Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
What marks the passage of time? Maybe the retirement from one of the best known companies at the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, that's NYSE with a symbol GS, of a leader who devoted 37 years of his career to the firm and became one of its legends. ICE's Founder and CEO, Jeff Sprecher sent around a Bloomberg news story this week to Jeff's own management team here at ICE. It told the story of the legendary Tim O'Neill, one of the eight remaining Goldman partners from its pre-IPO days, who, at age 69, is finally ready to head to greener pastors.
Tim got his start working alongside former Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the law firm founded by Wild Bill Donovan, the World War II OSS hero who went on to become the first director of the CIA. They came to Goldman in 1985. And as fate would have it, Tim became a mentor and a cheerleader for our own Jeff Sprecher when he started ICE in 2000. As Jeff tells the story, he and co-founder Chuck Vice, business plan and hat in hand, called on 107 companies in the first two years of forming Intercontinental Exchange looking for partners in their new venture, many of which showed the pair of the door. It wasn't until Tim O'Neill and Goldman took Jeff and Chuck under their wing, goading them, encouraging them, coaching them that the business took off.
As Jeff told a Bloomberg reporter, Tim was the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz. Well, in some ways, ICE has its own wizard in the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain, and one of the truly original cast members of the company that started with Jeff's purchase of it for a dollar and now has a market cap of 60 billion of those dollars. People know the names of ICE's pioneers like Sprecher, Chuck Vice, and Edwin Marcial, but many haven't really gotten to know another one of the OGs, our Chief Information Officer, Mark Wassersug, previously our Chief Operating Officer in SVP Operations.
Mark joined the firm in its nascent months in 2001, and now, 21 years later is, like Tim O'Neal at Goldman but with a fewer gray hairs, approaching his own retirement and the next chapter in his life, which, as we will learn, will take him high up into the mountains with perhaps another industry to transform and make more efficient. Coming up, our very special valedictory conversation with Mark Wassersug, a Wizard of Oz you may have never heard of but who helped transform ICE from an idea on paper that 107 meetings struggled to jumpstart into the world's foremost operator of exchanges, clearing houses, data services providers, and overseers of the technology that drives the mortgage industry. Our conversation with Mark Wassersug is coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
Connecting the opportunity is just part of the hustle.
Opportunity is using data to create a competitive advantage.
It's raising capital to help companies change the world.
It's making complicated financial concepts seem simple.
Opportunity is making the dream of home ownership a reality.
Writing new rules and redefining the game.
And driving the world forward to a greener energy future.
Opportunity is setting a goal.
And charging a course to get there.
Sometimes the only thing standing between you and opportunity is someone who can make the connection.
At ICE, we connect people to opportunity.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Mark Wassersug, is sadly the outgoing Chief Information Officer of Intercontinental Exchange. As I said, he's been with the firm 21 years, really since the company's founding, but doesn't look to me like a day over 35. A native of New Jersey, an engineer from Lehigh in Pennsylvania and an MBA from Emory in Georgia. Mark is one of the OG members of the ICE management team and its former COO. Mark's about to hang up his cleats and strap on his ski boots. But we're visiting with him at the NYSE this week, and so glad that he could stop by the ICE House on his way out the door to, first, remind us of the journey that he's had, the things he's seen, and as we pivot through the show, look ahead to a passion we both share and how to make the experience of enjoying the great outdoors even better in the years and decades ahead.
Welcome, Mark inside the ICE House.
Mark Wassersug:
Good morning. Great to see you.
Josh King:
Great to see you. Sort of a whirlwind couple days for you. What's going on at the NYSE today? How do you feel?
Mark Wassersug:
Nostalgic, a little sad, and very excited.
Josh King:
How does today feel compared to the first day you arrived at the NYSE working on its biggest ever deal at the time in which ICE would buy this place, lock, stock, and barrel?
Mark Wassersug:
My first experience with the NYSE was the Friday after Thanksgiving when Jeff, Edwin, Chuck Vice, myself, and a few others got on a plane and flew up to New York to meet with Duncan Niederauer and the entire NYSE management team. It had been shortly after Superstorm Sandy hit, and we were holed up in some legal offices. And sitting across the table, much like I'm sitting across the table from you two gods of the industry. We were a ragtag bunch of guys from Atlanta who had no street cred outside of we were running a pretty good derivatives exchange. We're sitting across the table actually having a discussion around buying the New York Stock Exchange. It was surreal and exhilarating, but surreal and scary to the same degree.
Josh King:
It's been about a year mark since I worked on this big announcement with Doug Foley of some of the major changes at ICE, which would include the news that you were moving from this longtime perch that you had as ICE's CEO to this new role of Chief Information Officer. What was the mission that you set out to accomplish as CIO, and what are some of the milestones that you achieved over the past year?
Mark Wassersug:
I'd been running operations since 2001, as you mentioned in the introduction, and had been COO for five years. When Chuck Vice left... actually before, he put me in a COO. I really worked on crafting my team, which has been with me for anywhere from 14 to 19 years, and really putting all those leaders in a position to really work autonomously without me. Fortunately, they can do that quite well. I approached Jeff with another idea for me from a career growth perspective. What we have done in operations throughout the entire history was looked to standardize how we do things, standardize the way we take phone calls, standardize the way we design servers, standardize the way we communicate with our customers and our staff. I saw an opportunity to do something similar across our development and overall enterprise technology stack.
I approached Jeff with it, pitched him, and he said, "Look, I think it's a great opportunity for you. I'd love to see you do this. I think it would be great for ICE." At the same time, we've got Stuart Williams who was running one of our European exchanges, he was looking for another opportunity himself. So it was a perfect opportunity to put Stuart in and move me to this new role.
Look, it's a hard role to fill in a company with a lot of diverse technology, but my approach was twofold. One, I wanted to find enterprise tech that we could standardize across the company. It would save us money, it would be more efficient, and ultimately we'd want to bring best-of-breed tech to our employees. Second, I thought it would be an interesting pipeline for the NYSE from listings perspective. Where I think we have great opportunity is to get in much earlier with entrepreneurs, CEOs of startup companies, Series A, Series B type companies, and begin the relationship there. We can begin a relationship from a commercial standpoint, whereas their technology might be something we at ICE want to use. And if not, we could give them a opportunity in a relationship because we could give advice for how to work on their product roadmap, or at least at a minimum it's a relationship because I was at a startup at ICE 21 years ago. I can actually give some interesting advice about the challenges that we faced, which are not dissimilar to the challenges that entrepreneurs face today. And I've been relatively successful at that.
Josh King:
What have some of those conversations been like?
Mark Wassersug:
When people hear that I started at ICE and there was less than a couple hundred people at the company and now we're 10,000 in a $60 billion market cap, their eyes bug out. And all they wanted to do was pick my brain about, "Well, how did you deal with growth? How did you deal with scaling? How did you deal with technology? What about security?" You can imagine the questions are endless. I'm trying to keep them focused on, "Hey, let's talk about the NYSE, let's talk about your technology." Everybody asks different questions, but the general gist of the questions is, how do you get from point A to point B in a successful way much the same way that ICE did?
Look, I'm a down to earth kind of guy. I'm very approachable. I don't BS around, I'll just tell you how it is. Some of the entrepreneurs find that interesting, and some of them, especially when I'm looking at their company and I'm not quite sure what they do or how their tech would ever work or why they've got people all over the world or why they have a thousand employees when we had 100 or 50 doing the same job, that's the kind of advice I would talk about, is look at costs, look at scaling, and figure out what you absolutely must have, and if you don't need it, get rid of it.
Josh King:
So if you're helping those companies go from point A to point B and perhaps getting rid of some of the fluff that goes along with that, why was it time to think about you going from point B to point C and leaving this great place that you've been here for 21 years?
Mark Wassersug:
Yeah, it was a real hard decision. I mean, look, I love this place, and I have a tremendous amount of pride in what we've done. I have a tremendous amount of pride in the people that I work with. Because the teams that I've been able to work with broadly across this company, and in my role I've been able to visit almost every single office at ICE and I've been able to meet the people who are getting the real work done, and we have passionate, dedicated, amazing employees. When I look back at the legacy that ICE has been for me, that has been the hardest thing to be able to walk away from.
But the reality is, look, I was 32, I actually started on my 32nd birthday at ICE, and I'm 53 now. I feel like I've done what I needed to do. I am leaving this place in a much better position than when I came here. I think for me it's just time to think about what is next. I've got a lot of things to give, I've got a lot of passions outside of work, and I want to begin to explore some of those and evaluate what Mark Wassersug 2.0 is.
Josh King:
And we'll begin to evaluate the Mark Wassersug 2.0 in a couple minutes. But let's go back to how it all began for you at ICE, and it actually begins with a passion for engineering that you and our founder, Jeff Sprecher, share. The story doesn't really begin to unfold at ICE but rather at an Atlanta apartment complex and an intelligence mission focused on solving a problem, problem-solving being one of the core values at ICE, this one involving sanitary conditions in you and Jeff's elevator.
Mark Wassersug:
Yeah, yeah. I've known Jeff since couple years before I even came to ICE. We happened to live next door to each other in a condo building in Midtown Atlanta, 805 Peachtree Street. Jeff was this late 40s guy who was either always at work or always shut in his condo. My wife and I, who were recently married, moved into the condo and met Jeff just because he was our next door neighbor. We just hit it off. Honestly, we both felt just bad for him because he was pale, he looked like he'd never seen the sun. He was always traveling or always just sitting in the condo. In the condo, we had this great pool and a gym, and we had all sorts, and it was a pretty fun place to live. He never wanted to come out, so we befriended him. I'm like, "I feel really bad for this guy, so let me just go and hang out with the guy."
Every time I'd go over there, which was I guess next door, he'd have Natural Light in the fridge, so we'd grab a Natty Light, and he would sit around and talk to me about what's going on in his industry, this business that he was trying to build. Well, that sounded really interesting. I was in technology, and it turns out ICE actually hosted their servers in the data center that I was working for, Exodus Communications. So fast forward about a year, I am now on the condo board, I'm the treasurer of the condo board. As the treasurer, we had just taken over the condo association from the builder, and I realized that we were underrunning budget significantly. I had to raise dues, HOA fees, by about, I think it was like 35%.
Josh King:
Not insignificant for the residents.
Mark Wassersug:
It was painful. It was painful. We did a presentation in front of all the residents. I got up there, I know Jeff was in the audience at this time. Now, Jeff had one of the smallest apartments, so it didn't really matter to him so much. Let's put it this way, it was a contentious discussion. And I think.
Josh King:
And he had not brought down a couple cases of Natty Light to smooth over this conversation.
Mark Wassersug:
I probably needed a few before and after, but I had to be sharp. Anyway, I did the presentation, I was handling the questions, and I think, honestly, that was the first time Jeff took notice and was like, "Oh, this guy actually might know a thing or two."
Jeff loves to tell the story, which I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but he is not, that we did have a problem in our building. Residents were allowed to have pets, small dogs, as long as they followed the rules, which was take the dog outside to a particular area, let it do its business, clean it up, come back into the building. From what I recall, there were one or two residents that might have had dogs that had issues. And there were issues, and I think that there were some cleanup issues. It's not that the resident was necessarily not trying to do the right thing, I just think that perhaps it didn't have the right tools to fully clean up what should have been cleaned up.
In any case, this was brought up to the board, and as the guy who had stood up in front of all the residents and could handle the flack from raising HOA fees by significantly, they said, "Go deal with this, Mark." Phase two was find the resident, make sure that they understood the rules. Actually more importantly, we added some sanitary wipes in the elevators so we could solve the problem if it wasn't just the resident issue, if they didn't have the proper tools. Ultimately, look, you can solve a problem, you can put a Band-Aid on it, or you can fix a problem permanently. For me, I always look at the approach of, "Let me just fix the problem. Let's not go just tell the resident that he needs to do a better job," it's "Let's make sure that this never happens again." Ultimately, that methodology, that theory has been with me throughout life, and that's how I ran operations at ICE as well.
Josh King:
Talking about running operations at ICE, so apparently this guy Sprecher thinks you're just the kind of problem solver he needs at this new business that he is starting with Chuck called Intercontinental Exchange. What's he telling you about what's going on at this new firm, the former Continental Power Exchange? And then what happens when you find yourself at lunch at Gordon Biersch with him and his co-founder, Chuck Vice?
Mark Wassersug:
He didn't even tell me. He set me up with this interview, which was he positioned it as a sales opportunity. Again, ICE was customers of ours at Exodus Communications Hosting, and he said, "Mark, I'd like you and our sales rep to come and meet us at Gordon Biersch, and we're going to talk about a new opportunity." I got the salesperson involved, she and I walked in, Jeff went with her to the left, and I met this guy, Chuck Vice, and he said, "Let's go sit down." He grilled me for an hour and a half on what my background was, what I knew about trading, what I knew about technology, how I felt about operations for 90 minutes.
We didn't talk for four seconds about selling him anything. We finished the meeting, and I was like, "That was terrible." I went over to my counterpart and I said, "How did it go with you?" She's like, "He didn't ask me anything. We just sat around and had a couple beers and ate. That was the weirdest thing in the world." Two days later, I'm sitting at my desk at my office and the phone rings. I pick it up, and it's Chuck Vice, and he says, "Hey, I'd like you to come work for me." I'm like, "Well, what do you want me to do?" And he said, "Well, I'd like you to be our director of systems operations at ICE." I said, "Oh, what does that mean?" He said, "It's best if you just come here and let me explain it to you."
So look, I really respected Jeff, really liked Jeff. Went over to Jeff and I said, "Knock, knock. Hey, this guy, Chuck Vice called me who I met the other day. What's the deal?" He said, "I don't really know." He's like, "I think you should just go talk to him." So I went into the office-
Josh King:
I can so see Jeff doing this.
Mark Wassersug:
I went into the office, sat down with Chuck, he walked me through what ICE was doing and what were some of the technical challenges they were dealing with and the customer challenges. And he said, "I want you to come and run the team." He said, "Jeff really respects you. Jeff likes you. I liked you from the faux interview that we did. Come run the team." I said, "Okay, what's the team?" "Well, it's two people, one who is a complete HR nightmare and a problem, and you'll have to deal with that, and the other one who's pretty good."
I went home, and I talked to my wife about it and thought about it. I didn't approach Jeff because I knew he wasn't going to give me anything. I said, "You know what? Let me just go for it. Let's just see what happens. I respect this guy. It's in Atlanta, I don't have to pick up and move anywhere." Honestly, I was doing business development, some strategy at Exodus, but the data center industry, unlike today, was faltering. We had this idea of cloud in the mid to late '90s and it just wasn't purpose-built for cloud the way it is today.
Josh King:
So you get in the door, and we're going to talk a little bit more about the timing later, but you get in the door and Chuck says, "Good luck. See you later," but what did you find when you got in the door?
Mark Wassersug:
All right, so my first day at ICE, I sat down with Chuck for an hour in the morning. At nine o'clock he walked me into the help desk, and they had just done a systems release. Our head of product, RJ Cummings who retired about a year ago, and then our head of QA, John Lawler, were standing toe to toe screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. Both these guys were Chicago guys, I think they were former trading guys on the floor of CME or CBOT. They were screaming, and I swear to God, they were going to punch each other. Chuck, he just looked at me and he said, "Good luck," and he walked out.
So I'm standing there and I said, "Who works in system operations?" Because he didn't introduce me to the employees. I met Todd and I met Betsy, and we started talking and I'm like, "Hey, what's going on over there?" They said, "Oh, we did a release and the exchange is down and all the prices in the markets are inverted. So if anybody does try to trade, they'll get the wrong price and we'll have to back out all the trades." I said, "Well, who's responsible? Who's handling this?" They both looked at me and they're like, "I guess you are."
Josh King:
Bring us back to 2001. What was the problem that ICE was trying to solve for its customers in those days? What was ICE then?
Mark Wassersug:
We wanted to bring transparency to energy markets, which were broker-based markets where you didn't really have good price discovery, you didn't have an opportunity to effectively hedge because you just didn't know where the market was. Jeff's idea in 1997 was, "Let me take these bespoke markets to the internet. Let me light them up, and let the world see what price discovery means, and let the world be able to transact with others all over the world regardless of who it is at the best price at the time." That was the goal, and that was the mission.
In August of 2000, they launched the first exchange. I think they had probably 700 users on there, from the Goldmans of the world. Jeff had done an amazing job of bringing participants to the market. It was bubblegum, shoestrings, a lot of duct tape. The first launch, the server was sitting under Mike Bixler's desk, and we had a ragtag bunch of scrappy individuals who were handling the phones. Phone calls were traders who were incentivized to trade on the exchange calling in saying it was too slow and the prices were wrong and there was system errors.
So it was the first several years were really challenging in that we knew what we wanted to build and we tried to build this high-speed exchange that it took us a lot of time and a lot of years of trial and error to get to where we eventually in the mid 2000s built an extraordinarily robust system that was evolved, mature technology, had disaster recovery, high availability, it was phenomenal. But the premise was right, and we know the premise was right because about a month after I got to ICE, Enron Online went out of business. We saw our volumes in terms of the number of traders and the volumes of trades per week double for about eight straight weeks.
Can I tell you, those were probably the most stressful time of my life because every day we'd finish at the exchange at 18:00, we would bring the exchange down for two hours to do maintenance, we'd drive down to the data center, we'd throw a bunch of servers and switches and configure everything. And then we'd drive back to the office and we would bring the exchange back up. We had two hours to do it every single day.
Josh King:
I want to get back to that exchange as it was in its more mature state in the mid-2000s and a couple minutes, but let's go back Mark even further. I want to listen to a quick clip, The Sopranos, the famous Pine Barrens episode in 2001, season three episode 11, Tony Sirico as Paulie Walnuts and Michael Imperioli as Christopher Moltisanti.
Speaker 5:
This is no fucking joke here. I going to lose a foot.
It's numb, huh?
What the fuck you think?
How can we be lost like this? We're in fucking New Jersey.
South Jersey.
Hi. Maybe we see some of these berries.
Are you nuts? Shit like that could be poisonous, you don't know. Come on.
Josh King:
Mark, would you be better to survive a night in the Pine Barrens than Paulie Walnuts?
Mark Wassersug:
I think after living in Georgia for almost 30 years that I'd struggle in the winter in the Pine Barrens for sure.
Josh King:
What was growing up there like though?
Mark Wassersug:
It was fantastic. I grew up in Medford, New Jersey. I moved there when I was in the second grade. We lived in this house that was built in the '70s, it had no air conditioning. We had central heat in one half of the house, and then in the other half of the house we had a wood burning stove. They had recently paved the road that I lived on a couple years before I got there, but if you left my house and you turned right and you went to the end of the street, it was dirt roads and just endless forests of pine and lakes for miles and miles and miles.
It was fantastic. I had a lake in my backyard. I grew up fishing, canoeing, sailing, loved to swim. I wasn't a typical New Jersey Jewish kid; I wasn't going to summer camps. I was spending my summer camp in my backyard with my friends riding BMX bikes and really just enjoying the outdoors. And really, my passion for being outdoors stems from my early childhood where I was outdoors all the time. Mom in the summer said, "All right, eat breakfast and get out of the house. I'll see you guys at 18:00. Figure out what you're going to do for lunch. Come back at 18:00 for dinner."
Josh King:
So mom kicked you out of the house, Mark. He learned also a lot from your dad who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and really thrived living off the grid in a quasi basis. What did he teach you?
Mark Wassersug:
Dad was an engineer also and worked for the EPA for about 35 years. He came to the Philadelphia area, lived in New Jersey running the division of the EPA in Philly.
Josh King:
Probably from when Nixon started it.
Mark Wassersug:
Yeah, early on. He was actually with the public health service prior and then moved from the public health service to the EPA when the EPA was first founded. Look, dad, he grew up post-depression era, single parent home, didn't have a lot. Look, the idea of making the most with what you have and figuring out creative and innovative ways to solve problems with your hands and your wit, those were major lessons that my dad taught. We weren't hiring people from outside, it was like, "Let's go figure out how to build the shed in the back. Let's go figure out how to put the brick walkway in. Let's go figure out what we need to do to make a beach in the backyard."
It was trial and error, and it taught me, take some risks to figure some things out on your own and trust your gut about working through problems. Don't shy away from potential opportunities if failure is the only reason. That's lived on, and those were milestone moments for me in terms of my abilities to learn how to do some things, but also give me the courage to explore, to test, to take some risks.
Josh King:
Don't shy away from opportunities if failure is the only reason. But at some point along the line, Mark, your dad goes way off the grid, accepting a job during the first George H. W. Bush administration to move to Budapest, Hungary of all places with the Eastern European Environmental Center. Did you end up harboring any resentment toward your folks for bringing the family to Eastern Europe during your prime years?
Mark Wassersug:
Well, actually, I was in college. Both my brother and I were in college. I harbored a little resentment because we left, I was working at the Jersey Shore, I was parking cars at the Sands Casino. The beginning of the summer, my parents said, "Hey, we got this opportunity to go to Budapest." I was a college kid working at the beach and parking cars. I'm like, "Yeah, it sounds great. Awesome." At the end of the summer they said, "Hey, we're leaving for Budapest and we rented the house, so you need to come pick up your stuff because the renters don't want it here."
Yeah, there was a little bit of like, "Huh, okay, I wish I had some more notice or maybe I wish I had paid attention a little bit more." But ultimately, look, the one thing that I do have to say from that is it taught me to be extraordinarily independent. There were no options. There's no backstop to go home. We didn't have the place I grew up in anymore, and I wasn't going to go to Budapest to go hang out for the holidays or fly over there for three days of Thanksgiving. My brother who's a year younger than I, he was in Virginia at the time at school, we figured out how to do what we needed to do. And much similar to how my dad taught us in terms of, "Go figure it out for yourself and get it done with what you've got," we figured it out.
Ultimately, I think if I look at my life going forward, the lessons learned of cutting the ties in my early 20s and being independent ultimately I think helped shape the person I am today.
Josh King:
Talking about being independent, Mark, figuring out how to do what you needed to do, there's another show that was formative for me as a younger man anyway. For 139 episodes from 1985 to 1992, Richard Dean Anderson was MacGyver on ABC, that's NYSE Ticker DIS for the Walt Disney Company. Let's have a listen.
Speaker 6:
Great. Now, break the tube and plug it fast like I just did.
[inaudible 00:30:18].
Done. I don't believe it.
Now, we're going to work the tube through the sealer. Now when I pull the core, hopefully I'll get a momentary suction in.
You ought to give us enough time to get the phosphorus out of there.
You with me, captain?
Under the circumstances, MacGyver, why don't you call me Carol?
Okay, Carol. Nice and slow.
Josh King:
You are a computer kid, a math geek, a science nerd, as you'd profess yourself. I think of you as the MacGyver of ICE. How did that start by becoming an engineer at Lehigh?
Mark Wassersug:
I've always been a tinkerer and I loved, loved MacGyver, so I'm with you right there, Josh. I used to get radio controlled cars and take them apart, try to understand how it worked and put them back together. Usually I put it back together correctly too. Sometimes reverse was forward, and forward was reversed, but those are good learning moments. So I've always been a tinkerer. I was always into science. I loved chemistry. I mean, in a different show we can talk about I had an advanced chemistry class and we'd spend time in the lab afterwards building small explosives. I love the sciences, and I was a math kid.
For me, actually growing within Pine Barrens was perfect because I had the laboratory all around me. I could look at biology, I could look at chemistry, I could do all sorts of things outside. My dad bought us my first computer, the Apple IIC... Gosh, I don't even know, I must have been in eighth grade. He didn't buy us any word processing programs, so I had to learn basic on the five and a quarter inch floppy drive, so I had to learn basic. And then I wrote a program to build my first word processor. Passion for computers was always there for me. In high school I took programming languages and as an engineer in college, you of course are doing programming. So it was always there. If you combine the idea of technology and computers with the idea of being a tinkerer or a nerd scientist, it was a perfect combination to come into ICE with, because especially in the early days, we just had a lot of problems that somebody just needed...
Look, by the way, I'm not saying I solved all the problems, but I was able to herd a lot of the cats to be able to at least focus on the problems and figure out novel ways to do it, and again, on a shoestring budget. We didn't have a lot at ICE. So I think that parallels my past.
Josh King:
Well, I mean talking about paralleling your past and bringing to bear down in Atlanta what you learned in both New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and ultimately Maryland on one of your assignments, you'd think that a young newly-minted engineer from Lehigh would have the world on a string. But you end up just a couple miles away in Philadelphia at a firm called Environmental Technology Management. They have clients like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. Your job is to suit up in hazmat suits and find where the toxic agents like mustard gas are amid all of their unexploded ordinance on that property, sort of like Breaking Bad meets The Hurt Locker. A fun assignment?
Mark Wassersug:
I loved it until all of a sudden I realized that I could be dead any given day. My job was I went to work for environmental consulting firm, because I was a civil and environmental engineer graduating from Lehigh. They put me on assignment to go and monitor hazardous waste sites. Monitor meant go dig up soil samples, put them through the lab, and test where there's those pollutants and what kind of pollutants are in the environment. Well, the particular firm had a contract with the Department of Defense. and so my first sites were DOD sites. You mentioned Aberdeen Proving Ground. I spent four or five months popping holes in unexploded ordinance burial sites. Unexploded ordinance is a bomb from the '40s or '50s or '60s that they just bury in a pit. No idea if the bomb is decommissioned, no idea if the actual warhead is still live.
As you mentioned, back in the '40s and '50s, they had nerve agent explosives, munitions, that they were pretty certain were buried in certain areas, and we didn't know where they were. So when I'm strapping on the Tyvex suit and the gas mask and they're training me on how to put the anti-nerve antidote into my leg with a four-inch syringe, I started to question, "What am I doing here?"
Josh King:
You could be doing a lot more with that Lehigh degree, maybe.
Mark Wassersug:
Look, so I spent three years doing that. I got myself off the hazmat jobs. I then spent two years working for Georgia Pacific. I did a bunch of their environmental programs across the United States at their various plants and mills and realized that, look, I love engineering, but I didn't love the project type work.
I knew I loved computers and I loved the whole idea of operations and workflows. So I dropped out of the workforce and went to business school for two years, and it was at Emory. Took a Stafford loan and got my MBA. I actually started a dotcom company in my second years. I took an entrepreneurial class and wrote a business plan and the professor said, "I'd love for you to actually go and execute on that." He actually funded the company and I ran it for my second year at business school. When I graduated, I had a decision, do I want to stay with this thing, this entity that I had built or is it time to do something else? Ultimately, looking forward, I said, "This thing is never going to survive, but it was a good experience," and went off into the workforce as a newly-minted tech MBA focused on operations.
Josh King:
Newly-minted tech MBA focused on operations. I mean, just to chart that journey from doing the environmental work in Philadelphia, you and your wife get in the 1982 Honda Prelude, grab your Rand McNally Atlas and head to this place in Atlanta. You go through the Emory MBA, start this business, have that conversation with Chuck Vice, he wishes you good luck. You've described, and others have echoed this, about that ICE journey, how you started solving small problems and moved on progressively to larger ones among adding people, you talked about some of the team members that you added and capabilities as you went along. What has been your work and operating philosophy from those very small days to where you sit now in 2022?
Mark Wassersug:
What ICE needed was that they needed a jack of all trades. They didn't necessarily need a specialist. We had lots of specialists who were great at doing things. We needed somebody to just focus a light on a problem and bring a bunch of specialists together to solve that problem and just get focused on it. Philosophically that's what I have done. As I started solving problems in our system operations group, like simple problems, how are we tracking customer calls coming in? What log files are we looking at to figure out could we have seen this problem in advance? To our networking problems, to our system engineering problems, to the trade desk problems. I mean, look, my first five years it was just problems everywhere. Let's just go solve the highest priority problem that's making the most noise and then just move down the list.
Again, I was responsible for focusing the light on the problem, getting the right people involved. I've always been very team-oriented in terms of thinking about who are the right people to solve this problem. And it's not micromanagement, it's not me, I'm not looking for any kind of accolades, this is a group activity. But when we do solve the problem, we have to solve it right, and it has to be solved in perpetuity. Much like the problem in the elevator, I don't want to Band-Aid the thing. I want us to never have to look at it again so we can go find something else. Ultimately, that's high accountability from the team, that's dedication, and that's perfection and execution, and that has always been my way.
The reality is, with those, there's always going to be failures. Make sure you've got a backup plan. Make sure we design for backups, and make sure we know when the shit hits the fan that we have a backup and we know it's tested and works well.
Josh King:
I said that we'd get to the point at which ICE was beginning to scale up and get a good rhythm to itself in the mid and late oughts. Talking about group activities, Mark, let's settle in somewhere around 2007. ICE acquires the New York Board of Trade, also tries to acquire the Chicago Board of Trade. I went back and read the seminal piece by Carol Lummus in Fortune about Jeff, the Iceman Cometh story and writing about those days. I'm just going to quote from Carol's writing, "When ICE bought the New York Board of Trade in 2007, it was trading a contract called World Sugar, that just as the name indicated, was setting a price for sugar everywhere. But the contract was trading four and a half hours a day in Manhattan. Says Sprecher, 'It really didn't take a lot to see that the biggest consumer of sugar is China, and we were only open when it was in deep sleep.'"
So Mark, given what Jeff was telling Carol, it's one thing for him to have a vision about changing things. How did people like you help to implement it?
Mark Wassersug:
Jeff was incredibly innovative and directionally thinking about where we needed to be. He set the mission, he set the vision, and Chuck Vice and myself had to tinker to figure out how we could do it. Look, we've always been a 24x7 exchange. When we first launched, we were 24x7. Granted, trading after hours was minuscule. But in 2001, 2002, we acquired the IPE, the International Petroleum Exchange. That was a floor-based system. We had worked tirelessly for years to get our technology ready to be able to handle the volumes and the loads. And when we closed the floors of the IPE, we had a rock solid system. And that rock solid system was where are we going to fall down? Where are we going to fail? Let's make sure that we can solve for that. So when that happens, as we know technology problems always happen, we know exactly what to do to recover as fast as we can at a point in time that we know where everything is. Because the last thing you want to do is recover any exchange and don't understand where trader positions are or what has cleared and what hasn't cleared.
Understanding the business and understanding the risk side of things, we designed specifically to eliminate... We knew there were going to be failures, but we designed specifically to eliminate the potential risks of not knowing things when we brought the system back up. The NYBOT actually was we had technology in place, the markets were transferrable to the technology since we had built it for the IPE. It really was a matter of trying to figure out the personalities in New York compared to the personalities in London, the personalities in Atlanta, and figure out how to get the markets to the ICE trading platform in a way that people would want to trade them.
We did a lot of work on having this mixed mode where you could trade on the floor, but you could hold a handheld and trade on the ICE exchange, so we started working at that. We built a trading arcade right across the street from the NYBOT floor, and we made this amazing arcade overlooking the water, windows everywhere. So we had traders coming in and secretly coming into the arcade and not going to the floor so they could test out the electronic systems. Because they knew it was coming, it was coming. The smart ones said, "All right, let me just embrace this thing." Eventually we had a tipping point where more people were wanting to trade on the exchange than on the pits, and that was our opportunity to then close.
Josh King:
So you get the success of the IPE under your belt in 2001, the NYBOT in 2007, creating the arcade that is going to let people begin this transition to electronic trading. And importantly, as you inferred, you've begun to figure out the personalities of New York, which becomes a major part and an emotional and human part of ICE's journey as opposed to the technological and problem-solving part. I guess the big moment that we're leading up to is December 2012, 10 years ago, I mean literally 10 years ago. Let's listen to Jeff Sprecher talking to David Faber from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 7:
I said on my call this morning with my shareholders, "We want to spring load this company so that as these trends come back into the market, we can really accelerate."
What does that mean by spring loading?
It means that we've got to get ourselves organized, we've got to plan on how we're going to come together. We've been working now for quite a while on how these businesses could join each other. We think we can affect that pretty quickly. As you know Duncan quite well, he's a straight shooter. We've been able to really lay out a roadmap that we think that we can affect. So this isn't a merger where we're hoping that certain things will happen, we really have a strong plan on how we're going to take costs out, how we're going to integrate the businesses, how we're going to be prepared for the next business cycle.
I know-
Josh King:
Take cost out, integrate the businesses, Mark, that's a lot to heap on the shoulders of the chief operating officer and his co-founder, Chuck Vice. How did you make it happen?
Mark Wassersug:
Well, I moved to New York for three years. It's funny, I never wanted to live in Manhattan, I really never wanted anything to do with Manhattan, and I found myself living here every week for, gosh, it seemed like forever. Jeff was right, we had done a lot of work in understanding where the costs were at the NYSE. Look, the NYSE is, was an amazing company, but I will say, unlike what ICE did, the NYSE, every exchange was like a different company. It had its own cost center for accounting and tax and finance. There was a lot of layers that as we looked at it, looking at ICE, we didn't have a lot of that.
Even though we had a commodities business for soft commodities, we had oil business, we had over-the-counter business, we ran on one exchange, we had one group and one team to manage all of that and that. Philosophically, that's what I implemented in the early days, that it didn't make any sense to have different factions of people working across different technologies. That was the mantra that we went with as we looked at every acquisition we'd done, because besides the New York Board of Trade, we had several other acquisitions for different exchanges before the NYSE.
We knew that, boy, we could really do a lot. We also knew that the NYSE's technology was ready for an upgrade. Our biggest decision, and thankfully I think we made the right decision, was whether we needed to move to the ICE trading platform or whether we needed to go with this new trading platform that we had heard about called Pillar. Boy, we drained over that decision for months and months, and we had large meetings and decided again, rightfully so, to go with Pillar. The ICE trading platform, robust trading platform, but it's specific for derivative markets, it's not specific for equities markets.
The other pieces were, look, I mean, I liken this to when we closed on that deal, I said we were a dog that had run out of the yard and bit onto the back of a bumper of an 18-wheeler. The train is running down the tracks. What do we? Just hold on and let's see what happens. Look, for me, coming to New York and spending all that time into New York was important because the personalities in this place made the place. Philosophically, what I think ICE does really well is identify the diamonds in the rough. There's layers of management in many companies that we've acquired that are really good managers, but they don't understand the underlying how things work and why things work. What we strive for is to find people who understand the technology, understand the operations, understand the business and are good managers.
We were able to identify several people at the NYSE who were exactly those people, and they're here today still. So we were able to elevate the doers, so the top of the management chain, and we were able to inject the ICE culture in, and they all got it. Again, once we set the path, things began happening in the right way, and people really bought into the idea. It was three years of really massive work. It was the hardest job that I've ever done because I was away from my family, I was traveling all the time. I was learning about these markets and learning about the business and understanding the regulatory side of things, which was really different from what we had grown up with the CFTC and ICE markets. So amazing learning curve, amazing technological challenges, but, boy, did we follow Jeff's path.
I think if you look three years after when that integration was really complete and more recently as Pillar now has moved into the mainstream of the technology and you look at the people around here in the culture at the NYSE vis-a-vis ICE, this is a very different place, but there's a lot of the same that's still around here. The cultures, the people, the bravado about the NYSE and the brand and just the way the markets trade and the importance of this company, the NYSE under ICE I think is still true to the way it was 200-plus years ago.
Josh King:
Eventually, Mark, the dog gets a hold of the trailer, pulls it over to the side of the road, replaces the axle and transmission, sets it up on a new course. That is sort of the big moment after some of the major milestones that we've already talked about, but really, it still begins yet another several and important chapters of ICE, acquisition of Interactive Data in 2015, acquisition of Ellie Mae, 2020, the now announced acquisition of Black Knight with expected completion of that deal next year. Now, I know I'm missing a lot of deals in between, but from where you sat, what's been the key to the success?
Mark Wassersug:
Standardization, without a doubt. Look, we have a model. I've been involved in 33 acquisitions and integrations in my time at ICE. It took a while to develop the playbook, but the playbook that we use and the way we think about bringing everything together, uncommon data centers, uncommon technology across the same incident management and change management and software development life cycle process, if we don't do that, then we build this bespoke company with a bunch of different factions that doesn't get it right.
By standardizing and centralizing a lot of the enterprise type technology and operational processes, we're able to layer on a common framework for how all of these companies should operate. And that makes cross-functional training very easy. It makes the ability for people to be fungal about supporting different technologies very easy. And ultimately, it allows us to scale exponentially without having to scale our staff exponentially. I think that's for me, I mean, look, people could agree to disagree, for me, that is the number one key to our success and how we've done so many integrations successfully and well and the company has continued to thrive as a result of all that change.
Josh King:
Companies continue to thrive. So Mark, now that you've been here 21 years, what do you see as the organization you're leaving behind, and what do you see as its future, maybe the next 21 years as technology continues to advance, as this team continues to grow, and as someone like Doug Foley always says, "Mark would always impart the need for us to mature."?
Mark Wassersug:
Look, we continue to mature. I think we are at a crossroads in terms of technology decisions. Cloud is... I mean, I would say it's the next big thing, but it's the big thing today. We are only beginning to dip our toe into that area. I think what I've learned just from my CIO role in the last year is that the tools that we are going to rely on in the future to make us better than our competitors and give our customers exactly what they want are only going to be available in the cloud. So as we look across our various technologies and platforms that we look across trading and clearing and data and mortgage, we really have to think about what the next five years is going to be and start thinking significantly about how we can move our platforms into those areas to be able to leverage the tools that we're going to need in the future, because they're not going to be available for our on-prem data centers.
I think in general, philosophically, we are well-positioned. The idea of being expert in the way we build, the way we deploy, the way we support, being extraordinarily customer focused, these are the keys for any successful business. So I think that mindset is correct. I also think, look, the way we were positioned with now mortgage is a big part of our business, boy, I just think the overlap between data and mortgage, potentially trading, is massive. Jeff and Ben have done a masterful job of understanding where we need to be in the next five to 10 years, and I think we're extremely well-positioned for it. I mean, I think great things for ICE in general. I'm sure Jeff already is thinking about his next next after Black Knight. I'd just say, Jeff, please give the ops people some time to do the integration because it's going to be a big deal between Ella Mae and Black Knight when it does happen.
That's not an insignificant amount of work, that's probably another three year type integration much like IDC was, much like NYSE was. Probably a year and a half from now would be the next right time to be thinking about something else. But I know Jeff, it's going to be six months from now, he's going to lay something else on us. But the team, like they've always, they're going to step up and really deliver.
Josh King:
As we wrap up our first part of our conversation before we move to the next chapter for you, if you were graduating as an engineer from Lehigh today, knowing what you know now, how would you best chart a career?
Mark Wassersug:
Well, I would not have gone as a civil or environmental engineer, for sure. I likely would've been computer science, and I really probably would've focused a lot more on operations management. I think today people coming out of college really need to be focused. If they want to go into a tech career, it's not just about programming, but you need to understand how the businesses work. Because the best technology will solve problems for anything, but the right technology will solve problems for the specific business you need. Technology experts need to understand how the business works.
So just coming in and being a coder, just being a electrical engineer doesn't give you, I think the well-rounded experience that you need coming out of college in particular to be able to make an impact early on in your career. Look, I do believe graduate school's important, and as an engineer, generally I couldn't take a bunch of MBA type courses as an undergrad. I do think that's important in some respects. But look, college today, you can learn so much outside of college that when you do get to your career, you can give yourself an MBA while you're working.
I mean, just look at the resources on our own internet. They're fabulous for being able to do self-training. Ultimately, I think, ICE rewards entrepreneurs and innovators and people who want to learn. I always say to when I do town halls or when I meet teams, "This could be the last place you ever worked, and you could have 50 jobs before the end of your career here because there's just so much to do at ICE, so many interesting areas whether you're a technologist, whether you're a product person, QA, or business person or salesperson. The company gives you all the tools to learn everything you possibly need to learn, not only about our company, but about all the different facets of business and tech and self-improvement."
For our employees who are, like I like to say, the 4.0 and 3.5, they're the ones who are leveraging the tools that we give them to be able to spend three or four years becoming an expert in one area and then move to another and move to another. My encouragement is stay with ice and just keep learning what you can learn and growing your career there. That's what I did. And look, after 21 years, I'm happy to move on, but I could have probably spent another 21 years in other areas of this company that I'd never explored before and would love to become expert in.
Josh King:
After the break, we'll talk for a little bit with Mark Wassersug about where an engineer and an operator and a leader like Mark goes from here after 21 years at ICE. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 8:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Mark Wassersug, Chief Information Officer of Intercontinental Exchange and I were talking about ICE, his 21 years of service to it and how it all started for him outdoors in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And now sort of work our way back to nature as it were. Like many people at ICE, Mark who were here at the beginning, people like Chuck and Edon Marcial, the rewards are going to come to people who work long and hard and grow something from something very small to something very large, reflected in its share price and market cap.
Along the way, the love of the outdoors that your dad and mom gave you is translated to really a symbiosis with a mountains. How's that manifested?
Mark Wassersug:
I bought a place, a mountain home in Colorado about five years ago. It was like bucket list forever goal for me. I never thought it would happen. And probably I was asking my wife to do it for 10 years, and it was, "No, no, no, no, no," and finally, I remember we were with some friends up in Highlands, North Carolina hiking, and I just wore her down, I guess. And she said, "Okay, fine." That was April of '17. In May of '17, I was already out in Aspen, Colorado looking for homes. And fortunately in July of '17 found one. It's nothing special, but it puts me smack dab in the middle of, I think, the town, but around four mountains that I can't get enough of in the spring, summer, and winter.
Josh King:
I look at the weather forecast for this week here in the northeast, looking for eight to 14 inches of snow in the Catskills by Friday night, and it should be a good skiing weekend in Wyndham for me by Saturday morning. How's the skiing right now in Pitkin County?
Mark Wassersug:
I just got back from Pitkin County, actually. I had to drive through a blizzard to get to Denver to be able to sit down with you today, but well worth it. Although, the nine inches of powder skiing yesterday probably would've been okay as well. Typically, the season starts right around Thanksgiving. When I'm employed and working, if I'm lucky, I'll get 15 or 16 days of skiing in. This year, my goal for 2023 season is 40 days of skiing, so I'm going to be spending a little more time in Colorado than I'm used to. It's a great early season. I think they've got a 35-inch base already in Aspen, and it's going to be phenomenal.
Josh King:
Now, my first experience at Aspen, I can't remember the year, but it was probably before 2000, I find myself skiing down behind a guy in black, and I realize that I'm trailing Jack Nicholson. You talked about the place that you have and you say it's nothing special, but there was a certain magic to that place around the seasons, and whether it's the Ideas Festival, the National Defense Conference that goes on there in August, and certainly what's happening now in the winter season, what's been the evolution of the place even in those five years since '17 to the present?
Mark Wassersug:
Price appreciation has certainly been the evolution. Yes, you've got celebrities and you've got all kinds of wealth that floats around in that place. That's not why I chose that place. Look, I chose that place because, strangely enough, there's a pretty significant Jewish population, which is important to me, that it's a small town, there's 6,000 residents, that it's a walkable town, and that you never have to get in your car. The city planners have done an amazing job with bus services, with trails, with bike routes everywhere.
Look, it's the right kind of place for me to be in and staying away from the Range Rovers world and Billionaire Alley, and there's plenty of those out there. I go out there to ski, to hike, to enjoy the sun, to do some fishing in the river, maybe some whitewater rafting, and there's some great restaurants. I don't shop at the Prada, I don't shop at the Brunelli, Brunolo, Cuccinelli or whatever that store is. I've got my suspenders, my duct tape, and usually my ski gear is from the Replay Sports, which is the secondhand sports store, and I usually have some duct tape on the knee or on the crotch.
Josh King:
Just like MacGyver in the Roaring Fork Valley. So Mark, if you are Mike Kaplan, who's President of Aspen Skiing Company, what are the existential operating challenges that you're facing to continue to provide customers this evolving experience that they've had since Fritz Pfeiffer, fresh back from his service in World War II and the 10th Mountain Division, opened to Lift I on January 11th, 1947.
Let's talk about an operational challenge. I think it would be fascinating to understand how mountain operations works. I mean, if you think about it, so clearly there's a technology play here. You've got people who are buying online, they're reserving tickets online. You've got the lift passes using RF frequency to be able to go onto your lift. But then you've got the mechanical side of things. You've got all the lift operations, all the restaurants getting, how do you get water to the top of the mountain so you can make some snow for fire suppression? How do you clear the trees out of the way to make sure that the trails are running? Then you've got how do you staff appropriately so the lifts are running correctly, and the ski patrol is making sure that your customers are safe and that when a customer does have a problem, that you've got people around to be able to support them.
You've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got restaurants to operate. I mean, it seems like some fascinating operational challenges that the company has to deal with every given day. And then you've got to worry about land right usage. You've got to worry about water usage. You've got to worry about global warming. You've got to worry about taxes and just things that are regulatory in nature that you've got to be thinking about from a long term perspective. And then you've got to worry about what in 20 years from now, is there going to be snow in Aspen? If there isn't, what are you going to do? How are you going to make this place be able to keep the mystique and the patina that it has today?
Mike has announced that he's stepping down at the end of this season, in April 23, after 30 seasons with the company, 30 years in the company, helping the Crown family expand across these four mountains that you say you love, Aspen, Ajax, Buttermilk, and Snowmass.
As you strap on your peak skis from Bode Miller this week, I mean I do it at my mountain too, and you look around, you say, "I'd fix that. I'd fix that. I don't like that." Give me a couple of those small problems on the tick list that you would start with.
Mark Wassersug:
Anytime that I feel like the things could be more efficient, I'm always picking them apart. So whether I'm standing in the lift line or I'm waiting for food or I'm getting my lift ticket or on the bus from my house to get into town, I'm constantly evaluating, looking at where's the bottleneck? How could this workflow be improved? Look, that's front of the house type things. I can't even imagine what goes on behind the house in terms of just logistics and getting where people are going to live, how they're going to get to work.
So fascinating problems. I've got a microscopic view into a couple areas that impact me specifically, but boy, you put me into that world, I would be all over it. I'd actually hang my skis up for some afternoons just to go and help them solve some problems there.
Josh King:
I'm sure they're going to ask you once you start spending your 40 days and more there and they realize what you have to offer and what you've done here at ICE, Mark. I mean, the industry has certainly transformed over the last five years since you've had a place there, through the arrival of the Icon Pass at Aspen and the other resorts of the Alttera Mountain Group, as well as the Epic Pass Vail Resorts, it opens up more mountains for the cost of a season pass to people like me, but it also brings long lines to Vail in Aspen.
How do you harness the benefits that this internet technology offers like ICE had but also mitigate the downsides?
Mark Wassersug:
You're spot on with the Mountain Collective Pass and the Icon Pass. It's been great for bringing people to various mountains. You can ski all over Summit County, Pitkin County in Colorado and in Utah on these passes where you're paying once and you can ski for at 30 different places for a couple days a year. But it has been a challenge, and you've probably seen at Vail, the lift lines are impossible at Vail. This year, they've begun to implement a reservation system, which clearly works, but that's going to piss some people off. If I have bought my pass and my ski trip to Vail or ski trip to Steamboat or ski trip to Aspen for example is in our particular day that's either blacked out or I didn't make my reservation to get on the mountain in time, I'm going to be a dissatisfied customer and I'm not going to go to the Mountain Collective to be dissatisfied, I'm going to go to the ski resort itself.
I think those problems will continue to fester for some time, and I just think smart people who are looking at them... I mean, I got to believe that you've got 50 years of data on who's coming to the mountain and when they're coming to the mountain and you can probably do some decent forecasting around how we're going to deal with capacity loads and maybe give people incentives to come on off-weeks to be able to allow them to actually leverage their pass a and have a wonderful experience. Because ultimately what you want is to deliver to the customer a wonderful experience.
Josh King:
There's no company in the exchange industry more advanced than ICE and no resort in the skiing industry more advanced and attractive than Aspen. But as we begin to wrap up our conversation, Mark, I'm curious, as you're reflecting on both your last 21 years and where you're going to spend more time in the future, about the core value proposition of both. Let's just start with ICE. How are traders and market participants better off now than when you started in 2001? 2022 has certainly been a challenging year, and whether you're trading stocks or natural gas, I mean, the difference between that moment that you and Chuck met at Gordon Biersch to today, even as challenging as today is, how has ICE made it better for them?
Mark Wassersug:
Clearly, price transparency, and tighter bid ask spreads. Electronic trading has really brought that. I think where you've seen the biggest opportunity for traders is the amount of data that's out there that actually will inform trading decisions and the ability for technology to quickly parse that data, understand that data, and make a decision on the behalf of the trader. These high frequency trading companies use very sophisticated algorithms and massive amounts of data to be able to anticipate where the markets are going.
Ultimately, I think that's a net benefit for the market, because without the keys and technology and speed by those market makers, we would never be in a position that we are today, to be able to achieve the volumes and to have such a tight spread on the pricing. I do think, ultimately, while there's obviously with the SEC and talking about market making and the potential for regulatory change there, I do think ultimately that has been a net benefit for the industry. That's a function of technology and data, which are two key areas that we live in and breathe in every day.
Josh King:
I mean, technology and data, we could just graph that right onto this other thing we're talking about, the skiing industry, if you strip it all away, if you strap on a pair of skins on a light ski that's wide under foot and you head up the inclines overlooking the Roaring Fork, maybe long Sam's Knob route or the Elkamp route, without power, except what your quads and glutes are going to generate for you, what's the pure expression of value on the mountain?
Mark Wassersug:
I feel alive when I'm up there, and the value is actually to be separated from the real world. I mean, for me, I'll ski up the mountains, and I'll ski down Sam's Knob and I'll ski down Elkamp, which are both at Snowmass, by the way. There's nothing like walking up and sweating and working the calories and breathing the cold air and feeling the wind and seeing the snow in the trees and maybe a grouse running past you or a moose in the trees. That is the expression of, for me, pure joy, just being in nature. It brings me back to my childhood. I mean, it really does. I remember seven, eight years old being in the middle of the lake with a fishing rod in hand with steam coming up with the water from the lake in the fall on a Saturday morning with my grandfather or my dad.
You just feel like you're one with the world. You look around us, New York City, Atlanta, it's hustle bustle, it's busy, it's traffic. You live with that. But to get away and actually be out there and be able to generate work to get up and speed to get down using gravity and ice under your feet and some 98 millimeter wide skis, there's just nothing like it.
Josh King:
I couldn't say it any better. I hope someday maybe to follow along your tracks on Sam's Knob, Mark. Thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House and best of luck as you follow those trails ahead.
Mark Wassersug:
Thanks so much, Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Mark Wassersug, Chief Information Officer of Intercontinental Exchange and one of the OG ICE leaders who helped build a company from a dollar into a $60 billion market cap business. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts, like Mark Wassersug, to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
