A small investment made at the right moment has the power to launch ordinary people to millionaire status. All it took was $1,000 and an out-there idea for Jeffrey Sprecher, the founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, to set his business on a path to becoming a $85 billion behemoth.
“I had this idea that you should be able to trade electric power, buy and sell electric power, on an exchange,” Sprecher recalled at the Rotary Club Of Atlanta earlier this year. But there was a huge caveat: He “had no idea how to do that. I’d never worked on Wall Street, I never traded.”
At the time, Sprecher had heard that Continental Power Exchange—owned by Warren Buffett’s electric utility company, MidAmerican Energy—was…