Lee Olesky’s kids wish he had picked a business more easily explained to their friends.

The year after Jeff Bezos’s little online bookstore opened its virtual doors for the first time, Olesky wrote a business plan that would one day disrupt hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of daily bond trades just as Amazon disrupted retail. But even though the chief executive and co-founder of Tradeweb is not nearly as famous as Bezos (to his children’s chagrin, he jokes), bond traders certainly know him. A central player in the shift away from doing deals by phone to trading online, Tradeweb’s volumes on its platforms reached $100tn this year alone.