Shari Noonan: Pack Light, Move Fast, and Rewrite the Market

Shari Noonan (see bio below) has built a career by stepping into complexity and figuring out how to move it forward.

In this episode, Jeff talks with Shari, CEO and co-founder of Rialto Markets, about a career that started with summers at Lake of the Ozarks, waiting tables, reading through the local library, and becoming an accounting major partly out of spite after a professor suggested she switch to communications. Naturally, she stuck with accounting. Spite, apparently, can be a surprisingly effective academic advisor.

Shari’s path took her from KPMG to consulting, from the early days of electronic trading to Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and eventually into the startup world with Rialto Markets. Along the way, she worked through major shifts in capital markets, post-merger integration, corporate complexity, thousands of systems, regulatory challenges, fundraising, litigation, and the identity shift that comes with leaving a big-company platform behind.

We talk about:

• Growing up in Kansas City and spending summers at Lake of the Ozarks• Why waiting tables taught her patience, rhythm, and awareness• Becoming an accounting major to prove a professor wrong• Working in Poland shortly after the Berlin Wall came down• The cultural whiplash of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and startup life• What it means to “burn the boats” after leaving corporate• Why taking the wrong money can be dangerous for a startup• How Rialto Markets is helping expand access to private market investing• Her mantra: pack light and move fast• Why young professionals should stop waiting for the perfect path and just start building skills

This is a conversation about reinvention, resilience, market disruption, trusting your gut, and learning how to move through chaos without dragging a steamer trunk full of old corporate identity behind you.

And yes, we also cover random Polish landladies, TV taxes, microfiche misery, eight bosses, 2,500 systems, dine-and-dash trauma, and why sometimes the worst job you ever had is useful because at least you can check it off the list.

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