The da Pontes had just gone through a period of severe financial difficulties after the Ottoman conquest of Negroponte, where it owned considerable property, but the marriage of his father with a Greek suggests that he still maintained business interests in the East.

Despite these difficulties da Ponte received an excellent education, training with the famous Ignazio Danti and studying philosophy at the University of Padua.

Like all young Venetian aristocrats, he began a promising cursus honorum (having significant physical and intellectual gifts) that saw him elected to the Collegio dei Savi, but he suddenly cut this career short.

It seems that in the twenty years between 1512 and 1530 he was engaged in trade and was so successful that he was able to build a sumptuous palace in San Maurizio and amass a fortune estimated at 150,000 ducats.

Young politicians looked to him during the internal crisis of 1581-82 that led to the reform of the Council of Ten.