solana vs. Bitcoin vs. Ethereum: How Do They Compare? Sponsored by CME Group April 29, 2025 5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit

6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 7. David Craig Thomson Reuters 8. Michael Spencer NEX Group 9. Don Callahan Citigroup 10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group

11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 12. Terrence Duffy CME Group 13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments 15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings

16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp. 17. Steven Lieblich Citadel 18. David Rutter R3CEV 19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments

21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group 22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 24. David Gledhill DBS Bank 25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings

26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies 28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp. 30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence

31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma

36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems 37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz 39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions 40. Jim Minnick eVestment