The Power of Positive Destruction

Introduction: Problems and Opportunities Are Two Sides of a Coin

I’m often told, “You don’t have to break everything, Seth.”

I think you do. All businesses and industries could probably benefit from being broken down and put back together better. In some cases, it’s continuous improvement; in others, it is wholesale disruption or positive destruction.

My work life began in the early 1980s when I worked as an intern on Wall Street. Wall Street seemed to me like the center of the universe. The whole world revolved around it. It was fast paced and exciting. It was either where all the smartest people were or where all the smartest people wanted to be. But only a few weeks into the internship, it became clear to me that it was a bit like the Land of Oz. The outside was a picture of well-structured sophistication and complexity. On the inside it was more like the man behind the curtain. I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who knew the reality or if I was the only one who wanted to change it.

Either way, seeing past the curtain was the start of my entrepreneurial career, which began at age 24 with my first business, Merrin Financial, a software company that created the first order management system, which automated much of the clerical trading process and ushered in electronic trading. The order management system has since been adopted and is used at every asset management firm around the world. The second company I started was a middleware software company based in New Jersey; the ...