CEO NYFIX
Where you come from does not necessarily determine who you are today, but your personal values are something which you get only from your upbringing, says Howard Edelstein, a Stanford-trained electrical engineer who grew up in the Bronx.
Though he describes himself as a poor kid, his family could obviously draw on a rich heritage in terms of values. I learned early on from my father the importance of persistence, and plain old hard work, says Edelstein. Even on the days he went to school, Edelstein worked behind the delicatessen counter of a Bronx supermarket. I was learning how to slice smoked salmon when I was 14 years old, he says. So I had a skill. Just in case. So I could always work somewhere.
Thirty-odd years on, that combination of pragmatism and determination can be seen as the driving force behind a remarkably successful career, but one which has always spurned the conventional approach in favor of taking on the assignments that others regard as impossible. I like turning technology into commercial opportunity, says Edelstein. But my real passion is for taking on challenges others view as too daunting, too complex, or simply too far gone.
A serial entrepreneur and (in recent years) turn-around artist who has now spent a quarter of a century on the frontier where computer technology and telecommunications meet the information and information-sharing needs generated by the securities industry, Howard Edelstein is unsurpassed in his mastery of that particular territory. But to understand the passion he brings to endeavors easily disparaged as dull, it is necessary first to understand the man.
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