Jim O’Donnell and the Long Bet on a Faster World

Jim O’Donnell spent more than seventeen years running a company devoted to making things happen faster. His own contribution required a different clock. Exegy began as a bet on computing research at Washington University in St. Louis. He helped back it in 2003, became its chief executive in 2005, and stayed in the job until March 2023. The company sold technology for impatient markets. Building the company took patience.

That is the appealing wrinkle in his career. Financial technology is usually described through the smallest available unit of time. O’Donnell’s story is easier to understand in decades: a degree, an investment career, a business partnership, a return to the university, then a long stretch translating engineering possibilities into something customers would buy. The stopwatch gets the attention. The calendar does much of the work.

A diploma with a long afterlife

In 1974, O’Donnell earned both a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and an MBA at Washington University. He began his financial career at Goldman Sachs. Later came Bush O’Donnell & Co., the St. Louis financial-services business he formed with William H. T. Bush. Before Exegy was his operating responsibility, investing was already his profession.

The distinction helps explain his place in the company’s beginnings. Exegy’s founding group included engineering professors Ron Indeck, Ron Cytron, Mark Franklin and Roger Chamberlain, alongside O’Donnell and fellow business-school alumnus J.J. Stupp. This was a meeting of disciplines with different daily preoccupations. A research result has to work. A business also has to find someone willing to pay for it, support that customer and keep doing both.

O’Donnell’s relationship with the university had already extended beyond his diplomas. He served on its Board of Trustees from 1996 to 2000 and was elected again in 2006. He taught finance as an adjunct. The campus was a recurring institution in his working life, supplying responsibilities as well as credentials.

By the time Bush O’Donnell invested in Exegy in 2003, the connection had acquired another purpose. University research needed a route into commercial use. O’Donnell brought the experience of someone whose career had been spent around capital and companies. An alumni relationship had become part of a startup’s financial foundation.

The university project meets the trading desk

Exegy was created to commercialize hardware-accelerated computing developed at Washington University’s engineering school. Its chosen market was financial data: the stream of messages that tells trading systems what is happening across exchanges. Its ticker plant launched in 2006. The name sounds as if it belongs beside a brass telephone. The engineering belongs to electronic markets.

A ticker plant makes incoming market information consistent and usable. Different feeds must be normalized. Information may need to be enriched or filtered before applications consume it. Exegy used field-programmable gate arrays, usually shortened to FPGAs, to accelerate that work. These are configurable chips, allowing processing tasks to be implemented in specialized hardware.

For a customer, the chip was part of a larger arrangement. A useful trading tool needs dependable data, interfaces that applications can use and an organization prepared to maintain the system. Exegy developed appliances and managed services around those needs. The route from research to a recurring customer relationship passed through a great deal of practical engineering.

O’Donnell’s role was to lead the enterprise built around that engineering. By February 2021, he could point to a business that had grown from ten employees and no sales in 2004 to 135 employees and recurring revenue. When promoting Rod Arbaugh and David Taylor to co-presidents, he credited their contributions across operations, service and technology. His account of growth had colleagues in it.

The cost behind the clock

In May 2021, Marlin Equity Partners backed the combination of Exegy and Vela. O’Donnell became CEO of the combined business. The transaction broadened what Exegy could offer across market data and execution, bringing together capabilities that had previously lived in separate companies.

His explanation of the deal was notably attentive to ordinary expenses. Market-data infrastructure consumes network capacity, equipment, power and data-center space. Feed handlers require development and maintenance. Combining products could reduce overlapping work and support a common platform across a larger customer base. Behind the elegant promise of speed sat a collection of bills.

There was a customer argument as well. A firm building its own infrastructure must carry those development obligations itself. A supplier serving many firms can spread investment across them. That does not eliminate the engineering. It changes who performs it and how the cost is shared. O’Donnell treated scale as a practical means of sustaining the product.

In May 2022, Exegy acquired Enyx, adding FPGA trading products and tools for developing customized applications. O’Donnell described the familiar tension between buying ready-made components and committing time and resources to an internal build. The enlarged portfolio was intended to give clients more ways to combine purchased technology with their own work. A customer could retain a particular idea without having to invent every tool needed to execute it.

Customers get the building blocks

Another shift was under way during O’Donnell’s final years as CEO. Exegy was adding predictive signals and analytical context to market data. The commercial proposition widened: deliver information quickly, then help customers extract something useful from the activity that information describes.

In November 2022, he discussed how clients were using the company’s components in their own strategies. His interest was in what happened after delivery. A supplier could provide a capability, but customers would find applications shaped by their own priorities. They were participants in the product’s usefulness, rather than merely recipients of a finished instruction.

“What surprised us is how creative our clients are in using the building blocks that we give them to construct their own solutions.”

Jim O’Donnell, November 2022

The idea fitted the larger access argument he had been making. Sophisticated firms could develop their own analytical machinery. Other firms might want those capabilities without taking on the whole infrastructure project. Exegy’s task was to make useful components available in forms customers could incorporate into their existing work.

It also placed a limit on the supplier’s authorship. The technology company could develop the tool; the customer still chose how to use it. O’Donnell’s surprise at their creativity is a small, revealing moment in a career often expressed through executive titles. Even after years of development, the next interesting idea could come from the other side of the commercial relationship.

A campus is also a constituency

The graduation photograph offers another view of the same career. O’Donnell stands at the left, greeting a graduate. In the fall 2014 Olin magazine, he appears among executives who had returned to participate in the school’s life. The business-school alumnus had become someone invited back to address the next group leaving it.

His university service included leadership of the Olin Business School National Council and participation in the Skandalaris Center’s national council. He also served as president of the William Greenleaf Eliot Society and chaired Olin’s campaign within the university’s Leading Together fundraising effort. These were continuing institutional commitments, alongside the demands of his companies.

Recognition followed at several points: the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1989, Olin’s Distinguished Business Alumni Award in 1997 and the school’s Dean’s Medal in 2005. The dates cover sixteen years. The record suggests repeated involvement rather than one ceremonial return, with teaching, governance and fundraising supplying different ways to contribute.

There was public service beyond campus, too. From November 2005 until October 2009, he was a trustee of Missouri’s public-school and education-employee retirement systems. His financial experience was being applied to an institution whose constituency included teachers and school support staff. The work belonged to the less photogenic side of finance: policy, stewardship and a board’s continuing obligations.

Leaving the chair occupied

In March 2022, the A-Team Group named O’Donnell its Most Innovative Financial Technology Executive. He connected the award to the broader effect he wanted Exegy’s products to have: markets that were more competitive, efficient and open to participation. It was an ambition about who could use the machinery, alongside what the machinery could do.

A year later came the leadership transition. On March 2, 2023, Exegy announced that David Taylor would succeed him as CEO. Taylor had joined in 2005 and worked through engineering and product leadership before becoming president. O’Donnell remained on the board. The colleague receiving the company had spent much of its development inside it.

That ending matters to the shape of the story. O’Donnell helped finance a university project, led the business around it, expanded its capabilities and handed operating responsibility to someone who had helped build them. His career at Exegy gives the smallest units of trading time a much larger setting: years of relationships, maintenance, investment and succession. Eventually, even a business devoted to speed needs someone prepared to stay.