No Priors · Thursday, July 9, 2026
Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, shared details of his unconventional start in the tech industry, beginning as a mainframe operator at Morgan Stanley in the early 1980s. He explained how this experience, far removed from his finance background, ultimately led him to pursue law and then a career on Wall Street.
“So, um, real short. I came out of Wharton with green finance, and now I ended up in the back office of M.I.S.”
“My first job is putting tapes on a drive in a data center of our IBM 3884s and the forces that went and and the tape drives were putting the tapes on on the drive.”
“And I then become, you become a developer and you basically learn that this is not a career for me. I should do something else.”