2025 etf.com Lifetime Achievement Award Nominee: Bruce Bond

This article is one in a series profiling finalists for etf.com’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, to be announced April 23 in New York City. 

Innovator ETFs CEO and co-founder Bruce Bond didn't just participate in the growth of the U.S. exchange-traded fund industry, he shaped it.

Recognized as an important figure in the industry's three-decade history, Bond is frequently featured and quoted in financial news publications and on TV. From launching Powershares in the early 2000s to selling it to Invesco a few years later—in a deal that included the ETF that would become the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ)—to then co-founding Innovator and its pioneering line of defined-outcome ETFs, Bond's fingerprints are all over the industry.

Bond has seen and seized opportunities over the past decades as he rode to the top of what is now a $10.6 trillion industry. He's sought and found gaps in the industry that he then filled with products that caught on with investors.

"If you want to be successful, you need to create for yourself a unique lane within the industry where you can be a thought leader and the leader," he said in an interview from his home in Naples, Florida. "The theory was to create your own lane."

Start at Nuveen

For Bond, 62, it began with his stint at Nuveen in Chicago, which he joined after graduating from Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, with a bachelor's degree in business systems. While at Nuveen, discussions had begun around starting one of these new trading vehicles, the exchange-traded fund, and the firm, Bond said, was among a handful to apply for permission to launch one.

Nuveen decided not to move forward. Bond thought they were wrong. Sensing an opportunity, he bought the nascent business from Nuveen, including the Powershares name, and set out to launch the company with John Southard.

"I was so convinced that ETFs were going to be a huge part of the industry going forward," said Bond, a hunter and fisherman who also farms corn and soybeans near Innovator's Wheaton, Illinois, headquarters. "I tried to convince them. Finally, I decided that if I believe this, I have to do something."

Innovator ETFs Origins

Not many years later, Invesco bought Powershares and used it to launch its ETF business. From there, Bond—a married father of three with 10 grandchildren—and Southard turned toward buffered, or defined-outcome ETFs, and started Innovator, which now manages nearly $24 billion in 157 U.S.-traded ETFs.

They went after defined-outcome ETFs because, as he said, "The bologna had been sliced pretty thin. They had taken every piece of the market and put an ETF on it."

"We created something brand new, and we are the thought leader in the category," he said, explaining how he heeded his own advice.

Where does Bond see the industry headed? Regarding his own involvement, he said he plans to stay involved for some time to come. For the industry?

"It still has significant upside. The operational structure is superior to most of the other types of products," he said, adding that active ETFs will continue growing and mutual funds will still lose market share to ETFs.