Larry Ng has done pretty much everything. He’s been a microprocessor designer at IBM, a marketing executive at CBS Records, a capital markets consultant specializing in risk models and options valuations, a trader on an arbitrage desk at Merrill Lynch, and co-founded Tradeweb, Moneyline Telerate (through Moneyline’s acquisition of Telerate), and MarketAxess, then held senior roles at Reuters, Wall Street Systems, and Ion Trading. Now, he’s back in the game as co-founder of data startup MarketDesk.

Meanwhile, former Multex co-founder Jim Tousignant has just raised $5.1 million in new funding for startup FinTech Studios, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze news and connect events and people to deliver greater insight across the investment research process. Over an almost 40-year career in technology before serving as CEO of FinTech Studios, Tousignant has served in various roles at Multex (before and after its acquisition by—and spinoff from—ADP), Morgan Stanley, Thomson Financial, and Scivantage, among others.

Both believe they’ve found compelling solutions for the modern investor: Ng believes MarketDesk offers a true way to disrupt the provision of market data using the cloud, enabling anyone to access content from institutional data sources, while Tousignant says FinTech Studios is “Google for financial services,” creating deep linkages between information that would be hard to track manually.

Though Ng and Tousignant stand out as being high-profile industry figures willingly returning to the coalface, it’s not unheard of for seasoned execs to take jobs at startups. Indeed, many place a high value on their years of experience.

Ed Guy, managing partner at Nationstaff, a recruiter specializing in the financial and fintech spaces, says experienced execs with an inquiring mind, who know how to dissect a problem, and who can motivate staff and build teams, are always in demand among startups. “You can build a great product, but you sometimes need that person who knows whether a trader will actually use it,” he says.

In addition, a well-known, experienced hand on deck—if not on the wheel—often opens doors that may be closed to complete newcomers, or at least makes them easier to open.

“Startups often want someone who can break them into an established business … and finance is such a niche that sometimes you need that established ‘name’ who can open those doors,” Guy adds.

Indeed, the presence of such a “name” can help separate the wheat from the chaff in a crowded fintech marketplace, says a data manager at a major investment bank.

“If some fintech company knocks on my door with a great idea, I can’t tell how good it is. … I’d need to do an evaluation. But if a trusted person is putting their imprint on that, it goes a long way to getting my respect,” the data manager says. “Generally, if the person has credibility and is a known quantity, it helps mitigate the unknown quantity exceptionally.”

This is the case for FinTech Studios, which enlisted industry veteran Gerry Mintz as an advisory board member at the start of this year. Mintz, who has held senior roles at Telerate, Thomson Financial, and Fame Information Services (where he was chairman and CEO), and Reuters, now runs his own advisory firm, Percepta Partners, focusing on product and market strategy for software companies. In this capacity, he has also held similar advisory board roles at Prattle, Quandl, Investment Metrics, and FTEN.

At Fintech Studios, Mintz has leveraged the relationships and credibility built over almost 35 years in the industry to introduce the vendor to potential clients.

Dealmakers

Notably, all the aforementioned companies that Mintz advised were quickly acquired—Quandl and FTEN by Nasdaq, and Prattle by Liquidnet. So when it comes to fundraising or M&A activity, an experienced hand can help guide a nervous vessel through murky and treacherous waters filled with venture capital sharks. Most of the individuals spoken to for this story have been directly involved in raising funds and buying or selling companies, and can bring that experience to bear for those still new to the game. In some cases, this can be spotting the right opportunity, negotiating, or—as Mintz puts it—“cleaning up” a company to make it more appealing to buyers.

“In terms of fundraising, corporate development and value creation, I’ve sold six companies now, so I know what people are looking for and where I can bring value,” says Dale Richards.

Richards has held senior roles at Interactive Data, Reuters, and Algorithmics in the 1980s and ’90s before selling his data startup Benton Associates to Fame Information Services, where he served as president and CEO. He then continued on as president of enterprise data management at SunGard following its 2004 acquisition of Fame. Richards now serves as managing director of Island 20 Ventures, a Toronto-based corporate development advisory firm, where he sits on the boards of data and trading technology-focused startups and growth-stage companies, including RoZetta Technology, Eagle Alpha, and Tick Trade Systems, among others.

One of the additional benefits of having fingers in so many pies is the ability to connect companies and executives that would work well together, and being able to spot those opportunities for cross-pollination, Richards says. It was Ng’s experience and connections that made him valuable to Warburg Pincus when it placed him at Wall Street Systems. And in fact, without Ng’s extensive connections, he might not have got involved in MarketDesk. The company is the brainchild of Brice Hamon, former CIO for Icap’s EBS currency broking business, who served as CTO of Telerate alongside Ng, and who has himself held technical roles in the fintech industry since 1992.

But the benefits of experience don’t just end with dealmaking and matchmaking. Much of a veteran’s experience is put to use on day-in, day-out management and strategy. Brian Hunt, chief administrative officer at Cloud9 Technologies, who previously considered becoming a consultant to help others benefit from his years of experience at Tradeweb and Thomson Reuters before being lured back to the game by Cloud9, concurs.

“At a senior level,” he says, “you narrow the odds of making mistakes due to experience. Experienced execs have very likely gotten things wrong in the past on someone else’s dime and hopefully learned from it. And they have connections—to money, and to others that they can ask for advice.”

Mintz also notes that those previous senior roles were essentially the training grounds for people exploiting those years of knowledge today. “In bigger companies, you gain a lot of experience of scale, managing people in geographically diverse locations, getting product built, and communicating clearly. You learn, you make mistakes—stuff you can’t learn from reading a book. And you learn how to get things done,” he says.

That learning process can take an entire career, and requires ambition and mobility, as well as vision and a desire to apply those skills as you go, says Andy Brown, former CTO of UBS—who also held senior technology roles at Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and Merrill Lynch among others—and is now CEO of technology advisory firm Sand Hill East, where he counsels numerous tech startups. Brown also serves as CTO in residence at startup incubator FinTech Innovation Lab, where he spends a lot of time helping tech startups led by founders without a background in finance to understand the challenges of the financial markets and figure out how their inventions could be used on Wall Street.

“After being a good programmer, you learn to hire good programmers, then you become a good designer and architect and figure out how processes work and interact with each other, and how operations work. You have to also be interested in people and the business,” he says.

Tools of the Trade

Like Brown, almost all the execs in this article started out in technical roles, then grew into other operational and management positions, using their understanding of technology not as an end-result, but as an enabler.

Island 20 Ventures’ Richards, for example, began his career as a database programmer, which he says means he’s still likely to delve into the weeds of how things work. “I really like building stuff … so things like product and company strategy—that’s like candy to me,” he says.

Advising on technology issues means understanding and keeping abreast of technology issues, which requires not just being able to teach based on experience, but to be willing to constantly learn and absorb new things.

“To be valuable as an advisor, you have to stay current—and if you’re good, then you want to stay current,” Mintz says. “One element of this is just raw interest: I’ve always been interested in technology. I love reading and learning about it. I started out as an engineer and software developer. So while I may not be able to sit down today and write a program, give me a month and I’d be able to. But essentially, I don’t have to be able to use a particular toolset, so long as I understand how it can be used.”

In fact, the ability and willingness to learn is critical to success, Tousignant says. “If you’re not keeping up with the right stuff, you become obsolete. If you don’t understand it, you’ll miss opportunities, because you can’t see potential places to make sales. … You need to have a passion for constant learning and innovation. You have to re-tool yourself all the time, by constantly talking to customers every day about their challenges.”

It was exactly this approach that led to the rebirth of Multex. In its first iteration, Tousignant was vice president of sales and marketing, and kept that role when ADP acquired the vendor to become its advanced development group. Tousignant was supporting the sales team and bringing in new accounts, constantly talking to clients.

One day, an investment bank client asked him whether the Multex business supported investment research. Tousignant responded, “What’s investment research?” The bank was spending more than $1 billion on everything research-related, including mailing its research reports to buy-side clients daily, and wanted a way to automate the process. After four years as part of ADP, Multex.com was reborn as a research platform that would eventually be acquired by Reuters. The key lesson: automate everything, Tousignant says.

It Takes a Village

It’s one thing to set direction for a company as part of management, but those who serve as independent advisors and board members must sometimes walk a fine line with management.

Sand Hill East’s Brown, for example, doesn’t just show up for board meetings or wait for a phone call; his role is one of constantly challenging and guiding, and, crucially, transferring knowledge rather than giving answers. The relationship must always be “collegiate, collaborative, and constructive,” he says.

Even those with star power must act as part of an ensemble cast rather than stealing the scene. “When I was at Quandl, I would sometimes go to client meetings. The company would exploit my experience and knowledge of the marketplace. Sometimes it’s just to support management, sometimes supporting the board, and sometimes I would act as a fully-fledged member of the executive team,” Richards says. But he stresses that his interest is in helping others accelerate their companies, not to get back into running one himself. “What I try to create is an environment where people understand that I’m here to help, not to take over.”

Cloud9’s Hunt says experienced execs can play the role of a pinch hitter. “I can put together the basic infrastructure and help support the business, be a key player on the management team, and understand where the organization is going—and bring in the right people and incentivize them correctly to achieve the company vision,” Hunt says.

But he also says it’s important to have the right mix of resources—experienced vision and leadership to set the tone and direction, alongside the creative, young energy often responsible for starting a company, with flexible resources, such as partnering with third-party providers.

However, when constructing a management team or a board of directors, it’s important to ensure that individuals’ skillsets are complementary and cover any gaps that others might have in their experience, adds Mintz.

“The different skills and approaches that people bring to the table is important—from sales skills to people management and technical skills. And the right mix can help an entrepreneur figure out what to do,” Mintz says, adding that it’s also key to find the right people at the right time, and match skills to a company’s needs at a specific point on its growth curve.

Bill Haney was one such “right person at the right time” for startup bond consensus rating service Credit Benchmark when the company needed a new CEO, having already run businesses ranging from pre-revenue startups to mid-size tech companies and divisions of large vendors. Of course, it helped that he had already worked with chairman Donal Smith at Thomson Financial and at Bisam before its sale to FactSet. This kind of pre-existing trust, and a track record of working together, can remove some of the friction that experienced execs sometimes encounter when trying to shoehorn an entrepreneur’s dreams into a capital markets business model.

“Doing that with people you know and trust takes a lot of the pain out of that,” Haney says. And doing it—being an agent of change—at a startup rather than a long-established business avoids having to deal with a lot of old platforms and management expectations. “At a startup, you can create challenges, rather than inherit problems.”

Common Traits

Between them, the individuals quoted in this article have about 250 years of industry experience. But two things that all these individuals have in common are a desire to learn as much as to teach others, and a genuine love of what they do. Engineer or strategist, these people thrive in an environment that allows them to create new things.

“Some are in it for the money, but generally, it’s a desire to change and innovate. Generally, these are people who see something inefficient and want to improve it, or who see an opportunity to deliver something new to the market,” Hunt says.

For others, the benefits aren’t monetary. “It’s a two-way street. You benefit from being close to these innovators, and you can also help them. I like building product, and I like working with entrepreneurs, especially those doing technology-based innovation,” Mintz says.

In some cases, startups provide the environment they need to succeed, where other companies may hinder or stifle innovation. “Big organizations spent their time managing what they’ve already put in place rather than innovating and doing new things,” Tousignant says. “I love startups. It’s a passion. I love building and creating stuff. I love the process of building something out of nothing.”

In fact, some are drawn to startups because large organizations can be “claustrophobic” for those who want freedom to innovate and experiment, says Anthony Schiavo, CEO of TruMid Technologies. Schiavo previously held senior technology roles at TrueEx Group, Citigroup, RBC Capital Markets, Merrill Lynch, and Swiss Bank Corp.

“I had so many experimental and cultural ideas that I had to keep climbing within organizations to implement them, but that took me further away from technology, where my passions lie. So over time, I found myself looking for smaller roles with larger remits, which you find at startups,” he says. “Large corporations are far more complicated interpersonally than smaller ones. At a startup, it’s a ‘Three Musketeers’ mentality—one for all and all for one.”