
A distressed-debt trader walked into cybersecurity and found a market where the price was panic. His answer was data, practice and a stubborn preference for paying nothing.
Tom Callahan is the CEO of Nasdaq Private Market (NPM), the New York firm building the plumbing for trading shares in companies that have not gone public. A 30-year markets veteran who ran a $700 billion cash business at BlackRock and led NYSE Liffe U.S., he took NPM's helm in 2022 and frames the private market as a multi-trillion-dollar asset class 'hiding in plain sight' - one whose infrastructure, he says, resembles the bond market of 1970. He argues tender offers will soon outpace IPOs as the way late-stage companies deliver liquidity.