EDITOR’S NOTE: Goizueta alum and founder/CEO of SecondMarket Barry Silbert was recently featured in a weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. Silbert discussed his company and the future of Wall Street trading.
“No entrepreneurs I know aspire to be a public-company CEO anymore,” Barry Silbert recently told The Wall Street Journal. Silbert, a Goizueta alum and founder/CEO of a successful startup — SecondMarket — said fundamental changes in the world of stock trading have changed outlooks.
SecondMarket is an SEC-regulated alternative trading system, registered broker dealer and member of FINRA, MSRB and SIPC.
“Working for a restructuring firm… he encountered ‘situations as a banker where there were illiquid assets, whether it was private-company stock or otherwise. I was always shocked there was no centralized place to go to, an eBay-type platform.’ So he quit the firm and put together a business plan,” writes Mary Kissel for the WSJ.
“It was like a Wall Street version of a Silicon Valley garage start-up,” Silbert said of SecondMarket’s beginnings. “Our technology was a telephone and an Excel spreadsheet. But over time, we were able to develop such a deep pool of buyers and such a large amount of assets for sale that we had to really start investing in technology to make the process more scalable, more efficient.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, In 2010, SecondMarket traded $10 billion in assets. In 2009, it was $2.5 billion. In 2008, it was $1 billion.
As for the future of the industry?
“There’s not going to be a concept of public versus private,” Silbert told The Wall Street Journal. “What there’s going to be is companies trading on different markets, and those markets have different rules.”
