Surfer Who Left Banking Creates a Niche Market in Fossils

For Cliff Hartono, it was a surreal moment. In October 2012, he was standing on a Wyoming hilltop, a hotbed of fossil discoveries. Dotted with Angus cattle, horses, and deer, the landscape was a world away from London’s Canary Wharf, where only a month earlier, surrounded by six computer screens, he had been selling exchange-traded funds at Credit Suisse Group.

Now here he was, at 27, on an Indiana Jones–style expedition with a bunch of American fossil hunters in cowboy hats. “Hey, kid, is this the first time you held a sledgehammer?” asked one of them, his body adorned by several fossil-shaped tattoos. Hartono remembers replying, “The heaviest thing I lifted last month was a computer mouse.”