30 Under 30 Finance: The Top Young Traders, Dealmakers And Big Money Innovators
November 14, 2017 by Nathan Vardi
The Wall Street landscape is becoming younger, digitized and more entrepreneurial. Technological and innovative forces are reshaping the world of money and they can be seen on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list.
The rising stars of finance are inventing new online investment platforms, writing high-speed trading algorithms and speculating in cryptocurrencies. Some are starting new companies while others work for big Wall Street institutions like Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management. They can be found at large hedge funds like Two Sigma Investments or at smaller trading outfits they have founded themselves.
Ryan Williams, 29, worked at both Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before he founded his own company, Cadre, to build a better way to invest in alternative assets, starting with real estate. Initially backed by brothers Jared and Josh Kushner, Cadre has raised $135 million at a recent valuation of $800 million from the likes of Jack Ma and Andreesen Horowitz. Williams has built an online platform where accredited investors can get in on commercial real estate deals, getting access to top operators and potential liquidity.
At 26, Tom Dadon is head of mergers & acquisitions at The Kraft Heinz Company, searching for deals and running financial planning for a company that sells iconic brands and sports a $90 billion market capitalization. He was in the position when the company unsuccessfully tried to buy Unilever for $143 billion. Previously, Dadon was an analyst at 3G Capital and worked on Heinz’s $45 billion merger with Kraft.
The mania over cryptocurrencies has to a large extent been driven by young financial innovators. Vitalik Buterin, 23, created Ethereum, the blockchain platform that acts as a world computer for decentralized applications. Its cryptocurrency, ether, has seen its value skyrocket in 2017. Buterin now leads Ethereum, which has a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion, working on upgrades to its protocol.
Olaf Carlson-Wee, 28, was the first employee at cryptocurrency wallet Coinbase. Now, he is running his own cryptocurrency hedge fund that has seen its assets rise from $4 million to $300 million in recent months, fueled by a position in Ethereum. He is backed by venture funds like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
Wall Street is still attracting plenty of young talent to the sell side. Lalit Gurnani, 28, is an investment banker in Goldman Sach’s tech group, helping lead initial public offerings of Twillo and Redfin. He has also advised Planet on its acquisition of Google’s satellite business and Uber on fundraising. Gurnani used to be former Goldman president Gary Cohn’s chief of staff. Also at Goldman, Anne-Victoire Auriault, 29, is a senior trader overseeing one of Wall Street’s biggest program trading desks, which buys and sells portfolios of stocks as part of index arbitrage strategies tied to index rebalancing.
Maria Egee, 29, is a director at Bank of America, which brought her on from Goldman to lead its effort to build out a credit default swaps trading business. Doug Schadewald, 28, runs Barclays’ S&P 500 and VIX derivatives portfolio, one of the biggest options books on Wall Street. He is a member of the Chicago Future Exchange’s advisory committee.
Hedge funds are also well represented on this year’s 30 Under 30 Finance list. Grant Wonders, 27, is a portfolio manager at Viking Global Investors, focusing on tech, media & telecom stocks, an area that has been a profit engine at billionaire Andreas Halvorsen’s $24 billion hedge fund.
Ben Bologna, 29, is a managing director at Maverick Capital, heading consumer stock investing at Lee Ainslie’s $10 billion hedge fund firm. Bologna oversees $1 billion of investments and sits on the board of Fresh Direct. Sunil Abraham, 29, is a New York-based quantitative researcher at Two Sigma, focusing on China while working on alpha strategies and portfolio construction at the $50 billion hedge fund firm that trades financial markets using computers and algorithms.
With financial innovation, there are opportunities to improve the financial well-being of people living on low to moderate incomes. Wendy De La Rosa, 28, is a cofounder of Common Cents Lab. A former private equity investor at Goldman Sachs and Centerbridge Partners, she created the Duke University lab with famed behavioral economist Dan Ariely to work with fintech companies to incentivize smarter financial decisions.
Click HERE to view the FORBES 30 Under 30: Finance honorees