Adena Friedman

How Adena Friedman took over Nasdaq and became its first female CEO.

In 1993, fresh out of Vanderbilt with an MBA, Adena Friedman stepped into Nasdaq as an unpaid intern.

“I graduated saying I wanted to be a product manager but not for shampoo. I wanted to manage complex products. Nasdaq gave me that shot.”

Adena’s first big win?

Resurrecting a failing initiative called PORTAL.

Nasdaq had launched it three years earlier.

No revenue.

No traction.

So she did what good product managers do: rewrote the plan, added a fee model, and made it profitable.

That fee structure is still in place today.

Over the next two decades, she helped transform Nasdaq from a trading venue into a tech-first global exchange.

She led the company through its biggest acquisitions.

She ran data products, corporate strategy, M&A.

Then left to take Carlyle Group public as CFO.

She came back to Nasdaq in 2014.

This time, as President.

And in 2017, she made history becoming the first woman to lead a global stock exchange.

But don’t mistake her for a figurehead.

She calls Nasdaq “an engine for capitalism.”

But she doesn’t mean that in the old-school sense.

Adena is obsessed with modernizing the system: making public markets more accessible, using AI to hunt financial crime across billions of transactions, and transforming Nasdaq into a platform company with tech and data at its core.

In her words: “We have to unleash technology to its full potential… because the criminals already are.”

When COVID hit, she didn’t wait.

She split her entire team into two rotating groups to keep the exchange running.

While other CEOs were navigating Zoom, she was processing 550 billion messages through Nasdaq systems. In a single day.

Her leadership is disciplined, methodical, and razor-sharp.

No press-for-the-sake-of-press.

No slogans.

She serves on the board of the New York Fed.

She’s the only exchange CEO to ever hold that seat.

She holds a black belt in taekwondo.

She started training after taking her sons to class.

“It helped me become more fearless in business"