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 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
In our last episode, Randall Lane, the chief content officer and editor Forbes, talked about how the entrepreneur has changed and how companies need to connect with consumers through both traditional and new media sources. Hosting that episode was my friend and colleague, Betty Liu, our guest today who last June was named executive vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, bringing a decidedly entrepreneurial and creative voice to the NYSE's leadership team. With a long career in journalism, writing and leadership development, Betty brings a fresh perspective on the direction of this iconic institution that it's taking well into its third century, reaching out to entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, China, as they seek to raise capital they need to change the world.
Josh King:
Fresh off a trip to the far East, Betty's joining us today to share what she's learned about navigating between the business cultures of East and West, becoming a leader by studying the greatest leaders she can find, and getting out of your comfort zone. Our conversation with Betty Liu, on her own career, the future of media, and whether US, China tensions will put up walls to aspiring Asian businesses entering the US. That's right after this.
Speaker 2:
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows software developers to embed any kind of communications into every software application they build. We see ourselves at day one of a future of communications, which is powered by software. And so we are going to continue to build out globally more ways of communicating. The New York Stock Exchange is a critical part of our global economy, it's amazing for a company to get to be a part of that long tradition. Twilio is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
Betty Liu joined the New York Stock Exchange in July as executive vice chairman, with the mission of growing our global network of leaders of listed companies, and managing the exchanges marketing strategy. Betty's career has evolved and grown too. She got her start in journalism, working for great media names, such as the Financial Times, CNBC, and most recently, Bloomberg, where she anchored its daybreak Asia program, and launched shows such as Titans Around the Table and In The Loop. In 2016, adding entrepreneur to her background as a journalist, Betty became the founder and CEO of Radiate, a company created to empower companies, their leaders and teams through expert advice from CEOs and other thought leaders.
Josh King:
All of these experiences let's Betty bring a wealth of knowledge and insight about the needs of CEOs and their businesses, from those nascent startup days to the moment when the founder stands on the podium of the NYSE to ring the opening bell of their IPO. Welcome to the ICE House Betty. You just landed from Kennedy, from a trip to Hong Kong, where you started your career, on the schedule, meetings with CEOs, government officials, and leaders of the media. As you're looking out of the windows of their offices, what's changed since you were last there?
Betty Liu:
A lot has changed. Just to give a little background, I was born in Hong Kong, my parents moved when I was three years old, to New York City. I've gone back to Hong Kong several times in my career. So I was there in 97 for the Hong Kong handover. At that year, 97, we all thought that the handover was going to be the big story, but of course, it ended up being the Asian financial crisis. That was the big story. And then I went back again in 2005 with CNBC Asia. That was a great time. I had brought my kids with me as well. And then when I left, the US financial crisis happened. So I always joke, don't follow me around, because that's where crisis start.
Betty Liu:
But any case, so this time around though, when I went back to Hong Kong, and we also went to Hangzhou to meet with political figures, CEOs and others, what I just thought was so interesting is just how much progress has been made in that region. When my parents left China, their mission, or their objective was to give us a better education, and because they felt there was more opportunity in the West, there was more opportunity in the US. Now I feel like a lot of people say, if you want to grow your business and you want to find opportunity, go back East, go to China, go to Hong Kong. That's where you see so much growth.
Betty Liu:
And so every CEO I talked to had these big visions, and had grown their companies by multiples. Just despite the political climate, which I know we'll get to in a moment, it just seemed to me that there was just so much opportunity, so much progress going on, that that's where a lot of the action is happening.
Josh King:
Did your parents ever regret their decision to come? And what drove them beside just education for you?
Betty Liu:
No, they never regret it because they felt that the US education system, which I think is still true today, is the best in the world. And so they really wanted my sister and I to have that educational experience in the US. So they've never regretted it. And I think my dad, he came from a very poor family, so did my mother, and so they really thought that if they were going to create something out of nothing, essentially, that they had to come to America, which is the American dream. And kudos to my dad, he worked his butt off and built himself a very solid, middle class life.
Josh King:
What was his business?
Betty Liu:
So he is the doctor. He's retired now. He had his medical training in China, and continued that in Hong Kong. Because his training in China was not valid, so to speak, in the US, he had to do a lot of it all over again. He's an inspiration to me because he basically rebuilt his whole career at the age of 45, and really started from scratch. So I really look to him in many ways. Even though he is a doctor, I look to him in many ways as an entrepreneur as well.
Josh King:
So you showed up here at age three, what was your educational trajectory from there?
Betty Liu:
So I came at three, going through public school my whole life. So private school was not something that we could afford. Went through the New York public school system, then we moved to Upstate New York where we were the only Chinese family in a town of 12,000 people, and then moved to Philadelphia where I finished my high school.
Josh King:
And then why was it your decision? You could have made many international trips as your role, and as executive vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, but the first trip you make is back to China, why?
Betty Liu:
My career has taken me back there. When I graduated, one of the things I really wanted to do was be a foreign correspondent. And one of the regions that I really wanted to report in was in Asia. I felt like that was my background. So I've just always naturally wanted to go back to Asia. And I feel like just given my background, given the contacts, it seemed a natural destination to make one of the first trips, to return back to a place that was very familiar to me, to a place where I had already quite a few people that knew me, and to reintroduce myself to them in my new role. So that just seemed like a natural thing to do.
Josh King:
One of those people that knew you and that you wanted to reconnect with was your old mentor and friend Tung Chee-hwa-
Betty Liu:
Yes.
Josh King:
... who was the first chief executive of Hong Kong upon the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997. Here's how Sky News covered that event way back then.
Speaker 3:
Hello again from Hong Kong, on the night the colony is about to be handed back to China. At last, the moment has arrived. After 156 years of British rule, China takes over the vibrant and enormously successful island of Hong Kong and the new territories. Time has run out. On the stroke of midnight, just one hour from now, Britain loses one of its proudest possessions.
Josh King:
We mentioned earlier that you covered the Asian financial crisis, and I want to get to that in a second. But just that moment, this historic moment with the transfer to China, from the UK, of Hong Kong, what did it feel like covering that story?
Betty Liu:
There was a personal and professional component to it. So personally, affected me a lot, because as I mentioned, my dad, we immigrated when I was three, but part of that objective was also to get the rest of his family over to the US. So by the time 97 rolled around, his brothers and sisters were all in Philadelphia with us. There was a real fear at that time, which now looking at it 20-less years later, seems odd given what's happened, but there was a real fear that China was going to take over and it was going to become a desolate place. So he really had also the objective of getting his family out, which he succeeded in doing. So it was a very personal thing for me.
Betty Liu:
Professionally though, that was the story of the year, maybe of the decade. And it was just so incredible to be there at the time. I remember it was pouring rain out. I was working at AP, Dow Jones, and the AP part of it, the associated press part of it sent me over to the border where the Chinese troops were going to come into Hong Kong for the first time. And I remember it was, again, the pouring rain, but that dramatic moment, I wish at that time I had my cell phone and that we had cameras on my cell phones, because I would've captured it, but it was just incredible, it still gives chills down my spine.
Betty Liu:
And that was when I first met Tung Chee-hwa, who's the first chief executive of Hong Kong. There were a lot of concerns about him. People felt like he was, and he still is very close to China, and they didn't know whether or not he was going to uphold this one country, two systems. Now his tenure had ups and downs, but for the most part, he's still looked upon pretty favorably in Hong Kong.
Josh King:
And we're now 21 years since you were winning awards for your coverage of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Let's hear a little bit of CNBC's Bob Pisani reflecting on those times.
Bob Pisani:
It's all an echo of markets in a similar era, late 1997, a period that came to be known as the Asian financial crisis, Asian countries kept rates high through the early 1990s in order to attract foreign investors. And it worked for a while. Growth rates soured and soon the pundits were referring to the Asian economic miracle. But when the US began raising rates in the mid 1990s, money began flowing back into the United States. That became a problem. The US dollar strengthened, and because many had currencies pegged to the US dollar, the higher dollar drove up the price of exports, and those countries that were big exporters suffered, lenders withdrew credit, and it caused a huge credit crisis.
Josh King:
Take me back to that time for you, covering it from the front lines?
Betty Liu:
What happened in the Asia financial crisis really solidified for me my love for business journalism. And I hate to say that because it isn't out of tragedy, that there weren't selfish reasons that out of tragedy, oh, I became fulfilled, but it was more that, when I first graduated college, my dream was to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. The problem was that everybody's dream was to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. So I decided to go into a field that not a lot of people were fishing in essentially, which is business journalism. And I remember a lot of my friends thought that it was quite boring and were not very interested in what I was doing. So what happened during the Asian financial crisis was, it really show showed me just how dramatic and how interesting this field is, because it was more than just about dollars and cents and more than about numbers, it was about human stories.
Betty Liu:
Many issues cropped up where you had companies going bankrupt, you had people committing suicide because they'd lost all their savings. The whole cultures were being changed in South Korea. And so it was just such a monumental moment, and it just made me appreciate just how interesting this area of journalism is. I just remember, I was based in Hong Kong, like I said, I thought my job was going to be that whole year covering the handover and how it was affecting Hong Kong, instead, I was traveling all around the region, spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia in particular and just covering the capital markets crisis. It became a very big human story.
Josh King:
Later on in that clip, Pisani talks about the symptoms or the effects of the Asian financial crisis, oil prices plummeting. He talks about on October 27th, 1997, the NYSE's circuit breakers kicked in to prevent a large market shock. Are we seeing some of those same symptoms today?
Betty Liu:
For different reasons. I think that in Asia, a lot of it was precipitated by what happened, as Pisani was saying, overseas, particularly in the US. Here, what's going on right now, it is impacted more by macro factors, but there isn't that Asian flu, I guess, you could call it, that had preceded other market moments of turmoil. So what's going on right now is both a combination of factors of the macro environment, the US, China relations, but also what has been well-telegraphed, which is the Fed raising rates, the tightening cycle, that has been well-telegraphed. But it's still uncertain what that outcome is going to be under credit markets.
Josh King:
In more recent days, Tung Chee-hwa has been instrumental in shaping the area's present day economy and has been very vocal about the current state of trade discussions between the US and China. We've got the G20 conference coming up in Argentina shortly. I want to hear a little bit of the scene as it exists today.
Speaker 4:
Let's get to trade. Vice President Pence in Papua New Guinea for a two-day trade summit, talks broke down completely because of this one line. And here it is, "We agree to fight protectionism, including all unfair trade practices." The Chinese would not allow that line to be in the communicate. So there was no communicate at all. Come in, Daniel Oliver, former FTC chair, Daniel, Trump meets with Xi next week at the G20 summit. We've got this breakdown in talks. Doesn't look promising. Does it?
Daniel Oliver:
Well, it doesn't look promising depending on where you're standing from, from the-
Josh King:
So when you're in Hong Kong talking to Tung Chee-hwa, what's his take on the ongoing discussions and the outcome that he'd like to see?
Betty Liu:
The man has been around for a long time. So I say that meaning that he's seen many moments of turmoil all between the US and China, he's also seen moments of breakthroughs as well between the two sides. There is a sense of, I guess you could call it frustration. He's noticed that some of his friends, who traditionally have been more friendly to China are a little less friendly perhaps. I think some of it is just a broader recognition here in the US that things do need to change on the trade front. They have been in some ways unfair, or in many ways, to US businesses. But he also says on the other side that, look there's 68, I believe he quoted 68,000 US companies that do business in China, that profit from the big consumer base in China. And he doesn't want people to forget that.
Josh King:
On this trip, you also met with many other financial and government leaders. Did they share his outlook?
Betty Liu:
Somewhat, yes. I mean, I think they were all... I mean, what I thought was really interesting was, I mean, they all had varying opinions about what was going on in relations and how they felt about the US administration, but they all, at the same time, said to me, "Look, we're running our business as is, we haven't seen a lot of impact. We're all cautious, but we're all cautiously optimistic." So nobody was saying to me that they were changing the trajectory of what they were doing in the US. I met with Johnny Chou of Best Logistics. He continues to expand in the US. He's got several warehouses in the United States, and he's continuing those plans, but he's being cautious as well. So everyone said to me, "Look, we're watching the situation, but we're moving on ahead, and we're progressing."
Josh King:
Johnny Chou, CEO of Best Logistics, and recent addition to the New York Stock Exchange. Part of the conversations you were having was about the pipeline of potential companies that are coming down the pipe to list for their IPO. We're still seeing a strong pipeline of companies from China listing on the New York Stock Exchange. What trends are you seeing in terms of the types of companies that are now looking to tap our markets? And why are they choosing the US?
Betty Liu:
No doubt that any of the companies that are coming out of China that are mostly in technology and biotech or life sciences are tapping the US markets. And some of that has to do with the fact that they're looking at an international customer base, but they're also looking for an international investor base. So in that respect, then the US market makes perfect sense for them. The other area that I know quite well now from having done Radiate is the online education companies. They're also tapping the US markets for very similar reasons. And just if I may, one other trend that I noticed when I was talking to many of the Chinese companies is, they're all moving ahead, they're watching what's going on in the US closely.
Betty Liu:
And I don't know whether it's a byproduct of what's going on with US, China relations, but almost all of them said that they were now looking, or that they were looking very closely at Southeast Asia as the next growth market. I'm sure those plans were in place many years ago, but there was a lot of talk about how the frontier market of Vietnam, or Indonesia, or Thailand, those are the markets that many of them are looking at now.
Josh King:
From Hong Kong, you then traveled to moderate some events at Money20/20 China, which was in Hangzhou, where multinational companies gather typically to discuss the future of FinTech, both in China, but well beyond China's borders. What are some of the most disruptive technology trends you've been seeing coming out of China in this space?
Betty Liu:
There's a lot of talk about AI, a lot of conversations around crypto. In many ways, and maybe this is a testament to the borderless case of business, is that many of the trends they were talking about in China were the many of the similar trends that we were talking about here in the US.
Josh King:
I mean, in a way, taking an entrepreneurial spin on journalism is what you did when you moved into a new cross-section of both journalism and technology when you launched Radiate. I want to hear a little clip.
Speaker 5:
Totally blow up the concept of a mentor. I think mentoring moments are far more important.
Speaker 6:
You have to believe in the power of your story, and you have to be able to articulate it confidently.
Speaker 7:
Emotional intelligence is the game.
Speaker 8:
You want to win, you don't want to be in the losers' locker.
Speaker 9:
You got to be the best.
Josh King:
Those are some brief clips from all these Radiate interviews that you created. What was your vision for Radiate, and did you set out to create a micro-learning platform?
Betty Liu:
No, but I will say though that it just feels like it was something that I was wanting to build for quite some time, but didn't know exactly what it was going to be. The idea of Radiate really just came out of my own experience. I mentioned earlier that I'm the daughter of Chinese immigrants. So my parents blessed their heart, worked really hard. And my dad was a doctor and he succeeded in his career, but they didn't always know how to navigate the corporate culture. So their advice to me was great when I was 12, great when I was 18, but by the time I got to 25, their advice didn't always apply to my situation, because they hadn't experienced it.
Betty Liu:
So that's when I started to really seek outside mentorship. I needed to learn from people who'd been there and done that, dealt with office politics, knew how to ask for raises, and all of that stuff. And then I just got to a point a few years ago where I'd written a book called work smarts where I'd put a lot of people's advice into a book, advice from for Warren Buffet, or Elon Musk, or Jamie Dimon. I put that all in a book, and people came up to me and said, "I've been looking for this kind of advice for a long time, really good nuggets of information from people who've been there and done that."
Betty Liu:
And I thought to myself at that time a few years ago, "Well, people want this advice, but it's static in a book. Why not make it come alive in video? So why don't we make these videos, make them short, less than two minutes, get big names so that people will actually want to watch these videos, and put them together and create a library." And that's what exactly what we did. So we ended up with about over a hundred CEOs on the platform, and a library of about 2000 video. And we keep adding more videos onto this library.
Josh King:
You've often stated that running Radiate was like earning your real world MBA. How so?
Betty Liu:
Yes. I have always talked to entrepreneurs, they've always told me things about what it's like, the grind of starting a business, raising money, building a team, firing people, hiring people, motivating, lots of stuff. So they always told me those stories, and I learned so much from them, but it's a whole different story when you're actually doing it yourself. And so raising capital, building a team from scratch, getting people to come and join you for just a dream, there's no nothing there, but just a dream that you're telling them. I mean, it's an incredibly humbling thing to do, but so educational. And I learned so much about the world and so much about myself from that. So I do call it street MBA.
Josh King:
I mean, talk about the dream, and perhaps a part of that dream that we would more appropriately classify as the nightmare scenes. What was the most challenging part about building your own company? And how do you think that experience of, as you said, finding investors, running a company and building a brand changed your outlook for entrepreneurs?
Betty Liu:
Well, so I think entrepreneurs say this, and I think they're a hundred percent right, which is, when you build a company, you know that you're going to have lows, but you also know that you're going to have highs. And the great thing about being an entrepreneur is that your highs are limitless. But I had heard a lot about the dark days, and I had a lot of dark days. I was at the time working two jobs, I was still anchoring at Bloomberg and also working at Radiate. The lows came with, raising capital is extremely hard, extremely humbling. I had the fortune of having some credibility being a Bloomberg journalists, but that only gets you so far, gets you in the door, but once you're in the door, you've got to sell that dream to investors and actually make them put down cold, hard cash. That's a very hard thing to do. And I learned a lot about my myself, and I learned a lot about people in general.
Josh King:
Talk about the contrast of the length of time from those first days that we were talking about, the transfer of sovereignty from UK to China, of Hong Kong, and then the Asian financial crisis, and what you had to work with back then, the tools at your fingertips as you're launching a business, social media, you have a huge following on LinkedIn. How did that help you build and grow your business?
Betty Liu:
Well, I think in both those respects, being a storyteller is really important. As the CEO, you're the top salesperson. So you have to tell the story, and if you don't tell it properly, then you won't have investors, you won't have customers, attach that, is being able to write that story as well. I still consider myself a writer. I've written two books. I love writing. Started off in print. And so I continue that today. And so I do a lot of my writing now on social media. I built a pretty substantive following on LinkedIn, just simply writing blogs and they could be everything from things I experienced personally as an entrepreneur, to things I was learning from some of our Radiate CEOs. So I think that has really helped me build a following. And that's helped me build a personal brand as well.
Josh King:
After the break, Betty and I talk more about storytelling, building the personal brand, and how she came to her new role at the New York Stock Exchange, and her vision for helping companies around the world grow and make an impact. We'll be back right after this.
Speaker 10:
We began with a vision to transform energy trading through technology, creating a modern, accessible marketplace, the level of the playing field and drove transparency. Today, Intercontinental Exchange operates markets around the world. We provide data people rely on and connect participants to support investing, trading hedging and capital raising, driving the world forward. Well-functioning markets play a critical role in advancing economies and create opportunities for those who build them. And we innovate to ensure our markets serve the world every step of the way. When you turn on a light switch, we help ensure that energy is priced efficiently, from fields to your cup each day, from farms to your table, and products that enable financial opportunity. At Intercontinental Exchange, we build, operate and advance global financial and commodity markets. It starts here.
Josh King:
Welcome back, Inside the ICE House. Our guest today, Betty Liu executive vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. We've been talking about a range of issues in the first part of the program, including US, China relations and Betty's entrepreneurial experiences. As a reporter, Betty, you covered the New York Stock Exchange, including ICE's acquisition of the exchange five years ago, but then this year you found yourself as a headline.
Speaker 11:
Also want to get to Betty Liu, veteran anchor over at Bloomberg, now being named executive vice chair of the New York Stock Exchange, which is also acquiring Radiate, which she co-founded. What are the details here? And what does it mean for the exchange?
Speaker 12:
Well, it's a positive development for the Exchange, they just got a new president, Stacey Cunningham, a few weeks ago. And this deal right now is interesting because it's a content-play. Now, Betty Liu's company, Radiate, which still has to be approved of by regulators, if this goes forward, it would be... They have 2,400 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and this would be a way to leverage that even more. Betty Liu has experience as a broadcaster at CNBC and Bloomberg, and the Financial Times. So really a powerhouse team in terms of content here, assuming it all goes through.
Josh King:
Betty, take us back to that moment earlier this year, Radiate had amassed a lot of subscribers in a full library of content with tips from global CEOs, we were talking about this before the break, people Steve Case, Arianna Huffington. And then out of the blue, you heard from Jeff Sprecher, the founder and chairman of Intercontinental Exchange. What did you discuss with Jeff? And before that conversation, had acquisition been part of your exit strategy?
Betty Liu:
I think any founder would be lying if they didn't say that an acquisition could be in the cards at some point, as well as an IPO, but certainly not at this point. That's one of the great things about being an entrepreneur and building your own company, is that the sky's the limit and you just never know where the next opportunity is going to be. And I just remember, it was at nighttime at one point, back in, I believe it was March, where I got an email from Jeff, who I hadn't talked to in many years, and he just said he wanted to have a quick chat. And I really thought that it was to have a chat perhaps on partnering together. I was thinking that he was pretty aware of the CEOs in the videos that we were doing in the content.
Betty Liu:
So I thought, "Okay, maybe this going to be an interesting content partnership." The conversation went from partnering to a slow, but sudden realization by me that, "Wait a minute, I think he's talking about actually acquiring the company and me joining the New York Stock Exchange." When I thought about it more, I just thought, "Wow, it makes so much sense. And I wish I had thought about this." Which is, Radiate is a lot about bringing a community together to learn and grow. And it's a CEO community as much as it is an online content platform. And to bring that over here to the exchange, where we have this great community of 2,400 listed companies, just made so much sense.
Betty Liu:
Like I said, I almost thought, "Wow, I wish I would've thought of this idea." But, Jeff, did, and Jeff is who he is, and he's built this massive $50 billion company primarily because he has great ideas and is able to execute on them.
Josh King:
And from that first email, the deal happened pretty fast.
Betty Liu:
It happened quicker than I thought.
Josh King:
The life of a journalist is tough, but everyone that I've ever met that is a full-time journalist loves their work, and perhaps could do it in perpetuity if the opportunities continue to be the there. And yet, I also know many people who've taken their journalistic training, their journalistic outlook, the skills that they have as a writer and reporter and researcher, and applied them into corporate jobs and the business world. How did you weigh the decision to leave journalism and move into a completely different type role, specifically New York Stock Exchange?
Betty Liu:
Yeah. I think one thing that journalists don't get a lot of great credit for, but that they're really good at, at least the really good journalists, is that they're great networkers. You have to be a great writer and you have to know how to craft a story, but you also really have to know how to network. You have to be able to talk to any kind of person, whether it's the man on the street, or the billionaire, or the president. You have to know how to talk to anybody. And that's the skillset that I've been able to develop the most as a journalist, is being able to really network. So that was really very easy to bring over to the New York Stock Exchange.
Betty Liu:
I mean, I was networking to get guests onto my a program, and once they got on the program, asked them the tough questions, but also remain friendly, so that they'll come on again the next time. Same thing here. I might not be sitting across them on an anchor desk, but it's networking with folks, getting them into the exchange, telling them the story.
Josh King:
Networking and storytelling. And I think that would be the real, great preparation for a building that is a focal point for, as you say, 2,400 companies that are constantly coming in and out of the door.
Betty Liu:
Can't agree more. So I think that was maybe the moment after that conversation with Jeff, where I just thought, "Wow, it's pretty genius of him to put that together, that skillset would flow over here." And once that clicked with me, I thought, "This is great."
Josh King:
So in your role as executive vice chairman, you're helping to grow the NYSE's global network of 2,400 listed companies. Tell us more about what you'll be doing to connect this network?
Betty Liu:
Internally, I'm going to be really helping curate our CEO community. We already have a great community as you know, again, 2,400 listed companies, but how do we connect them even more together? So as part of that, tactically speaking, I run our marketing department here. We do everything from partnering with our member companies, to running events, strategic events. So we're looking at launching several NYSE-owned events, but also creating content as well. How do we connect our community through some of the content that we'll be creating? So excited, stay tuned for 2019, we'll be announcing some pretty cool content initiatives that also involve Radiate.
Betty Liu:
So we're going to be leveraging the platform of the NYSE to make this micro-learning content even more available to a wider audience. And then externally, what I'm doing is really advocating for the entrepreneur. So I am an entrepreneur, I've got my chops there. I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs in my life, have heard their ups and downs as well, I've experienced them. So really out there externally advocating for the entrepreneur, making it easier for people to start companies, and also making it easier for them to eventually, IPO here at the New York Stock Exchange.
Betty Liu:
So I want the NYSE to be right there in the middle of the conversation when we talk about entrepreneurship. So I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling around the country, talking about that and partnering with different accelerator your programs. I'd love to also focus on entrepreneurship, not just in New York and San Francisco, but all around the country. I mean, entrepreneurship is happening all over the world, and here in the US, it's happening in so many other cities as well. And sometimes they don't get as much attention as the New York and San Francisco companies, but I think we want to change that.
Josh King:
So as the entrepreneur gets over the goal line, to that point when they are potentially going to become a company that has an IPO, it is a very competitive environment for those listings. And marketing is a major part of the pitch. In addition to the unique features of the NYSE's market model, as you lead these marketing efforts, what do companies look for as they think about their listing?
Betty Liu:
So it's a great question, because when I first joined the New York Stock Exchange, I wanted to learn more about these competitive advantages. I think number one is what you just described, Josh, which is the market model. I mean, it perseveres in times of volatility. And of course we've seen that over the last several months, that has only shown a brighter light on how valuable that market model is. At the same time, a lot of companies are looking to make sure that they're with their peers. This is where the community comes in. Shine a brighter line in the community to say, "Look, when you join the New York Stock Exchange, you're joining the greatest group of companies in the world."
Betty Liu:
And at the same time, also making sure that the brand is out there. When I was in China, something that was quite interesting to hear from many of these CEOs is that the brand is so prestigious to them, just the NYSE name alone is something that they want to be associated with. I understand the brand value, and I also understand that how fragile brands can be. And also making sure, for the companies, that we continue to help them with their visibility efforts. And they get a lot of that, being as part of the building, being a part of the community. Helping them solve their problems is going to be very important.
Josh King:
The brand of the NYSC built on 226 years of entrepreneurship and innovators that are helping to change the world. What can we do to solve some of the challenges for entrepreneurs so that they can bring their ideas to market and thrive? You were mentioning that there are entrepreneurs to be found so much all over the world, not just the East Coast and West Coast, but in the middle of the country and in countries far a field, what do they need, well, before they get here?
Betty Liu:
I think anybody can be an entrepreneur. Number one, I think people just, if they want to become entrepreneurs, or they want to start their own companies, I want them to have the confidence to be able to do it. You don't need to be a 25-year-old Stanford grad to start your own company. You can be in your fifties, you can be a woman, you can be a minority. Entrepreneurship is available to everybody, you just have to get over that hump. The second thing I would say is, I think funding is so important. Gary Vanerchuck who I respect and admire, he says something to the fact that funding cash is like oxygen for any startup. And it's a hundred percent true.
Betty Liu:
If you don't have cash, you don't have oxygen, and you're going to die. So making funding more accessible and easier for entrepreneurs. We've all seen the statistics. Female founders have a lot harder time raising capital, so do minority founders. So finding ways to make that more accessible to them, I think is going to be very important. And then also just giving them knowledge. There are a lot of things that I did at Radiate that I am very proud of, and then there are other things that I did that I wouldn't say I regret, I would just say that, if I had some knowledge, if I knew certain things, I would have avoided some mistakes.
Betty Liu:
So being able to give them intelligence, some knowledge, I think that will also be incredibly important for them as they grow their companies. And obviously, as you get later and later stage, then other factors come in, making it less of a financial burden for them, for companies as they grow, what regulations we can help to ease that financial burden, I think those things come to play as companies get bigger and bigger.
Josh King:
Talking about those later stage companies that are getting bigger and bigger, a lot of discussion about, are they waiting too long before they tap the public markets? How does a company's delay to come to the public markets affect an entrepreneur and ultimately the investors who may want to put their money into them?
Betty Liu:
It's probably a little less of an effect on an entrepreneur, as it is more of an effect on the investor. So we do believe that companies should be coming to market at an earlier stage, that some of them are staying private for longer. And that's not very good for investors, because investors end up losing out on some of the biggest growth phases for these companies. By the time they go public, they've been funded multiple times, and a lot of that growth has already happened. So that for the retail investor, they're not participating in that dynamic growth.
Josh King:
So as we wind our conversation to an end, Betty, let's go back to those first entrepreneurial days for your Radiate and growing that business. The vast archive of leadership lessons that you amassed across those hundreds of hours of conversation, what are some of the most memorable pieces of advice that you heard?
Betty Liu:
Wow, it's hard to choose, because I mentioned we have a library of about 2000 pleasant growing videos. But there are a few that stand out, and they're not from people that are in household names, meaning like an Arianna Huffington, or a Jack Welch. Sometimes I found the best pieces of advice came from people that were not as well-known, but just as accomplished. So one of those pieces of advice comes from Scott Kurnit, who was an advisor at Radiate. He's the founder of About.com, which actually I had listed on the New York Stock Exchange many years ago. He has a piece of tactical advice that to this day, I still practice. One of the most watched videos or trends in videos on Radiate was the concept of, how do you bounce back from failure? Right?
Josh King:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.
Betty Liu:
I think a lot of people face failure, and they want to know, how do you bounce back? So Scott has this piece of device where he says.
Scott Kurnit:
When you're devastated about something, and it's like, you're almost paralyzed because you did something wrong or something didn't work, turn your virtual calendar forward three weeks, and write down in it what that was. When you get there in three weeks, you go, "That's such a big deal." You do that three times, and interestingly, it will change your behavior, changed my behavior.
Betty Liu:
I have to say that I practice it, and he is a hundred percent. I tell my kids to do the same thing, he is so right about that. Failure seems so daunting when it happens to you, and it's gut-wrenching, three weeks later, you almost have forgotten about it. So that's one practical piece of advice that really puts things in perspective for me. The other one comes from Kat Cole of Focus Brands. I love Kat. I think she is such a great mentor, and she's been a mentor to me. And I believe she's become more and more pop... I see her on the speaking circuit now all the time time. But she put into words what I couldn't put into words, which was, when we talk about mentoring, she hates the word mentor.
Kat Cole:
Mentor feels like this big mountain you have to climb, both if you're a mentee, or if you're a mentor, but simply seeking mentoring moments, getting super good at going up to someone and saying, "Hey, you don't know me, but I heard you've dealt with this issue before and I'm dealing with it. Do you have five minutes? I'd love to hear your story." Or asking someone for coffee. I love coffee, obviously. Asking someone for coffee and having a chat, or at the water cooler, saying, "I'm dealing with this issue. Do you know anyone who's dealt with it?" Those are little micro moments where you can get the benefit of perspectives of others' experiences.
Betty Liu:
And that's really what Radiate is about, which is, forget the idea of, "Oh, I got to find five or six mentors or else I'll never be successful." There are micro mentoring moments happening all the time. It could be a sentence someone says to you, it could be a quote you read, it could be a little odd, it could be something said on this podcast, it could be just a little thing that can change your perception, it can change your life. And she talks about that. And when she said that, it really just solidified for me what we're doing, and also solidified for me that all the things that I thought were happening to me, that were changing my life, these micro mentoring moments, were correct. So that really stuck out to me. And her videos, by the way, were the most watched on Radiate, and they still continue to be, because they're so good.
Josh King:
I remember shortly after you joined the NYSE, you and your colleagues that came over to the exchange from Radiate, held a lunch-and-learn to with several hundred employees of the exchange what Radiate was about, give us a tour through some of the content, in particular, some of the interviews that were there. And I was surprised that as they played, the room erupted in laughter. And I'm curious, as you're sitting across from these people conducting these interviews, who've realized their dream, or taught so many lessons through entrepreneurship, and business leadership, who in your recollection gave some of the most surprising answers?
Betty Liu:
Yeah. We wanted to make sure with these Radiate videos that they accomplished two things. One was that they would give somebody actionable tips. They could take some action on this information. And number two, we wanted the videos to be engaging, otherwise, nobody's going to watch it. When you hear about leadership learning, sometimes it sounds like spinach. And we didn't want it to be spinach, we wanted it to be dessert. So I think the fact that folks were laughing made me very happy inside, because I felt we were accomplishing that objective. I think one of those videos that made people beloved was David Cody from Honeywell, who has seen everything in the corporate world, has overseen hundreds of thousands of employees.
Betty Liu:
And it's just incredible to think about how many people he's managed. And he still maintains that Boston accent and demeanor, and he has great stories. And every single of his answers had a great story attached to it. And I think the one that we played for our audience here at the NYSE had to do with, how do you get people to do what you want them to do? Nobody wants to be told what to do. So how do you craftily do it? And he had a great story about it.
David Cody:
Some people, as I've said many times, some people you need to absolutely hit them with a two by four to get their attention. They're just like that. And I've had discussions with people where I've said, "I'm hitting you with a two by four. And I am telling you, I'm hitting you with a two by four, so that there's no confusion about me hitting you with a two by four." And they actually look astounded. What I always tell them is, "You seem impervious to suggestion in previous conversations we've had, so I'm going to be very direct with you." There are other people, all you have to say is, "You're capable of better work than this."
Betty Liu:
It was a great story, and it really helped drive that point home in a very friendly way.
Josh King:
I mean, talk about legends that you've interacted with throughout your career. How did your year-long quest to interview Warren Buffet change your outlook on perseverance?
Betty Liu:
It was actually multiple years. When I first joined Bloomberg, one of my mandates was to interview Warren Buffet, and I didn't know him at all, I had no connection to him, and I was like, "How am I going to do that?" So I spent the first year just doing what normally people would do, which is just writing him, and asking for interview. And of course I was told, "No, no, no, no, no, not right now." In a very polite way. And so I spent a few more years trying to figure out, "How do I get him to join me on air?" And it was a moment where, after maybe my 18th no, that I realized, "You know what, I need to change my thinking. It's not about what I want, but it's about what I can give him." And I started to just find new stories, information about maybe teams that he liked.
Betty Liu:
There was one time where it was his birthday, and I knew he liked Frank Sinatra, so I put together an iPod full of Frank Sinatra songs and sent it to him as a birthday present. And finally, there was one day where we had done a story about one of his companies, and I sent him a DVD at the time of the interview, or the video package. And he wrote me back finally, after all these years, wrote me back a letter that said, "Thanks so much for the interview, I really enjoyed the piece." And I remember showing it to one of his friends, and his friend said, "Oh, he'll give you an interview next time."
Betty Liu:
And lo and behold, the next time I asked for an interview, I was invited out to Omaha and did an hour-and-a-half-long interview with him, couldn't have been nicer, drove me around in his Cadillac. So it taught me that you really have to think about not yourself, but think about what other people want. How can you be helpful to other people? And the moment you do that is the moment where you become much more engaged with them.
Josh King:
On that note, about the Oracle of Omaha, I'm off to send an email to Warren Buffet to see if he'll join us in the ICE House. I'll include an MP3 of Sinatra singing My Way. Betty, thanks so much for giving me that lesson and perseverance. It has only begun Mr. Buffet, I'm onto you. Thanks, Betty, for joining us.
Betty Liu:
He'll be joining you soon enough. Thank you so much, Josh.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Betty Liu, executive vice chairman of the New York's Stock Exchange. 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 one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us at NYSE. Our show is produced by Lizette Quang and Pete Ash, with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Portner. 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, expressed 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.
