Biography | Adena Friedman — The Owen MBA Finished in the Hall on 21st Avenue South

The intern-to-chief story at Nasdaq does not begin in Times Square. It begins in Management Hall. Friedman completed an MBA at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management in 1993. Owen's own alumni pages say she applied only to Vanderbilt. She already knew Nashville from the summer before her Williams senior year. Management Hall, at 401 21st Avenue South, opened in 1982. The Walker Management Library and the school's core classrooms still sit in this building. In 1993 she married Michael Friedman, who finished a Vanderbilt law degree the same year. After the MBA she joined Nasdaq as an unpaid intern. Nasdaq's 14 November 2016 succession release starts her company clock in that intern year. The product work that later defined her titles — data, strategy, finance — was trained as management of a complex service, not as trading-floor folklore. Owen still lists her as MBA 1993. The building on this corner is the one that granted the degree. Photo: Vanderbilt University, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.