1/7/23 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange

Next Wednesday, January 11, marks the 76th anniversary of the 1947 grand opening of the 8,500-foot Lift One at Aspen Mountain. Aspen’s new uphill conveyor was, at the time, the world’s longest and fastest chairlift, its debut serving as the Big Bang of the American skiing industry. In some ways, it’s a war story.

The patron saint of Lift One was Friedl Pfeifer. A native of St. Anton, Austria, Pfeifer was part of professional skiing royalty in Europe before Hitler’s Anschluss annexed his homeland in 1938. He decamped to Sun Valley, Idaho but soon found himself as part of the U.S. internment of German-speaking people. His exit strategy from that fate was joining the 10th Mountain Division, United States Army in 1943, then training for war on skis at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado.

In February 1945, Pfeifer was wounded in combat in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, losing part of his lung. He was sent to an Army installation in Colorado Springs to recuperate and there met Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist who would eventually give Pfeiffer the financial backing to launch the Aspen Skiing Corporation and build Lift One. The rest, as they say, is history.

Last season, Aspen Skiing Company Co. recorded 1.42 million skier visits. According to the Aspen Board of Realtors, the 2022 median sales price for a single family home in Aspen was $13,100,000, with townhouses and condos going for $3,137,500. Not a bad appreciation for Pfeifer’s dream built on Paepcke’s investment of $150,000 in 1946.

One of Aspen’s seasonal residents is Mark Wassersug , ICE’s longtime chief operating officer. Mark’s retirement from ICE, after 21 years stretching back to the founding of Intercontinental Exchange, took effect on December 31, 2022, giving him a lot more time to spend on skis. Like Friedl Pfeifer at Aspen, “Wass” was there at the beginning of ICE, and his origin story is equally compelling in its way.

The view from Aspen: ?

• Mark Wassersug, ICE’s Wizard of Operations, Reveals the Magic of the Machine: Teamwork Mark Wassersug, an OG member of the ICE leadership team and its longtime COO, is readying to swipe his lift pass instead of his company ID pass after two decades transforming ICE from a startup into one of the world’s foremost operators of financial infrastructure. As he readied to swap wingtips for ski boots, “Wass” joined us in the Library for a swan song on the passions and curiosities that drive an operator, the existential moments of the company’s early days, the challenges of integrating its biggest acquisitions, and the magic of teamwork that makes the enterprise tick.

If you’re on a smart phone, all of our Inside the ICE House podcast episodes are available wherever you get your podcasts, including the Apple Podcast App, Spotify, and Stitcher, and other audio platforms. Feel free to reach out to me with any feedback about our show, or suggest any guests for future episodes.