Miguel Armaza Interviews Tom Callahan on the Fintech Leaders Podcast

Miguel Armaza sits down with Tom Callahan, CEO of Nasdaq Private Market (NPM), a secondary marketplace and liquidity provider for private company trading and transactions. NPM spun out of Nasdaq in 2021 and is now backed by a consortium of banks and financial institutions, including Nasdaq, Citi, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and others.

Transcript:

Miguel

Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join me for a live fintech leaders recording and happy hour with Stewart Sopp CEO and co-founder of Current a multi-billion dollar fintech built in New York City. Join us at Barclays rise New York on Monday October 16 [2023] to kick off New York Tech week. You can visit the show notes on fintech leaders sub stack to find the registration link. See you there.

Tom

We’ve seen private companies blocking trades because they don’t like the price that implies too low of value on their company, and it’s kind of a crazy thought. Can you imagine the CEO of a public company calling the floor of the exchange in the morning and saying, please don’t let my shares trade below 19 today? Like no, it’s unthinkable that that could happen. For a private company in 2023, 2021 might as well have been a hundred years ago because those valuations literally don’t matter. Investors want, it’s a sort of Jerry Maguire Market, show me the money, they want to see revenue today, not in a year, not in six months not in two years.

Miguel

Tom

Well, first of all I think you’re being kind. I think I just blew it the first time, so you’re, you’re just you’re being kind and letting me do it again no whatever technical glitches we have I think this is better we’re glad to welcome you here to our offices here in Flatiron and really excited to be able to have the conversation again.

Miguel

Absolutely, so we’re going to learn a lot. Let’s start by getting some context of you know the story of financing Innovation. I know you’re very passionate about private markets and financing Innovation, you know, how did we get to the point of where we are today.

Tom

Sure, yeah, I mean we are passionate at NPM about innovation and private markets are the epicenter of American innovation. Its where Innovative young companies get funded and without funding Innovation suffers and dies. And so, that’s what gets us out of bed every morning, that’s our mission. And you know our view right now is just given the state of the markets that innovation is at risk. We had a huge bubble I think we can safely say that in 2020 and 21 there was a mass of capital that flooded into the private markets driven by, you know, zero rates and QE but that tide has receded now. So as easy as it was to get funding in 2021, right now, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of innovative great companies that are struggling for funding and you know, given the state of private markets, how inefficient they are, we can talk a little bit about what that looks like. You know, I think to protect and preserve American innovation we need to improve the functioning of the private markets and really at NPM that’s our mission.

Miguel

And why is this? To just to drill down a little bit more why is this Mission important.

Tom

Yeah, well, so if you think about it, the way the private companies operate in primary rounds, they come to market as seed, series A, series B, series D. Right now, you know those private companies are really struggling because they were such an incredible bubble back in 2020 and ’21. And what we’re seeing is, you know, trying to assess the value of private companies is incredibly difficult right now. The way historically that it’s worked is you would just look at the last primary round. That’s where the biggest Sand Hill Road investors in the world bought in. Well, for a private company in 2023, 2021 might as well have been a hundred years ago because those valuations literally don’t matter, and you see time after time companies doing what, you know, down rounds, 60-70-80 percent down. So, in a private company, you know there is no tape, there’s no tape A, B, or C as there is in the public markets. So, if you want to know what a private company is worth today, really you need to see where people are buying and selling shares in that private company, and because there is such a lack of transparency and such a lack of liquidity in the private markets, that transaction data is incredibly hard to come by. So if you don’t have a lot of transaction value and you don’t have can’t rely on the last funding round, then really it becomes incredibly ambiguous to determine the value of a private company today. And what does that mean if you’re a private company that needs to come and raise capital, either to continue the operations of your business or to give liquidity to your employees? It’s an incredible challenge, and that’s the challenge that we’re looking to solve at NPM.

Miguel

And it’s a challenge not just for investors, right? Because there’s the other side of, I guess, buyers and sellers, especially sellers, and those are employees of companies. You join, you think you’re joining the next amazing company, and at some point, you want some liquidity for it, but then the market turns, you know. What has been your experience working and serving employees or former employees of companies?

Tom

Well, I think we have a unique perspective on this because, of course, we service private companies, but we’re a private company ourselves. So, we’ve sort of eaten our own cooking from that perspective. Yeah. So, I think, you know, it starts with the meta story of the private markets and the hyper-growth that we’ve seen, and that will lead to a conversation about employee equity. So, really what sort of kicked off the hyper-growth we’ve seen in the private markets and how we define private markets are VC-backed unicorns worth more than one billion dollars. There were about 40 unicorns a decade ago. There’s now close to 1,200 depending on how you measure it. It’s somewhere around a three and a half trillion-dollar market. It’s about 15 percent of U.S. GDP if you measure it that way. So, the private markets have experienced this incredible parabolic growth in the last decade. So, what’s driven that? A number of factors, certainly, you know, the liquidity regime from the FED helped a lot, but really we look back at the Jobs Act, which was a President Obama legislative initiative that did a lot of things, but one of the things is it liberalized the ability of a private company to take on more shareholders. There used to be a cap at 500 shareholders as a private company. They expanded that to 2,000. So, for a private company, the ability to access capital while you’re still private became just a hell of a lot easier. And so, as a result, private companies are staying private longer. You know, 20 years ago at about five years old, companies were forced to go public because that was the only way for them to continue to raise capital; they hit up against that 500-shareholder limit. Well, now at 2,000 shareholders, and then sort of in parallel to that, you saw this incredible rise of private equity and venture capital. There became this immense uh reservoir of private capital for private companies to access, and they could take more on their cap table. So now, uh, the average private company waits 14 years before they go public. And given the state of the IPO market today, that’s likely to extend even further still. So, so what does that mean if you’re an employee of a private company? Well, if you’re a 25-year-old engineer of a tech startup, it’s kind of hard to say to that engineer, “Well, wait till you’re 39 years old, 14 years later, to pay off your student loans or buy your first house.” Employees need liquidity to live. So along the way, for private companies to be able to attract and retain talent, they have to offer liquidity in their shares. So really, the ability for employees to monetize the value that they’ve created by working in private companies and getting compensated partially in equity becomes really, really critical. So that’s a big part of what we do is offer liquidity programs to private company employees.

Miguel

So, this becomes a recruiting tool, if you will.

Tom

Yeah, I’d say especially for private companies as they get larger and they start competing against publicly traded competitors where the way that it works at most public companies, you know if you get equity, they come in the form of restricted stock units which tend to vest every two or three years. You know, there’s a fairly orderly and predictable way of getting liquidity in public shares via a publicly traded company. So, if you’re at a private company and you want to attract and retain the best employees, you have to offer something comparable or else your employees are, frankly, just going to quit. So, it becomes a really important employee retention tool.

Miguel

So, most people when they think about public markets, it’s ubiquitous at this point, right?

Tom

Yeah.

Miguel

You go, pick your favorite app, buy a couple shares of any company, and you don’t even think about it, right? The the clearing service is done behind the scenes, and it’s so seamless that you don’t think about it. It doesn’t really exist in the private market. Talk about the clearing service.

Tom

Yeah.

Miguel

Provided at NPM.

Tom

Yeah. For people that aren’t familiar with how the private markets operate, their jaws usually hit the floor a little bit when they understand exactly how primitive—you sort of have to like mentally teleport yourself back to like 1930 or something to understand how these markets really work. You know, there isn’t a concept of a private listing. You know, commissions now on, you know, Robin Hood and other platforms, you can trade public equities for free. They’re five, six, seven, eight percent in the private markets. If you want to know where any public equity trades, you could pull up your phone and put in a ticker in about five seconds, get an accurate quote. There are no quotes in the private market. So really, it’s this sort of OTC call-round market where you sort of have to be an insider to know where things are trading. And then, you know, one of the great efficiencies of the public markets is that no matter what platform or ATS you trade equities on, it all settles at the DTCC. And you don’t spend a nanosecond worrying when you sell a share, “Oh my God, is the money actually going to show up or not?” Well, in the private markets, uh, settlement is a huge, huge risk factor. It takes on average in the legacy market about three months to settle a private market trade. So, it’s—it’s actually a lot like a residential real estate transaction. There’s wet, signatures and DocuSigns and lawyers. It is like a real estate closing, which everyone knows takes around three months. So, you know, you can’t have an efficient asset class, you can’t have trade certainty when, you know, fundamental elements like settlement are so up in the air. So it’s one of the products that we have launched at NPM. And it doesn’t sound particularly sexy, but it—it—it’s fundamental. We have a settlement service that we offer to banks and brokers and to issuer clients where if they sign up for our service, we sort of streamline, automate the whole process and we can settle a trade in less than a week with 100% certainty. So, those are the kind of fundamental market infrastructures that need to be built if we’re going to take this three and a half trillion-dollar asset class and actually make it efficient.

Miguel

Tom, I’m curious. You are seeing a lot of the market activity for especially the type of companies you’re describing, which are more growth or scale-ups, whatever you want to call them. Last year was kind of frozen, even secondaries, right? How is it looking today? Are you seeing a rebound? And also, importantly, what kind of discounts are you seeing on their last rounds?

Tom

Yeah, so the good news is that we are starting to see some healing and recovery in the private markets. And, you know, I think a big factor of that is just the general macro healing. We’ve all seen, you know, some very large IPOs be announced recently, and it looks like fourth quarter the IPO market is, is grudgingly reopening. And that’s certainly a positive sign. Public markets have recovered very substantially off their low, so there’s been a macro healing and a return of risk appetite from investors. That’s certainly helpful. But specific to the private markets, essentially, these markets were by and large closed for a year between June of ’22 and June of ’23. June of ’22 was just sort of, you know, the public markets were-were-were really aggressively repricing, you had all this confusion and ambiguity in the private markets that I talked about. What is a private share worth? There were 10 sellers for every buyer. So, for all intents and purposes, the secondary market closed. So, if you’re an employee or an investor or a company looking to raise capital in the second half of last year, the markets just were not functioning. You know, we came into 2023, started to see a little bit of recovery in January, and then of course, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in February, and that had, you know, an enormously chilling impact on private markets. I mean they, a lot of our private company clients had their cash with, you know, SVB, so there was a time they weren’t even sure where they were going to be able to make their, their payroll. So that put another freeze on, on the markets. So, you know, I would say starting around June, July of 2023, the market started to reopen, and there is this enormous, enormous need for liquidity. I mean, shut any market for essentially a year, and these pressures build: from private companies that need funding, from employees who need liquidity to live their lives. Probably the most active call we’re getting right now are from VCs who, if you think about it, the average Venture Capital Vehicles is 10 years. Well, I already said that the average company IPOs in 14 years, and IPOs are really not happy, it’s like an asset liability mismatch. So, what do you do when funds get to end of life and you still have assets? Well, it’s a series of bad options for VCs. They can try to do portfolio sales, they can try to do continuation funds. I mean the easiest thing for them to do is just to be able to sell assets into the secondary market. And so, you know, the pressures from VCs have built enormously as well. So we’re really are starting to see activity. So, you know, July and August were our two best months of the year. Our order book now is the best it’s looked since kind of pre-2021. It’s a couple billion aside, you know, 40, 50, 60 names on any given day. So, these markets really are starting to recover. And what I would also say is we’re actually seeing some very positive price appreciation in certain names in the private market. So, it looks like valuations have bottomed and actually, you know, are starting to recover. So, all these things coming together means the markets are starting to function again, which is good, albeit from a low base, but still. I mean we, we look at our order run every morning, there are names trading still 50, 60, 70, 80 percent below last funding round. So, there’s a lot of investors that are looking at the private space in 2023 and they’re saying, gosh, it’s like buying, you know, real estate in 2009 after the GFC, you know, when you’re there still are a lot of great companies that you can buy at very, very, very healthy discounts. So, there’s a lot of capital being raised right now to buy private secondaries because I think people are saying that these discounts are, are too good to pass up.

Miguel

It’s a good time to have cash in the bank.

Tom

Very good time to, to be liquid. Exactly, exactly. And listen, it’s, it’s, it’s a great reset and it’s a bit of a game of musical chairs. You know, there will be a lot of companies that come into this market and do down rounds and maybe substantial down rounds. The lucky few will do flat to up rounds and, and I do mean, you know, a lucky few. And unfortunately, there’ll be some private companies, maybe even some former unicorns, that are unable to get refunding, get funding in this market. You know, it’s, it’s a market and I will say, you know, right now, NPM, we’re in the middle of our series B fundraising right now. Investors want it’s a sort of Jerry Maguire Market, show me the money. They want to see revenue today, not in a year, not in six months, not in two years. Uh, they care about near-term revenue, what are you generating right now? That’s just the mood that investors are in, in, after having been burned. I think, you know, by a lot of out-year parabolic growth forecasts from private companies, they become incredibly practical and really want to see near-term revenue. So, if you’re able to, to deliver that, you know, you can still get funded in this market, but I think it’s going to be very interesting over the course of the next 12 months to see how this whole space, space shakes out, who are the winners, who are the losers, who merges, all these kind of things. It’ll be a fascinating space to be watching over the next year.

Miguel

Yeah, what we have observed at Gilgamesh Ventures is that the good names, and the ironic part is that they’re still extremely competitive, right? Because obviously there’s less companies out there, but the good names, they, they are getting very well founded.

Tom

There still is demand for good names, but there’s also a bit of a Winner’s curse, and I, this is a story that I heard from one of our issuer clients recently. He said he got a call not too long ago from one of his largest and earliest VC backers, and that VC said, “We’re on a mandate to sell all of our top-performing companies, and congratulations, you’re one of them.” So, we’re exiting our positions because in this market, the only names you can sell are exactly what you just said, the top-performing companies. So, there can be a bit of a Winner’s curse because that’s the only names where there’s liquidity. It’s really, really hard to sell in this still somewhat distressed market and underperforming name, a name with four financials, a name that’s not widely held. You can do it, but you’re going to end up, you know, having to probably, you know, sell at a very, very, very deep discount. So, it’s the best names where there’s liquidity. So, as you know, is often the case, you know, you don’t sell what you want to, you sell what you can, and what you can sell are the best names in the market. Great for investors, it means that it’s an opportunity to buy some of these amazing companies at deep discounts, but not always great for sellers.

Miguel

You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the JOBS Act and in the past, you’ve told me that the FCC created a monster, through the JOBS Act. Let’s explore that a little bit.

Tom

Well, I think there is a view from certain SEC chairs that there was an unintended consequence of the JOBS Act. The JOBS Act was really meant to fund Main Street—you know, dry cleaners and hardware stores. It wasn’t really meant to create an epic bubble in private markets and to create a thousand unicorns. But that’s exactly what it did. So, you know, I think there is a general sense from some at the SEC that essentially the JOBS Act might have created a bit of a loophole, and that loophole should be closed. What does that mean? You know, when a private company gets to a certain size, there is a school of thought that says, you know, once they have a certain number of shareholders or reach a certain valuation or, you know, a certain sort of systemic importance, there should be some baseline financial disclosures that are required. Obviously, not at the degree of public companies because then you’re just going to force those companies to go public. But there should be a baseline of financial disclosure, and now there really is none. So, you know, I don’t think this is on the near-term SEC agenda, but there have been some speeches given by Commissioners that would indicate that, you know, this is on their roadmap of essentially re-regulating the private markets and trying to create better transparency once private companies get to a certain size. That would be very good for private market liquidity because it’s, you know, the number one question that we get from investors. You know, obviously, if you’re an institutional investor and you’re going to put tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into a company, you want financials—you want to know how are they doing, are they shrinking, are they growing, what are they doing with proceeds—all those baseline questions that you can answer again very, very easily in a public company because of course, they’re forced through quarterly earnings reports and others to tell the world how they’re doing, while private companies, you don’t have that requirement. And there does tend to be a real information asymmetry in the private markets where, you know, certain investors with sort of insider relationships will get access to that privileged information when many others don’t. So, it creates a real information asymmetry, and I think there are voices in the market that said that this really should be a level playing field and that all investors should get access to some baseline information once a company gets to a certain size. Now, what is that certain size? I think that’s what needs to be, you know, discussed and debated because it could backfire as well. If you put a bunch of onerous new restrictions on private companies, that itself is going to harm innovation. So, there’s a balance.

Miguel

Makes sense. Let’s talk a bit about your past roles, Tom, and how those inform, you know, your current position as a CEO of NASDAQ private markets. So, in the past, you—you spent a considerable amount of time with BlackRock. If I got it right, you were the head of cash management. So, I want to hear a little bit what that means, and you’re also a leader at the New York Stock Exchange.

Tom

Yes, yeah. I’m one of the few people that’s worked both at the New York Stock Exchange and then NASDAQ. So, that’s a little bit like the Red Sox and the Yankees, but I’m both. Amazing organizations. I feel very lucky to have worked at both. So, yeah, I’d say, you know, the common theme through my career is I’ve either started businesses or fixed broken ones. And those things have a lot in common, strangely enough. I’d actually say starting new businesses is easier than fixing broken ones. It’s like sometimes it’s easier to build a brand-new house than to renovate an old one because you just end up inheriting a lot of legacy problems. It can be hard to deal with. But yeah. So, so NPM right now is an independent big company. We were once upon a time part of NASDAQ, we spun out in 2021, and we’re now a bank consortium. So, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, Goldman Sachs are our owners. In addition to NASDAQ, still owns part of our company. And as I mentioned, we’re in the middle of our own fundraise and about to bring on a group of new investors as well. So, I’m a consortium CEO right now. When I was at the New York Stock Exchange from ’09 to 2013, I was also a consortium CEO. I joined to be the CEO of one of their U.S. Futures divisions, which we ended up spinning out into an independent company owned again by a group of banks, actually some of the same banks that own NPM. So, I have a lot of experience in spinouts and market structure consortiums. That one was in the future space. We were trying to create competition, as you probably know, the U.S. Futures Market is a monopoly. It’s an organic monopoly run by the CME. So, the banks were trying to create a viable competitor. So, we built an exchange, we built a clearinghouse with DTCC, and created an industry consortium that was sold to ICE as part of the acquisition back in 2013. And of course, now NPM also running a consortium. And yeah, before that, I was at at BlackRock and I ran their cash management business, which I had some some commonality with NPM because our clients were largely private and public companies, and we we managed their cash more efficiently than if they just put it in the bank. You know, it’s funny, we talked to private companies back then, this was obviously pre-SVB, about counterparty risk and hey maybe it doesn’t make sense to put all your cash with one bank because crazy things happen. And then funny enough earlier this year when when SVB met their demise, the number one call we were getting at NPM from our clients who a lot of them had you know, money tied up at SVB was, “Hey, can you help us with the treasury management policy and what should we be doing with our cash?” So, my old life and my new life sort of collided together. But that was a that was an interesting nine years at BlackRock, which is obviously an amazing company, the world’s largest asset manager. You know, cash management was a business I joined them in 2013 after after I left the New York Stock Exchange, and the the cash business, which part of that business are running money market funds, you know, the money market fund industry had a very difficult time in the global financial crisis, and a lot of money funds broke the buck and needed to be bailed out by either the treasury or by their sponsors and assets sort of rushed out of money funds because people, you know, lost confidence. And so, you know, BlackRock navigated that period incredibly well. They didn’t have any problems in their funds, but the whole sector just was suffering from this lack of confidence. And so, they had lost a ton of assets, assets had fallen about 40 percent to about 250 billion when I, I got there. And so, it was an opportunity to really rebuild a business. So, we we built, rebuilt the team, rebuilt the tech, you know, re-engineered all the products. And so, in the nine years I was there, we took the assets from 250 billion to almost 750 billion. So, we added a half a trillion dollars of assets in nine years, and it was really quite a fun, rewarding turnaround. And was very happy to leave that that business in pristine shape when I left to go to NPM.

Miguel

And it’s interesting, you were running that business, a cash management one, specifically during an essentially zero percent interest era.

Tom

So, the way that the money fund industry works is the fees are usually somewhere in the teens, you know, 15, 16, 17 basis points. You’re exactly right, you know, when rates are at zero, that you can’t charge 15 basis points or else the fund would have a negative return. So, we had to waive the fees in our funds and that was very, very, very expensive. So, when the FED first raised rates, first of all, a lot of money flooded to money funds because all of a sudden, you know, it became an asset class you can put your cash in a BlackRock money fund right now and earn, you know, five, five and a half percent. So, you had this rush of money into the sector, but also they were able to reinstate fees. So, listen, that had really kind of just started when I, when I left last year and like I said, the business was in amazing shape and the revenue profile was fantastic. And you know, at 750 billion in assets, it’s a really great business for BlackRock. So, I really just missed the startup world. I miss being an entrepreneur, I miss being an innovator, and was looking for an opportunity to come and do that. And so, as I look around the market and I’ve, you know, been doing this now for 30 years and I’ve watched the evolution of market structure, you know, when I first started as a bond trader in the early ’90s, you know, we were yelling and screaming and handing each other paper tickets. Now you go on to any bond trading floor and it’s a bunch of folks with headphones on sitting there coding and its total silence. So, the efficiency, the speed, the velocity has improved by light years and that’s happened in equities, and it’s happened in derivatives and it’s happened in cash. Well, it needs to happen in the in the private markets. I view the private markets as the last great frontier of market structure. And so, the good news is we kind of have a road map and we have a business plan. We’ve watched what happened in all these other asset classes and how they’ve gone from voice trading and friction and commission and paper tickets and all those inefficiencies and watch them go to be automated and trading in microseconds on exchange. So, we know what this, what this business plan looks like. We’re taking a lot of those lessons and we’re trying to apply them to the private markets.

Miguel

And you cannot get there alone. Obviously, who are going to be the most important partners to work with in order to get ther?

Tom

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, we’re a bank-owned Consortium. And for us, you know, as we look at the future of the private markets, banks are going to be a much bigger part than they’ve been in the past. You know, Banks really for the last 10 years haven’t been the dominant players in private markets. It’s been a lot of smaller boutique players. But if you think about it from a bank perspective, you know, the crown jewel of most Bank franchises in 2023 is their private wealth business. Well, you know, a lot of those entrepreneurs and ultra-high-net-worth individuals have started private companies, have sold private companies, have worked at private companies. So, to be able to service their most important high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients, they need a private market liquidity solution. You know, Banks service hedge funds, they service venture capitals, they service large buy-side asset managers—all enormous players in private markets. So, Banks need to be relevant. They need an institutional trusted solution in this space. So, all the banks, even you know, we talked about this is a market that closed for a year, all the banks that we talk to are building out their private franchises, they’re hiring, they’re investing in technology. So, that’s kind of our bet as intermediaries that sort of banks become the dominant players in this space, they dominate every other asset class. I think they’ll end up dominating this one as well. So, they’re a critical player. Obviously, the issuers, the private companies themselves, are a critical player in this space. Because I think what a lot of people don’t understand, and maybe the most fundamental difference between public and private companies is that all share transfers need to be approved by the private company. And, you know, they sort of have unlimited discretion to do that or not. They can block trades for all kinds of reasons. In 2023, we’ve seen private companies blocking trades because they don’t like the price that implies too low of value on their company. And it’s kind of a crazy thought. Can you imagine the CEO of a public company calling the floor of the exchange in the morning and saying, ‘Please don’t let my shares trade below $19 today’? Like, no, it’s unthinkable that that could happen, yet in the private markets, that happens as a very common practice. So, private companies because again this right they have and is this requirement to authorize and permit it and okay the transfer of their shares means that private companies are always sort of at the center of everything that happens in this market. And that’s where we at NPM, having serviced private companies for a decade, you know, we’ve done over 45 billion dollars in volume in tenders for private companies. We have a lot of very long deep relationship with private issuers. And so, for us, that’s critical. And then the third and again essential sort of participant ecosystem are the investors—large buy-side asset managers, venture capitalists, family offices—again some of these people that are looking to deploy capital at these very deep discounts right now. So, at NPM, we have to service kind of the whole ecosystem of banks, brokers, issuers, employees, investors. We need to bring them all together in order to create efficiency.

Miguel

so, Tom final question when you’re not at NPM how do you disconnect?

Tom

Well, my passion, I’ve been a private pilot for 20 years and I do a lot of Charity flying. I fly a lot of animal rescue missions, where we fly down to a lot of the Southern States where there’s an oversupply of Strays and we bring them up to New York and I’m on the board and fly for a charity called home for good, it’s based in New Jersey. So, yeah, I love dogs and I love flying airplanes, so that brings my two passions together. So, that’s a big part of what I do, and I do a lot of Angel Flights as well, which is a charity that flies sick patients to their treatments free of charge. So, I have a lot of fun flying I’m able to do a lot of you know charitable work that’s really important to me and when I’m flying, I don’t think about the private markets I don’t think about anything. I think about flying. So, for me it’s a lot of fun but it also is very meditative. So, that’s what I love to do.

Miguel

What’s the longest flight you’ve piloted?

Tom

I flew to Panama a few years ago, not in one go but I turned 50 and thought I’d treat my myself. So, I flew kind of around the U.S, a little bit through Central America, saw the Panama Canal which is amazing and flew myself back that was an epic trip. So that was probably the longest that I’ve done.

Miguel

Sounds awesome, I’m jealous.

Tom

Well come with me on a dog flight sometime. It’s a lot of fun you’ll get a kick out of it.

Miguel

Make the call.

Tom

okay

Miguel

thank you Tom. This was awesome.

Tom

My pleasure great to see you again foreign.

Miguel

Thanks for tuning in I hope you enjoyed this great episode with Tom Callahan CEO of NASDAQ private Market if you want more interviews make sure to subscribe follow and leave a review on Apple podcast Spotify or whatever gauge shows it helps and means a lot and if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show just drop me a line on Twitter or LinkedIn signing off till next week I’m your host Miguel Armaza

NASDAQ PRIVATE MARKET, LLC IS NOT A REGISTERED EXCHANGE UNDER THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934. NASDAQ PRIVATE MARKET IS OPERATIONALLY INDEPENDENT AND DISTINCT FROM THE NASDAQ STOCK MARKET LLC. SECURITIES-RELATED SERVICES ARE OFFERED THROUGH NPM SECURITIES, LLC, A MEMBER OF FINRA AND SIPC. NONE OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED REPRESENTS AN OFFER TO BUY OR SELL, OR THE SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY OR SELL, ANY SECURITY, NOR DOES IT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER TO PROVIDE INVESTMENT ADVICE OR SERVICE. INVESTING IN PRIVATE COMPANY SECURITIES IS NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL INVESTORS. IT IS HIGHLY SPECULATIVE AND INVOLVES A HIGH DEGREE OF RISK.

English (auto-generated)