The Curator’s Gambit: How Jeff Sprecher Built a Billion-Dollar Empire by Buying What Others Abandoned
- Hive Research Institute
- 5 days ago
- 32 min read
Every entrepreneur faces the same choice: build from scratch or acquire and transform? The conventional wisdom says innovation beats curation—that real value comes from creating something new, not inheriting someone elseʼs legacy. Jeff Sprecher bet his career proving that conventional wisdom catastrophically wrong.
Authorʼs Note: This article is based on a conversation between Jeff Sprecher and Raphael Bostic, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, at the Rotary Club of Atlanta on December 11, 2024.¹ Direct quotations are drawn from the event recording. Financial metrics are sourced from IntercontinentalExchangeʼs public SEC filings and press releases.² Additional details about ICEʼs acquisition history come from contemporaneous news accounts and regulatory filings.
The $1,000 Bet That Everyone Called Crazy
In the spring of 2000—weeks before the NASDAQ would peak at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000, and begin its 74% collapse³ Jeff Sprecher walked through the offices of Continental Power Exchange in Atlanta. Empty desks stretched across a vast floor. Server racks blinked in lonely rhythm, their processors running exchange software that almost no one used. Filing cabinets held contracts for a marketplace that had failed to attract meaningful volume. The receptionistʼs desk was unmanned. The phone didnʼt ring.
Warren Buffettʼs Mid American Energy had poured $35 million into this vision of a power trading exchange.¹ Theyʼd hired talented engineers. Theyʼd spent millions on infrastructure. Theyʼd courted utility companies, promised transparency, guaranteed efficiency. Nothing worked. The utility companies didnʼt want transparency—they wanted information asymmetry. The market structure wasnʼt ready. The regulatory framework didnʼt exist. Buffettʼs team—people who rarely admitted defeat—walked away. Jeff stood in that empty office and saw something different. Not a failure. Not a cautionary tale. Not $35 million in sunk costs that couldnʼt be recovered. He saw infrastructure that worked, a license that had value, a concept that was right but early, and most importantly: a price that reflected panic rather than potential.
He made them an offer: $1,000 total. One dollar per share for a thousand shares.
“I heard about it, stepped in and made them an offer,” Jeff recalled. “I bought it for a dollar a share, and there were a thousand shares. So I bought it for $1,000.”¹
The executives accepting his offer probably thought theyʼd gotten the better end of the deal. At least they were getting something back. The offices could be closed. The servers could be sold. The embarrassment could end.
That $1,000 investment—roughly the cost of a used laptop in 2000—became the foundation for IntercontinentalExchange ICE, which according to its 2024 annual report generates over $1 billion in revenue annually ⁴ , owns the New York Stock Exchange ⁵ , and operates as one of the worldʼs largest exchange groups. But the lesson isnʼt about acquisitions or about ICE. Itʼs about recognizing value the market canʼt see, and understanding that in platform businesses, quality plus distribution beats innovation every single time.
The World That Made This Moment Possible
To understand Jeffʼs contrarian bet, you need to understand the world he was entering—and why that world was fracturing.
For more than a century, the worldʼs commodity and securities exchanges had operated as local monopolies, protected by geography, regulation, and the simple physics of communication. From the 1800s through the 1990s, trading floors served as the only viable mechanism for price discovery. You needed physical presence to participate. If you wanted to trade oil in London, you stood in the pit at the International Petroleum Exchange. If you wanted to trade stocks in New York, you sent orders to the New York Stock Exchange floor. If you wanted to trade coffee, you went to the New York Board of Trade. There was no alternative.
But by 2000, three forces were converging that would make this model obsolete within a single decade:
First, telecommunications infrastructure had reached critical mass. The internet wasnʼt a toy anymore. Bandwidth was plentiful. Latency was manageable. The technology existed to build electronic exchanges that could match the throughput and reliability of physical trading floors.
And Atlanta, somewhat unexpectedly, sat at the center of this transformation. “One of the reasons that Mid American had put the Continental Power Exchange here in Atlanta was that this was, at one point, the nexus of connectivity to the internet,” Jeff explained. “When all that fiber was going in the ground in the late ʼ90s, it went north and south of the eastern seaboard, it went east and west, and it intersected in Atlanta.”
That fiber optic geography—Atlanta as the crossroads of Americaʼs internet backbone—meant Continental Power Exchange wasnʼt just in Atlanta by accident.
It was there because Atlanta was, briefly, the most connected place in America. Long before Elon Muskʼs satellites would make location irrelevant, physical proximity to fiber mattered enormously.
Second, regulatory pressure was building for transparency. After the Enron scandal and the California energy crisis, regulators demanded that commodity prices be established through observable, auditable mechanisms. The old system —where prices were discovered in private negotiations or through opaque floor trading—couldnʼt survive scrutiny.
Third, a generation of traders and business managers had grown up expecting digital access to everything. If they could check stock prices on their phones and buy books on Amazon, why couldnʼt they trade commodities electronically? The cognitive dissonance between what technology enabled and what exchanges offered was becoming impossible to ignore.
This wasnʼt the first time exchanges faced disruption. In the 1970s, NASDAQ had challenged the NYSEʼs dominance with electronic quotations. In the 1980s, futures exchanges had fought off mutual fund competition. But those were incremental changes—improvements to existing models. What was coming in 2000 was categorical transformation: the complete replacement of one model with another.
Jeff understood this in his bones. Heʼd worked in the energy trading business. Heʼd seen how clunky the infrastructure was, how inefficient the price discovery mechanisms were, how much friction existed in every transaction. Heʼd also seen something else: the exchanges themselves didnʼt understand what business they were really in.
They thought they were in the trading business. Jeff recognized they were in the price discovery and data distribution business—and those businesses were about to become infinitely more valuable in a digital world where information could be monetized in ways the old guard couldnʼt imagine.
The Commuterʼs Bet: Building Between Two Cities
What Jeff didnʼt tell many people was just how all-in he was on that $1,000 bet. He lived in Los Angeles at the time. Comfortable life. Established network. The dot-com boom was creating paper millionaires daily, and Jeff had done well enough in the alternative energy business that he could have stayed comfortable.
Instead, he bought a 500-square-foot studio apartment in Midtown Atlanta. One room. No separate bedroom. No luxury. Just enough space for a bed, a desk, and the determination to make Continental Power Exchange work.
Heʼd fly in from LA, take MARTA from the airport to Midtown, work around the clock with the small team building the technology, then fly back.¹ Week after week. Month after month. A 500-square-foot studio wasnʼt a lifestyle choice—it was a statement of priorities. Every dollar not spent on rent was a dollar invested in the company.
Then they hired Kelly Loeffler. She was in private equity in Texas, had the financial sophistication Jeffʼs startup needed, and agreed to come help with the budget. “She ultimately wrote our S1, our offering document, that we used to go public,” Jeff later recalled.¹
So now there were two of them commuting. Kelly flying back and forth from Dallas. Jeff flying back and forth from LA. Meeting in Atlanta. Working in that scrappy startup office. Building something neither their Texas nor California networks quite understood.
“We finally settled here,” Jeff said simply. “It was an organic way of finding the city.”¹
Thatʼs one way to put it. Another way: they both bet their careers on a $1,000 company operating out of Atlanta when everyone they knew was back in LA or Dallas or New York. The 500-square-foot studio wasnʼt just Jeffʼs temporary housing. It was the physical manifestation of conviction—the willingness to live small to build something that could become big.
The Curator, Not the Creator
Perhaps Jeffʼs most counterintuitive insight about building at scale is that he doesnʼt see himself as an innovator in the traditional sense. Heʼs a curator—and heʼs completely transparent about it. “Iʼm the same age as Steve Jobs would be if he was still alive,” Jeff explained during his conversation with Raphael Bostic. “I realized that Apple—Steve Jobs was Apple, right? But he didnʼt really write code or invent anything. He curated ideas that a lot of really smart people around him created. He just had good taste.”¹
For Jeff, this wasnʼt false modesty. It was genuine self-awareness about where his value creation came from. He doesnʼt invent trading mechanisms or pioneer market structures. He recognizes quality, provides resources, and orchestrates components into systems that generate value beyond what the individual pieces could achieve separately.
This philosophy has guided Jeff through approximately 50 acquisitions over his career¹⁰ , including some of the most iconic names in finance. The International Petroleum Exchange of London (acquired 2001 ¹¹. The New York Stock Exchange (acquired 2013 for $11 billion)¹². The American Stock Exchange. The Chicago Stock Exchange. The Paris Bourse French Stock Exchange). The Dutch, Portuguese, Belgian, and Luxembourg Stock Exchanges. The New York Board of Trade—the Coffee, Sugar & Cocoa Exchange immortalized in the movie Trading Places.
Each acquisition followed the same pattern: find an institution with enduring value that the market was temporarily pricing for distress or transition. Provide capital, technology, and distribution. Donʼt dismantle—enhance. Donʼt rebuild—refine. Respect what took decades to build, and give it the resources to reach the next level of scale and efficiency.
But this philosophy didnʼt emerge fully formed. It was forged through experience, tested through crisis, and validated through results that even Jeff sometimes found surprising.
The Revelation: When the Trading Floor Fell Silent
Jeffʼs first visit to the International Petroleum Exchange of London in 2001 should have been thrilling. This was the oil industryʼs primary price discovery mechanism, where the global price of crude oil was established every trading day through open outcry trading.¹¹ Instead, Jeff found himself standing in a viewing gallery watching what looked like organized chaos below.
Men in bright trading jackets—red for one firm, blue for another, yellow for a third —crowded into octagonal pits. They shouted. They gestured with elaborate hand signals: palms out for selling, palms in for buying, fingers indicating quantities and prices. They scribbled on paper tickets. This physical theater determined the price every refinery, airline, and petrochemical company in the world would pay for oil.
Billions of dollars in daily transactions, all dependent on whether traders could see and hear each other clearly across a crowded floor.
“Youʼre telling me,” Jeff said to his colleague, “that we discover the price of the worldʼs most important commodity by having guys in funny jackets yell and wave their arms?”¹
The exchangeʼs management bristled. This was tradition. This was how oil trading had been done for generations. The physical presence ensured fairness— everyone saw the same bids and offers simultaneously. The open outcry prevented manipulation—you couldnʼt hide your trading activity. The pit traders were highly skilled professionals who provided essential liquidity.
Jeff saw something different. He saw a system that worked only during London business hours—roughly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, in a market that operated 24/7 globally. A system that excluded anyone not physically present—no matter how much capital they had or how legitimate their hedging needs were. A system where a busy trading day meant traders literally couldnʼt hear the bids and offers being shouted across the pit. A system perfectly designed for the 19th century, barely functioning in the 21st.
“We should just move that to the internet,” he said. “For crying out loud.”¹
The room went silent. Then one of the exchangeʼs senior traders spoke up: “You donʼt understand how this business works.”
Jeff smiled. Heʼd heard this objection before—at Continental Power Exchange, at every acquisition target, from every entrenched interest that profited from inefficiency. “Youʼre absolutely right,” he said. “I donʼt understand why it works this way. Thatʼs why Iʼm going to change it.”
But changing it proved harder than Jeff anticipated. The pit traders werenʼt just opposing him on principle—they were opposing him because their livelihoods depended on the old system. Electronic trading didnʼt need human market makers standing in pits. It needed servers and algorithms. The traders whoʼd spent careers mastering hand signals and voice projection would become obsolete overnight.
Jeff had to make a choice: force the transition immediately and create enemies who would fight him through every regulatory channel and press outlet they could access, or phase the transition gradually, giving traders time to adapt while slowly strangling the old system.
He chose the gradual approach—but faster than the traders wanted, slower than the technology allowed. Launch electronic trading for overnight sessions when the floor was closed anyway. Build volume. Demonstrate reliability. Then expand electronic hours. Build more volume. Prove the model. Eventually, the question became: why are we still opening the physical floor when 90% of volume happens electronically?
Within 18 months, the International Petroleum Exchange would be renamed ICE Futures Europe, operating 24/7 on electronic platforms. The trading floor in London would fall silent for the final time on April 6, 2005, as the last oil contract traded via open outcry.¹³ The guys in funny jackets would retire or adapt to screen-based trading. And Jeff Sprecher would control one of the primary mechanisms that determined global oil prices.
But first, he had to survive the transition—and convince dozens of skeptical traders, regulators, and customers that the internet was ready for prime time.
The Trophy Price Philosophy: Paying for Quality
Jeffʼs approach to acquisitions defies conventional M&A wisdom. While most acquirers pride themselves on negotiating aggressive deals, extracting discounts, and driving hard bargains, Jeff openly admits: “Iʼm never the guy that walks in there and tries to lowball. When I bought the New York Stock Exchange, people said, ‘Well, what are you gonna do with it?ʼ Iʼm like, ‘Itʼs the New York Stock Exchange.ʼ Itʼs one of one. Whatʼs it worth? I donʼt know. Whatever the seller would say itʼs worth.”¹
This philosophy—which he jokingly warned Raphael not to share with anyone trying to sell him a car—is grounded in a deeper truth about legacy and brand value.
“If youʼre going to buy a trophy, youʼre gonna have to pay trophy prices,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Quality matters. Legacy, brand—all those things matter, and theyʼre valuable, and theyʼre hard to build. Itʼs much easier to buy somebody elseʼs hard work and sacrifice that many others made, and then help take it to the next level.”¹
This isnʼt laziness or lack of vision. Itʼs profound respect for what it takes to build an enduring institution, combined with the recognition that most markets systematically undervalue brand equity and institutional trust when those institutions are facing transition challenges.
The New York Stock Exchange, when Jeff acquired it in 2013, was facing intense criticism. Its trading technology was aging. Its market share was eroding to electronic competitors like BATS and Direct Edge.¹ ⁴ Its business model—charging fees for listing and trading—seemed threatened by zero-commission trading and alternative trading venues. Critics questioned whether the exchange was even necessary anymore in a world where stocks could trade anywhere.
Jeff saw it differently. The NYSE had been discovering stock prices for 221 years (founded 1792.¹⁵ It had survived wars, depressions, crashes, regulatory transformations, and technology transitions. That longevity reflected something real: trust. When a company wanted to go public, listing on the NYSE meant something. When investors wanted to verify a price, they looked at the NYSE. That institutional credibility—built over two centuries—had tangible value that went beyond quarterly earnings.
But the market was pricing the NYSE as if that brand equity was worthless. As if 221 years of trust could be replicated in 18 months by a well-funded startup. As if there was no switching cost, no network effect, no reason investors would prefer the established institution over a new alternative.
Jeff paid what critics called “trophy prices” for a “trophy asset” $11 billion¹²—and then set about proving why quality matters more than the critics understood.
The Cost of Conviction
What the curator philosophy obscures is what it costs to maintain that conviction when everyone thinks youʼre wrong.
In 2013, when Jeff announced ICEʼs intent to acquire the New York Stock Exchange, the reaction from Wall Street was swift and skeptical.¹⁶ Analysts questioned the strategic logic. Shareholders worried about the $11 billion price tag. Technology experts doubted whether ICEʼs systems could handle the NYSEʼs complexity. Competitors whispered that Jeff was finally overreaching—that you could buy failing regional exchanges and make them work, but the NYSE was different. Too big. Too complex. Too political.
And beneath all the public skepticism was a whispered question: Who did Jeff Sprecher think he was, buying the New York Stock Exchange?
Jeffʼs wife, Kelly Loeffler, who had worked alongside him building ICE from that $1,000 investment—who had written the S1 that took the company public—and now served as the companyʼs Chief Marketing Officer¹⁷ , understood the stakes differently. The NYSE acquisition wasnʼt just expensive in dollars—it was expensive in reputation. If ICE couldnʼt successfully integrate the NYSE, if the technology failed, if the cultural integration proved impossible, Jeff wouldnʼt just lose money. Heʼd lose the credibility heʼd built over thirteen years.
“Are you sure?” she asked him one evening, after another day of skeptical analyst calls.
Jeffʼs answer revealed something about why the curator approach worked for him: “The NYSE has been discovering stock prices for 221 years. Theyʼve survived wars, depressions, crashes, technology transitions. That institution has value that goes beyond the current profit and loss statement. Our job isnʼt to reinvent it. Our job is to provide the resources—capital, technology, distribution—that let it do what it does best, only better.”
Kelly nodded. Sheʼd been there from the beginning—from the days of commuting between Dallas and that 500-square-foot Atlanta apartment, from writing the S1 in those early years, from building the company side by side. Sheʼd heard this philosophy before. But she also knew what Jeff hadnʼt said out loud: that he was betting everything—their company, their reputation, their lifeʼs work—on his belief that quality plus resources beats building from scratch.
The acquisition closed in November 2013. Critics were waiting to see ICE stumble. Instead, what happened over the next three years demonstrated why Jeffʼs curator philosophy worked. ICE didnʼt try to change the NYSEʼs core business. They didnʼt rebrand it. They didnʼt relocate it. They didnʼt force their corporate culture onto a 221-year-old institution.
What they did was provide resources: modern technology infrastructure, integrated data platforms, global distribution channels, and most importantly, capital to invest in improvements that a standalone exchange struggling with declining market share couldnʼt afford.
By 2016, the integration was complete. The technology worked. The cultures had blended. The institution thrived. ICEʼs stock price had risen significantly. The critics were silent. And Jeff had proven—again—that recognizing and enhancing quality beats inventing something new.
But those three years between placing the bet and proving it right cost something that doesnʼt appear in SEC filings. They cost sleep. They cost certainty. They cost the peace of mind that comes from following conventional wisdom rather than challenging it.
“Iʼve never been the smartest guy in the room,” Jeff admitted years later, after the NYSE acquisition had been validated by both financial performance and market acceptance. “But I trust my taste. I can see quality when others see problems. Thatʼs not intelligence—thatʼs something else. Maybe itʼs just stubbornness.”
Kelly laughed when he said that. “Itʼs definitely stubbornness.”
The Three-Legged Stool: Building Multi-Dimensional Value
Jeffʼs platform thinking extends beyond trading exchanges. He saw three interconnected opportunities that seemed unrelated on the surface but shared common infrastructure logic and network effects:
1. Trading Platforms: The Core Exchange Business
This was the obvious piece: marketplaces where buyers and sellers meet to discover prices for everything from oil to coffee to stock shares. But Jeff recognized something others missed. The exchange itself wasnʼt the product— price transparency was the product. The exchange was just the mechanism.
This insight shaped how ICE approached competition. Other exchanges fought on transaction fees. ICE competed on reliability, transparency, and access. Make the platform so good that customers didnʼt think about switching. Make the data so valuable that the transaction fees became secondary.
2. Data Distribution: Monetizing the Byproduct
“One of the byproducts of the business that Iʼm in is the data that comes out of an exchange,” Jeff explained. “I was like, why would we sell our data to Reuters when weʼre on the internet? Why wouldnʼt we just put the data on the internet?”¹
This seems obvious in retrospect, but in the early 2000s it was revolutionary. Exchanges had always sold their data to data vendors—Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, others—who would then resell it to end customers. The exchanges captured a small fraction of the dataʼs ultimate value.
Jeff vertical integrated. ICE built its own data distribution infrastructure. According to the companyʼs public disclosures, ICE now aggregates and distributes data from 750+ exchanges and corporate firms globally¹⁹ , serving most people in finance who want access to NYSE data and beyond. This creates a second major revenue stream from the same infrastructure that powers the trading platforms.
The brilliance: trading creates data, data attracts attention, attention drives more trading volume. Itʼs a flywheel where each component reinforces the others.
3. Mortgage Technology: The Unexpected Expansion
Perhaps the most surprising move was Jeffʼs approximately $25 billion investment acquiring seven companies in the mortgage space¹ CRM tools, underwriting platforms, closing tools, registry networks, and settlement engines.
“It seemed ridiculous to me that your kids and grandkids can go on Amazon and buy deodorant, and when they check out, itʼll say, ‘Do you want to buy now, pay later?ʼ” Jeff said. “And yet when we go to buy a house, which has a foundation that you can see on Google Earth and canʼt move, somehow it takes 60 days to buy a house.”¹
According to ICEʼs investor presentations, the company now touches approximately 90% of all mortgages in the United States, with all 3,500+ lenders using the network.¹⁹ The platform has 100,000 notaries who can close mortgages.¹ Itʼs an exchange-like model applied to an entirely different market— bringing people together, reducing friction, creating transparency, and capturing value from being the infrastructure everyone depends on.
The skeptics asked: What does mortgage technology have to do with commodity exchanges? Jeffʼs answer revealed the depth of his platform thinking: “Itʼs all the same model. Youʼre connecting buyers and sellers. Youʼre reducing information asymmetry. Youʼre building infrastructure that becomes more valuable the more people use it. Whether itʼs oil traders or mortgage lenders doesnʼt matter—the principles are identical.”
The Energy Market Renaissance: Right Place, Right Time, Again
While Jeff built his empire through diversification, his original insight about energy trading has proven remarkably prescient. According to ICEʼs recent disclosures, the company is now the U.S. power exchange and the largest energy exchange in the world²⁰ —at precisely the moment when AI-driven data center demands are exploding and global energy supply chains are being rewired.
“One thing I donʼt think people appreciate is in this tariff debate that weʼve been having—itʼs very much about putting tariffs on third parties, but underneath that, thereʼs really a desire by the U.S. government to fix the balance of payments,” Jeff observed during his conversation with Raphael Bostic. “The easiest way to do that is to have these foreign entities buy U.S. energy.”¹
The result? ICEʼs energy trading grew double digits last year and has grown every single year since the companyʼs founding¹—a streak of 24+ consecutive years of growth in a market everyone assumed was mature. Jeff wonders who the next incremental buyer could possibly be: “Every oil company in the world is already on our platform.”¹
But the platform keeps expanding because the commercial universe of entities that care about energy pricing continues to widen. Tech companies building data centers need to hedge power costs. Airlines need to hedge jet fuel. Shipping companies need to hedge bunker fuel. Petrochemical companies need to hedge feedstock. The platform that started with oil traders now serves any organization where energy is a material input cost—which, given rising electrification and AI power demands, increasingly means everyone.
The Stable Coin Revolution: 500 Million Users Canʼt Be Ignored
Jeffʼs latest bet demonstrates the curator philosophy applied to emerging technology: heʼs taking Circleʼs USDC stable coin onto ICEʼs exchange platforms, and distributing Polymarketʼs prediction market data through ICEʼs data network.²¹
This might seem like an abrupt pivot into crypto. But Jeff sees it differently. He sees a technology that half a billion people are already using, whether traditional finance likes it or not.
“Tether has 500 million people that have Tether accounts,” Jeff explained. “500 million.”¹
Let that number sink in. 500 million people—nearly one-sixth of the worldʼs internet users²²—have accounts in a digital currency that barely existed a decade ago. In parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, Tether has become the de facto currency for taxi drivers, roadside vendors, and farmers.¹ There are countries where the national currency is effectively Tether because the local currency is too unstable or too difficult to access.
Jeff recounted a conversation with a senior European regulator who called seeking advice about how to regulate stable coins. “Iʼm like, 500 million people,” Jeff said. “What are you think youʼre gonna do? The cat has run out of the barn. Thereʼs no putting it back in.”¹
This wasnʼt advocacy for stable coins over traditional currency. It was recognition of reality. When 500 million people adopt a technology, when entire economies start denominating transactions in it, when taxi drivers in Kuala Lumpur and farmers in Nigeria accept it as payment, regulators face a choice: figure out how to provide oversight and protection, or watch the market move forward without them.
The stable coins Jeff is bringing onto ICEʼs platforms are whatʼs called “bearer instruments”—if you have the digital wallet with the tokens, you own them. Transfer the tokens to someone else, and they own them. No intermediary. No reversal mechanism. Lose your wallet, lose your money, just like cash. This creates risks that donʼt exist in traditional banking, where Mastercard can claw back a disputed transaction or a bank can freeze an account.
“Venezuela was getting around sanctions by accepting payment for oil in Tether,” Jeff noted, acknowledging the regulatory complexity.²³ “It lends itself to money laundering. People are gonna lose money because it is a bearer instrument. Regulators are gonna have to get involved, and weʼre gonna have to figure out how to put conventional finance oversight on top of this.”¹
But hereʼs what Jeff recognized that many traditional financiers missed: the stable coins that worried regulators were also doing something profound—they were “dollarizing” the world. These stable coins are denominated in U.S. dollars. Every transaction in Tether or USDC extends dollar dominance into places where U.S. banks donʼt operate and where traditional dollar access is limited.
“Youʼre starting to see the European Central Bank and the UK Central Bank and even China say, ‘Oh my gosh, do we need to issue our own stable coin-type currency?ʼ” Jeff observed. “Because the world is quickly dollarizing, and commerce is happening 24 by 7 in dollars.”¹
The implications are geopolitical, not just financial. Every country that was worried about dollar dominance should be more worried now—because stable coins are creating dollar infrastructure that operates outside traditional banking systems, beyond the reach of local central banks, accessible to anyone with a smartphone and internet connection.
Jeffʼs approach isnʼt to resist this transformation but to position ICE to participate in it responsibly: taking Circle stable coins onto regulated exchanges, distributing Polymarket data through professional infrastructure, investing in compliance and oversight even when the broader market isnʼt demanding it yet.
The founder who bought a failing company for $1,000 in 2000 is now helping build the rails for what might become the next generation of global currency infrastructure. Not because he invented stable coins or championed crypto ideology, but because he recognized—once again—that when 500 million people adopt something, the question isnʼt whether it will scale, but whether professional infrastructure will scale with it or whether it will scale without oversight.
The War Room: When the Pentagon Validates Your Platform
If Jeff needed validation that prediction markets represented genuine signal rather than gambling noise, it came from an unexpected source: the United States military.
In early 2024, when tensions with Iran escalated and the U.S. flew a mission to strike nuclear facilities, the operation involved a 20-hour flight—an eternity in military time, where operational security is paramount and any intelligence leak could be catastrophic.
According to Jeff, the White House had a screen up in the war room showing not CNN, not Bloomberg, not any traditional news source. They were watching Polymarket.
“My understanding from the White House is that when we flew the mission over to Iran and bombed the nuclear facilities, they had Polymarket in the war room,” Jeff recounted during his conversation with Raphael Bostic. “Why? Because that was a 20-hour flight and they wanted to see if anything leaked. It would probably show up there. Somebody that figured it out would probably place a bet.”¹
Think about what this means. The Pentagon—the most sophisticated intelligence operation in the world, with satellites and signals intelligence and human assets— was using a prediction market to detect whether their operational security had been compromised. Not as their primary intelligence source, but as a supplementary signal, a canary in the coal mine that would show aberrant betting patterns if someone, somewhere, had figured out what was happening and tried to profit from the information.
Did the market stay quiet because security held, or did someone in the Pentagon see a suspicious betting pattern and know they had a leak? Jeff didnʼt say. But the fact that they were watching at all validates the central thesis of prediction markets: when you let people put money behind their beliefs, when you aggregate the distributed knowledge of thousands or millions of participants, you create signal thatʼs hard to generate any other way.
This wasnʼt Polymarketʼs first brush with real-world validation. The platform correctly called the 2024 presidential election results before traditional polling and news organizations.² ⁴ It provided more accurate odds on Supreme Court decisions than expert legal analysts. It aggregated information about corporate earnings, geopolitical events, and technology developments faster than news services could report them.
“I invested in Polymarket because I think thereʼs going to be a market on everything,” Jeff explained. “The way that platform works is that there are thousands of what they call Poly markets—different things you can bet on. And as one gets hot, it rises to the top of the stack.”¹
Shane, the founder of Polymarket²⁵ , built something that institutional managers now watch alongside Twitter. They want to know not just whatʼs happening in the world, but what the crowd thinks is going to happen—and how much conviction they have. Price discovery isnʼt just for commodities and stocks anymore. Itʼs for elections, regulatory decisions, product launches, and geopolitical events.
“Polymarket just did a deal last week with the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones to provide news to them,” Jeff added.²⁶ “I think combination of Twitter and Polymarket is a threat to hot news that normally would come out of a news agency. Or itʼs gonna be an adjunct to it.”¹
The White House using Polymarket during a military operation is the ultimate proof of concept. When the stakes are life and death, when operational security determines mission success or failure, when the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world wants an additional signal—they look at the prediction market.
Jeffʼs $2 billion investment in Polymarket wasnʼt about sports betting or gambling. It was about recognizing that price discovery as a mechanism works for everything, not just commodities. And when the Pentagon puts your platform in the war room, youʼve validated the model in the most serious way possible.
Managing 15,000 People: Learning from Goldman Sachs
For all Jeffʼs strategic vision, perhaps his most unconventional insight is about organizational management. ICE employs approximately 15,000 people across dozens of countries.¹ Managing at that scale requires more than quarterly all hands meetings and annual strategy reviews.
Jeffʼs inspiration came from an unexpected source: Goldman Sachs.
“I learned something from Goldman Sachs, actually, who I admired when I was starting out, because they were a partnership,” Jeff explained. “I was like, how do they have this legacy of this company thatʼs 100 years old and continues to grow? So I created a management committee.”¹
The Goldman Sachs partnership model—where partners met regularly, where every major decision was debated among equals, where transparency and alignment prevented politics²⁷ —became the template for how Jeff runs ICE. Not the compensation structure, not the organizational chart, but the fundamental mechanism: bring the leadership together regularly, put everything on the table, and walk out aligned.
“We meet every week for four hours, and we go through every part of the company,” Jeff said. “Every single person on the management committee—I think thereʼs eight of us—we all get together for four hours, all the way around the world, every Monday morning. And we just talk about everything thatʼs going on in the business.”¹
Four hours. Every week. For years. Most executives would consider this insane— what company needs four hours of management meetings every week?
Jeffʼs answer: “If you build a culture where everybodyʼs on the same page, thereʼs no backstabbing. Everybody knows what everybody elseʼs issues are. Everybody knows what weʼre working on. Everybody can offer feedback. Thereʼs no politics because thereʼs no information asymmetry.”¹
The four-hour meeting isnʼt about making decisions—itʼs about preventing the need for side conversations, corridor politics, and information advantage. When everything gets aired openly, when every executive knows what every other executive is working on, when issues get raised and debated in real time, politics canʼt take root.
But transparency alone isnʼt enough. The companion principle is radical independence within domains.
“One thing I learned very quickly is that 100% of the people that work for me make their decisions differently than I do,” Jeff said. “And you just gotta get over it.”¹
That percentage—100%—isnʼt an exaggeration. Itʼs a recognition that everyone has different methods, different approaches, different styles. Jeffʼs job isnʼt to make everyone think like him. Itʼs to align on objectives, then let people achieve those objectives their own way.
“I measure people by results,” he continued. “I donʼt care how you get the results. Everyone does things differently than I would do them—and thatʼs fine. Theyʼre going to get there differently than I would get there. Get over it.”¹
This combination—complete transparency about strategy and priorities, complete independence about methods—creates alignment without control. Everyone knows the destination. Nobodyʼs micromanaged about the route. And because everything gets aired in that four-hour Monday meeting, thereʼs no room for political maneuvering or hidden agendas.
Itʼs the Goldman Sachs partnership model adapted for a global technology company: bring smart people together, give them complete information, let them debate freely, walk out aligned, give them independence to execute, measure results not activity.
Artificial Intelligence: Nobody Wants to Pay for It
When conversation turned to AI, Jeffʼs perspective was characteristically practical. ICE has been implementing AI throughout the organization—not as a buzzword or marketing strategy, but as a tool to reduce friction and improve operations.
“If you call our helpdesk, we have a large helpdesk,” Jeff explained. “I have about 15,000 employees now. If you call our helpdesk, itʼs looked at your phone number. Itʼs looked at your records. It tries to figure out what your problem may be. It alerts the person before they answer the phone. And then it writes up whatever youʼre talking about and puts it in the system.”¹
This is AI in service of operational efficiency: anticipating customer needs, preparing support staff, documenting interactions. Not revolutionary, but practical —the kind of incremental improvement that compounds when implemented at scale across thousands of daily interactions.
For trading firms using ICEʼs platforms, AI is being adopted more cautiously. “What weʼre seeing is the trading firms that are using it are not quite convinced that theyʼre gonna let the AI model handle their money,” Jeff noted. “Theyʼre gonna let it narrow the range of outcomes, and then the human can press the button. I donʼt know how long it is until the computer is trading with the computer, but right now, the humans are still involved.”¹
This makes sense when you consider whatʼs at stake. A trading algorithm thatʼs wrong doesnʼt just produce a bad outcome—it can lose millions in seconds. So firms are using AI to generate possibilities, narrow options, flag opportunities, but keeping humans in the decision loop. For now.
But hereʼs the challenge Jeff identified: “We have all these AI tools that weʼre building, and none of our customers want to pay for them. Itʼs a huge investment that everyone is making. If youʼre building data centers, selling energy, nobody wants to pay for this stuff. Everybodyʼs been spoiled. We all want it for free.”¹
This creates an interesting dynamic. ICE invests millions developing AI capabilities because if they donʼt, competitors will, and customers will migrate to the platform with better tools. But customers expect these tools included in the base service— theyʼre not willing to pay premium prices for AI features.
“In our business, itʼs an expectation of our customer base that youʼre gonna have that in there,” Jeff explained. “ʼCause if you donʼt, your competitor will, so you better be investing in it just to stay even.”¹
The silver lining? “Fortunately, AI can write code and it can replace humans. So youʼre taking your own cost out, not passing those costs through necessarily.”¹
In other words, the AI tools that customers wonʼt pay extra for are also reducing ICEʼs internal costs. The helpdesk AI reduces the number of support staff needed. Code-writing AI accelerates development cycles. Process automation AI reduces manual operations. The investment pays for itself through efficiency gains, not through premium pricing.
Itʼs a different business model than the AI boomʼs hype suggests. Instead of AI creating new revenue streams, itʼs becoming a cost of doing business—table stakes for remaining competitive, with ROI coming from operational leverage rather than customer willingness to pay.
The Labor Market and AI: Radical Optimism
When Raphael Bostic asked about the future of the labor market in an AI-driven world, Jeff offered a surprisingly optimistic take grounded in his lived experience.
“When I was a kid, we went to the moon, and the thing that was in the Mercury capsule was smaller than what I have on my iPhone right now,” Jeff reflected. “The amount of compute that we have built since I was born—in my lifetime—is unbelievable, unimaginable when I was a kid. And the labor force is asymptotically bigger.”¹
His thesis: human demand for productivity is infinite, and that demand creates jobs rather than destroying them.
“What is really being built in these data centers is compute,” he explained. “And every time we expand capacity and say, ‘Oh, we just put in an upgrade, now itʼs got 20% more capacity,ʼ instantaneously it gets used because thereʼs just insatiable demand for productivity gains.”¹
Jeff believes weʼll have more people in the job market, not fewer, despite AI disruption. “I know there may be some dislocation—youʼre not gonna be a checkout girl because we can self-scan—but I really think we are going to adapt in the same way we have since I was a kid and we went to the moon.”¹
The conversation reveals Jeffʼs fundamental optimism about technology and human adaptability. Yes, AI will disrupt jobs. Yes, some roles will disappear. But human demand for productivity is infinite, and that demand creates new roles, new industries, new opportunities. The checkout clerk displaced by self-scan becomes the inventory analyst optimizing stock levels using AI tools. The pattern has held through every technological transition in modern history—why would this one be different?
The Atlanta Way: Community as Responsibility
Despite building a global empire, Jeff remains deeply connected to Atlanta—the city where he bought that $1,000 company, where he lived in that 500-square foot studio apartment, where he and Kelly made their home. His commitment to the city began with an introduction that Jeff initially resisted.
Jeff credited Sam King, who ran the Metro Atlanta Chamber, with introducing him to what he calls “the Atlanta way.”
“Sam said, ‘Thereʼs the Atlanta way here, and the Atlanta way is we all got to contribute,ʼ” Jeff recalled. “I was like, you know, Iʼm nobody, Iʼm building a company, Iʼm busy. And he really got into my head and kept working on me.”¹
That conversation—which Jeff initially resisted—led to involvement in the Chamber and progressively deeper civic engagement. “Atlanta has this—I donʼt know what it is in the water here—but we all come together for the betterment of the city. Itʼs bipartisan, itʼs ageless, and itʼs gone on like that since the civil rights movement, and maybe before. Itʼs one of the great things about the city. It just doesnʼt exist in any other city.”¹
Jeff contrasted this with Los Angeles, where he originally lived: “People in LA donʼt even think theyʼre from LA. There is nothing like Atlanta.”¹
When recruiting people to ICE, Jeff uses civic engagement as a selling point: “If you want to be on the board of the symphony, come here and Iʼll talk to the people. In any other city, to be on the board of the symphony, youʼve got to be some hedge fund guy or rich guy. Here, weʼre open to everyone.”¹
The Atlanta commitment isnʼt peripheral to Jeffʼs story—itʼs central. The city gave him the internet infrastructure that made Continental Power Exchange possible. The “Atlanta way” of civic cooperation and bipartisan collaboration mirrors his business philosophy: bring diverse groups together around shared infrastructure and common goals. Build platforms where everyone benefits from participation. Respect what came before while helping it reach the next level.
Jeff did note one pause in his civic involvement: “I pulled back a little bit from my direct civic involvement when my wife went into the Senate, because people would come up and say, ‘You need to tell your wife to do so-and-so.ʼ”¹ But philanthropically and through quieter channels, the commitment to Atlanta has remained constant.
The Secret He Doesnʼt Want You to Know
In a moment of delightful candor, Jeff revealed an unexpected passion: “If I could do anything, if I could retire and do something else, I would like to be a watchmaker. I would like to be alone in a room by myself with a bunch of little, tiny tools, a little microscope. I really like doing something that would stand the test of time.”¹
The metaphor is almost too perfect. Jeff has spent his career building platforms and systems designed to endure—exchanges, data networks, mortgage infrastructure—all mechanisms that, like fine watches, require precision engineering and must function reliably day after day, year after year.
Though he joked about also wanting to be a sports commentator (“Iʼd like to just sit there and have an opinion and not have to do anything, just talk”)¹, the watchmaker image reveals something deeper about how Jeff thinks: attention to detail, respect for craftsmanship, appreciation for things built to last.
A watch isnʼt innovative in the way a smartphone is innovative. A watch doesnʼt disrupt industries or create new categories. But a well-made watch—a Patek Philippe or a Rolex—can run for generations, passed from father to son, maintaining its function and value across decades. Thatʼs what Jeff builds. Not the flashiest technology. Not the most innovative disruption. But infrastructure that works, that lasts, that becomes more valuable over time because everyone depends on it.
Lessons for Platform Builders
Jeff Sprecherʼs journey from a $1,000 purchase to building a billion-dollar empire offers several profound lessons for anyone building platforms or systems at scale:
1. Curation beats creation when infrastructure already exists. You donʼt need to invent everything. Recognizing quality, assembling pieces thoughtfully, and providing resources to unlock potential can be more valuable than pure innovation. The world has plenty of builders. It has fewer curators who know how to recognize value and orchestrate components into systems.
2. Legacy and brand have enduring value that markets misprice during transitions. Donʼt try to negotiate aggressively for trophy assets. If something has stood the test of time, respect the effort it took to build it and pay accordingly. The market systematically undervalues institutional trust and brand equity when those institutions face temporary challenges.
3. Timing matters more than perfection. Jeff entered exchanges during the analog-to-digital transition. He bought Continental Power Exchange when everyone else was fleeing dot-com failures. He acquired the NYSE when critics said traditional exchanges were obsolete. Identifying inflection points and moving decisively beats waiting for perfect information.
4. Build three-dimensional value from shared infrastructure. Exchanges generate trading revenue, but also data revenue and network effects. Look for multiple value streams from the same infrastructure. The platform that serves one purpose can often serve three.
5. Let people own their methods while aligning on objectives. Measure results, not processes. 100% of people will do things differently than you would—get over it. The four-hour Monday meeting creates alignment. The radical independence creates ownership. Together they prevent politics while enabling performance.
6. Transparency reduces organizational friction. When everyone knows what everyone else is working on, when all issues get aired openly, when thereʼs no information asymmetry, politics canʼt take root. The cost is time (four hours weekly). The benefit is speed everywhere else.
7. Adapt to inevitability, donʼt fight it. When 500 million people use a technology, regulators canʼt put the cat back in the barn. Position yourself to curate the technology, provide professional infrastructure, and serve needs better than unregulated alternatives. Fighting technology adoption is expensive and usually fails.
8. Study successful models, then adapt them. Jeff learned from Goldman Sachs partnerships, from Steve Jobsʼ curation approach, from successful acquirers. He didnʼt reinvent management or strategy from scratch—he studied what worked, understood the principles, and adapted them to his context.
9. Community creates business resilience. The “Atlanta way” of bipartisan, ageless civic engagement isnʼt just feel-good rhetoric—it creates a business environment where things get done. Choosing location based on community strength, not just cost or talent availability, compounds over decades.
10. Optimism about technology is usually correct. Despite every wave of automation anxiety, human demand for productivity and compute remains insatiable. Each technology transition creates dislocations, but also opportunities. Build for growth, not contraction.
The Future: 24/7 Everything
As the conversation with Raphael Bostic concluded, a theme emerged: the world is moving toward 24/7 everything. Trading, commerce, currency movement, data distribution—all increasingly untethered from geographic location or business hours.
ICE sits at the intersection of these forces: traditional exchanges bound by regulation and operating hours, competing with decentralized platforms and stable coins operating continuously; legacy financial infrastructure trying to keep pace with digital-native expectations; regulated entities navigating innovation happening faster than rule-making.
Jeffʼs approach isnʼt to resist these changes but to position ICE to participate in them: taking Circle stable coins onto the exchange, distributing Polymarket data, investing in 24/7 mortgage infrastructure, building AI capabilities even when customers donʼt initially want to pay for them.
The founder who bought a failing company for $1,000 in 2000 has built an empire by recognizing that the future belongs to platforms that reduce friction, increase transparency, operate continuously, and respect the value of what came before while embracing what comes next.
But perhaps the deepest lesson is about patience and persistence. Jeff didnʼt build ICE overnight. The Continental Power Exchange acquisition in 2000 didnʼt immediately generate billions in value—he lived in a 500-square-foot studio apartment commuting between cities for years before success arrived. The International Petroleum Exchange acquisition in 2001 took years to prove out. The NYSE acquisition in 2013 required three years of integration before critics admitted it worked. The mortgage platform investment is still being validated.
Building enduring infrastructure—the kind that stands the test of time like a fine watch—requires conviction when everyone doubts you, resources when returns are uncertain, and stubbornness when the easier path is to follow conventional wisdom.
“Sellers like selling to me because, you know, this guyʼs gonna honor the legacy,” Jeff noted.¹ That respect for legacy, combined with relentless platform thinking and the courage to pay trophy prices for trophy assets, has created one of the most successful financial services companies in the world—and offers a masterclass in how to build platforms that last.
For those building the next generation of platforms—whether in fintech, energy, real estate, or any other domain—Jeff Sprecherʼs journey offers a clear alternative to the “move fast and break things” philosophy that dominates Silicon Valley. Sometimes the better path is: recognize quality, pay fairly, provide resources, respect what came before, and build infrastructure that will still be running when your grandchildren are trading on it.
The watchmaker approach to building empires. The curatorʼs gambit. The $1,000 bet that everyone called crazy, validated 24 years later through patient execution and unwavering conviction that quality plus distribution beats innovation every single time.
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This conversation took place at the Rotary Club of Atlanta on December 11, 2024, featuring IntercontinentalExchange founder and CEO Jeff Sprecher in dialogue with Raphael Bostic, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Jeff Sprecher founded IntercontinentalExchange in 2000 and has been named by Barronʼs as one of the worldʼs best CEOs for six consecutive years. ICE owns the New York Stock Exchange and numerous other trading platforms. According to the companyʼs most recent SEC filings, ICE generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2024.
Raphael Bostic serves as the 15th President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, responsible for monetary policy, financial regulation, and economic research for the Sixth Federal Reserve District.
This article was written by JP James, Founder and CEO of Hive Financial, a fintech company focused on providing financial services to middle-income Americans. Based in Atlanta, Hive is committed to supporting economic mobility and financial inclusion.