""I had this idea that you should be able to trade electric power, buy and sell electric power, on an exchange," Sprecher recalled recently at the Rotary Club Of Atlanta. But there was a huge caveat: He "had no idea how to do that. I'd never worked on Wall Street, I never traded.""
"At the time, Sprecher had heard that Continental Power Exchange-owned by Warren Buffett's electric utility company, MidAmerican Energy-was about to go bankrupt. Despite Buffett's business pumping $35 million into it, the company was still struggling. And so Sprecher saw this as an opportune moment to swoop in and pursue his entrepreneurial vision."
""I bought the company for a dollar a share, and there were a thousand shares. So I bought it for $1,000, and I used that as the basis to build Intercontinental Exchange.""
Jeffrey Sprecher bought Continental Power Exchange for $1,000 after identifying an opportunity to trade electric power. The exchange had been owned by MidAmerican Energy and faced bankruptcy despite a $35 million investment. Sprecher purchased one thousand shares at one dollar each and used the asset to found Intercontinental Exchange three years later. He assembled a small team of nine employees in Atlanta in 2000 and focused on building trading technology. Sprecher lived modestly while scaling the company, operating from a small studio and driving a used car, ultimately reaching a net worth of $1.3 billion.
Read at Fortune
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