Adena Friedman

Adena Friedman has been the CEO of Nasdaq, where she began her career as an intern in 1993, since 2017. She was appointed board chair at the start of 2023. Nasdaq’s namesake stock exchange welcomed three of the five largest IPOs in the first quarter of 2025—CoreWeave, SailPoint, and Smithfield Foods—part of a stretch in which it posted an 82% win rate for new listings. The company also recently reported that its switch program has attracted more than $3 trillion in combined market cap since 2005, with companies including Shopify, Thomson Reuters, and Domino’s Pizza transferring their shares to trade on the tech-forward exchange in Q1. Under Friedman’s leadership, Nasdaq has diversified its revenue streams as the company’s market capitalization has increased roughly four-fold to $45 billion. In between her stints at Nasdaq, Friedman served as CFO of the Caryle Group from 2011–2014, helping the private equity behemoth go public in 2012. She serves as a director to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a board member for the Business Roundtable, where she chairs the technology committee.