The 2015 Tech 50: Jock Percy

< The 2015 Tech 50: Racers to the Edge

50
Jock Percy
Chief Executive Officer
Perseus
PNR

In 2010, its first year of operation, Perseus was a boutique, serving a handful of customers who had caught on to a bespoke, managed telecommunications service model that may have been slightly ahead of its time. The following year, recalls founder and CEO Jock Percy, proprietary traders started climbing aboard, drawn to the LiquidPath network’s low latency and market-access connectivity. A steady stream of exchanges, investment banks and hedge funds — and a small but growing number of media, e-commerce and gaming companies — followed. If Perseus, which has its headquarters in New York, hadn’t quite established itself as a Wall Street name, that changed in April, when Goldman Sachs Group bought a minority stake for $20.5 million. It was more than just an image booster, says Percy, 41, who placed so much stock in the power of his brand that he dropped “Telecom” from the company’s name some months before. The funding will enable Perseus to complete a 28-location expansion of LiquidPath in one year, instead of the original plan for five years. Three cities added in the first quarter — Johannesburg, Istanbul and Santiago — are representative of Perseus’ global reach. Percy says his main competition is do-it-yourself networking, which is increasingly ripe for outsourcing as firms come to the conclusion that their competitive advantages lie elsewhere. With a Ph.D. in political economies from the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Percy has an intellectual and professional fascination with Bitcoin. He announced early last year that Perseus would accept Bitcoin payments. In May 2014 the company launched a digital currency initiative, offering its “Wall Street–grade” infrastructure as an alternative to Mt. Gox and other platforms that did not serve Bitcoin well.

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The 2015 Tech 50