Allegra’s mantra: Take risks, embrace change

BOULDER — When Catherine Allegra wanted to move her pioneering, five-year-old financial-technology company out of New York City 26 years ago, she narrowed her search to college towns in North Carolina, Utah and Colorado.

What was it that made her choose Boulder? A world-class research university? The federal labs? The majesty of those towering Flatirons? Yes, all that played a part.

But what tipped the scale was garbage.

“We had two very young children. We were in a one-bedroom apartment in New York because we were starting the company,” Allegra said. “We came to Boulder to check it out. We were sitting at a restaurant called the New York Deli” – the long-gone Pearl Street Mall fixture of “Mork and Mindy” fame – “and we saw a cab driver throw his trash out of the taxi and it missed the garbage can. My husband knew I really wanted to move, so he said to me, ‘If the cab driver picks up the garbage, we’ll move to Boulder.’ The cab driver backed up, stopped his car, got out, picked up the garbage and put it in the garbage can. That’s usually the story we tell about why we moved to Boulder.”

Things have been picking up for Allegra ever since.

Her company, originally called Wall Street On Demand (“We’ve been called the first fin-tech by our clients and data partners,” she said), moved to Boulder in 1996 with 30 employees and was acquired by Reuters, Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs before being sold in 2010 to IHS Markit, a provider of design, development and managed-data services to the financial markets.

And on Feb. 28 — just before Allegra received the Boulder Chamber’s Franny Reich Lifetime Achievement Award at its annual Celebration of Leadership — IHS Markit merged with S&P Global, and she became head of Markit Digital in the Market Intelligence division, one of six at S&P.

The merger boosted S&P Global’s employee base by nearly 98%, with more than 300 people based in the combined company’s Boulder office at 5775 Flatiron Parkway.

“My job is pretty much the same in some ways,” she said. “My job is still to work with Markit Digital’s clients and work with the people who provide the services for our clients. But S&P is such a large company with such a large reach that there are opportunities to also continue to work on areas I really care about, like women empowerment and pride… . I have the opportunity to expand that conversation, and I’m actually really excited about that.”

She’s excited about traveling to Australia to meet clients this month. She’s excited about working with new data sets and all the extra support she’ll have. But she’s also thrilled with what she sees as S&P’s commitment to Colorado.

Boulder “has been an extraordinary place to develop a business,” she said. “I think the university and the culture and the climate — all of those things make it a great place to do business. And I know S&P feels the same way, which is why it brought its business here as well.

“In Boulder, we’ve been able to find great talent. People really want to live here.”

But perhaps what drives Allegra most is the opportunities to mentor women and encourage them to find ways to succeed in business.

When she founded her company in 1991, she said, “in that world of financial technology, there were very few women. But when I started, we were building some of the first websites. When it’s all new, there’s a lot of opportunity there. We haven’t put a fence around it yet to choose who gets to come in and who can’t.

“So my advice to women is becoming more and more this direct: You should go write a P&L. You should think about how you could run a business, and you should do it. If you’re someone in sales and you’ve got the sales skills, go get the operational skills. Move from sales to operations. If you’re in operations, go get the clients and go sell. So for me it’s about thinking about that skill set so that you’re ready when the time comes to go take that job.

“It’s fun to run a business,” she said. “It’s rewarding. And I want more women to have that opportunity.”

Her accompanying lesson might have come from a hit song of 1944: Accentuate the positive.

“I’m a big believer in assuming positive intent,” she said. “This is my 11th merger, and so I think assuming that people want to do the right thing and are good is very important. It’s very easy to assume negative intent. So that’s a big piece for me.”

Another of her messages is to embrace change.

“If you can’t stop the waves, at least learn how to surf,” she said. “I don’t know how to surf. I would love to be a surfer. So when I think there are challenges, I think, ‘OK, it’s time to surf.’  So in the past three years with the pandemic and many of the challenges, I think we’ve all been surfing. If we think about it that way, it leads to greater success and also less friction.”

Allegra also stresses the value of taking risks.

“I also say this a lot to people who are afraid to make a move in their careers, like moving from sales to opps or whatever it is,” Allegra said. “Erica Jong has a great quote, ‘The biggest risk you can take is taking no risk at all.’ I think that when you think that, you’re not taking a risk you’re actually making a choice. By embracing change, by embracing meeting new people, by embracing learning new skills — that’s the only way I know how to be.”

Allegra remembers the days when opportunities for women were much more limited and strives to be the type of mentor she had growing up.

“I’m pre-Title IX,” she said. “When I was in high school, there weren’t a lot of women’s teams. I think going to Bryn Mawr” — the tradition-steeped private women’s college in Pennsylvania — “certainly reinforced the idea that I could do anything I wanted to do. I think it’s important that everybody feels that they can do anything that they want to do. So Bryn Mawr definitely reinforced that. I think being a trustee of Bryn Mawr, and being with all of these extraordinary women who had achieved many different things in their careers, also inspired me.

“So Bryn Mawr’s definitely the foundation. But I also grew up with amazing women in my life — my grandmother, my mother, my aunts — and so I think they were also role models. They all believed that with an education you can do anything. I didn’t come from a privileged background; my grandmother was the cook at a college. But they all encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do.”

And that’s the message Catherine Allegra passes on.

“I really want to focus on mentoring and developing the next generation of leaders. That’s actually my passion,” she said. “I started as a teacher, and developing people is the thing that really keeps me going. So I think that for me, at this stage of my career and my life, it’s the next generation I should be focused on, and leading and helping them grow.”

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