Growing the MEMX Team: A Staffing Update – Part II

I am pleased to announce that we have hired Louise Curbishley as our Chief Financial Officer and the latest addition to our management team. Our full staff, which was at ten when I last wrote in early June, is now up to thirty employees including our full development team and a growing sales force. In this post, I will introduce you to Louise, as well as another new member of our management team and Head of Member Experience, Nick Ciarleglio.

Louise brings a unique skill set to her new role at MEMX. She was most recently a Partner and Chief Financial Officer at Hitchwood Capital Management, where she was part of the leadership team that launched the firm. Louise was a member of the senior management committee involved in all critical business decisions and had direct responsibility for best execution as well as the finance and risk functions. Louise completed a Master of Engineering at Oxford, after which she held several positions across strategy consulting, M&A and venture investing. She went on to earn her MBA with Distinction at Harvard, which was followed by CFO roles at several asset managers. Louise’s analytical approach to business management and experience leveraging technology to generate efficiency will serve MEMX well as we grow. I am very excited to have her voice and viewpoint on our management team.

Meanwhile, our search for the right person to lead our sales efforts concluded with the hiring of Nick Ciarleglio. Nick has an impressive technical background, having started his career as a technical consultant for Hewlett-Packard. He then joined Arista Networks in startup phase as its first customer-facing engineer and, in his twelve years there, helped them to expand into a publicly traded company. Nick is a member of our management team and — in true startup form — is also a member of our technology staff, where he has already spent more than a few days configuring switches and helping lay out our network topology. His technical expertise combined with the experience he is gaining by helping build our exchange from the ground up is invaluable in his customer-facing role, especially as the trading business becomes more technology-driven and our clients become more technically savvy. We have purposefully named the sales group the “member experience team,” as we aim to ensure that our clients’ interactions with our exchange throughout the lifecycle of the trade (starting with onboarding and continuing through connectivity, execution, and clearing) are seamless and collaborative.

Not only are Louise and Nick important pieces of our management team, but they represent the diversity of thought and background we intend to leverage in order to bring competition to the market for the benefit of the investing public. While we are growing rapidly, I am proud of the discipline and focus we have exercised in our rigorous search process, by which we are diligently building a team of high-performers who add to our culture built on transparency, efficiency, and trust. We intend to further reflect these values as we continue expanding the team through launch and beyond. If you are interested in joining our effort, please see our openings here and email us at resume@memx.com.

Thank you and have a happy Thanksgiving,
Jonathan