Late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs has inspired a legion of entrepreneurs hoping to define the next era of business. Despite never meeting the tech legend, Intercontinental Exchange founder Jeffrey Sprecher hails Jobs as a “mentor,” and credited the pioneer for teaching him a critical lesson on career success.
“Steve Jobs was Apple, right? But he didn’t really write code or invent anything, Sprecher said recently at the Rotary Club Of Atlanta. “He curated ideas that a lot of really smart people around him created. He just had good taste.”
Over the course of his business career, Sprecher has achieved success by leaning on the brainchilds of other entrepreneurs.
The global exchange CEO said he’s led around 50 acquisitions, and confessed that it’s “much easier to buy somebody else’s hard work and the sacrifice that many others made” and scale it up, rather than start from scratch. Sprecher even got his start turning a failing company into a billion-dollar behemoth.
In the late 1990’s, Sprecher bought Warren Buffett’s near-bankrupt electric utility company, MidAmerican Energy, for just $1,000. He turned it into the Intercontinental Exchange, and more than two decades later, the company boasts a market cap of $98 billion and more than 12,000 staffers—and has also proudly owned the NYSE for over a decade.
