Podcast Episode 006 with Tony Schiavo, a Wall Street FinTec CTO

Tony Schiavo

EPISODE 006 DETAILED SHOW NOTES

Topics covered:  

  • Tony’s career in several Wall Street Banks
  • The challenges in managing people
  • How to manage by influence
  • Buy versus build in the software industry
  • How to hire the right persons and what to look for
  • How Tony took a break and went to a silent retreat

Career

Tony graduated with a degree in accounting but also studied other majors and spent most of his career in IT and especially in the electronic trading area transforming systems for many Wall Street Banks.

He started his career in the Swiss Bank Corporation  and then moved on to Merrill Lynch where he was responsible for over 700 people on 3 continents. After that he took up the challenge with Royal Bank of Canada who wanted to establish themselves on Wall Street and Tony was responsible for their Fixed Income and Currencies team and was instrumental in their move away from old mainframe technology to more modern systems.

After a short experience with Citi he took a year off and then moved more into the startup area and is now leading TruMid Technologies which is the technology branch of TruMid.

Silent Retreat

During his year off from work Tony took a 10 day silent retreat in Canada and that was the single biggest pivot point in his life.

It’s called Vipassana meditation and means “to see things as they truly are”.

No tv, no phone, no exercise and 8 hours a day of meditation and only vegan meals.

Tony compares it with a snowglob where you can not really see the image because of all snow flying around and suddenly you can see everything clear .

Mats wonders where he did it and how he found out about it and it is a quite funny story.

Tony was playing the guitar one day and he was playing and singing Under the Bridge with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and for the first time he really noticed the lyrics and wanted to find out more about about Anthony Kiedis who wrote the song and saw that he had done a Vipassana meditation in Quebec, Canada and Tony was inspired to take the journey himself and followed in his foosteps.

Management

In the conversation we talk a lot about management. Tony explains how he in Merrill Lynch learned the importance of manage by influence and he learnt it the hard way.

We talk about layoffs and how difficult it is to do this but how Tony surpringly has managed to stay friends with people he had to lay off.

Tony brings up trust as one of the most important things required in order to be able to move fast in a team and we discuss the importance to have complementing skills in a team but where an overlap of skills could be important in order for people to recognize each others value.

Recruitement

Mats is asking Tony what he is looking for when recruiting.

Tony explains that he has a data driven approach to hiring but that the single most important thing he is looking for is if people are an Adult or not. Listen to find out more!

TruMid

In the end of the converstation Tony is talking about how he has build the organization he is currently running without processes with nearly all people working remoteley and having trust between people as a leitmotif, and an “I will” commitment between people where the commit to “I will deliver this to you by x o’clock” is cemented and followed between all people.

Tony also emphasize something rather unusual these days and that is that he likes everybody in the office.

Please follow and like us:
error

Leave a Reply