Jenny Just has had a lot of success over the years, from making money with trading options to becoming a millionaire by starting a fintech company with just $1.5 million in seed money. But she says she learned one of the most important skills of her career very late and at great expense.
“If I had learned poker sooner, I think I could have avoided losing 10 years of my career,” Just said on the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
Just became famous for advocating for poker as a field that goes far beyond its association with gambling. She describes it as a training ground for decision-making under pressure, an important skill that young people, especially girls, should learn early in life.
Players must assess surrounding risks without complete information. You need to repeat your choices with real consequences. The situation in the poker game mirrors how mistakes can be costly when you’re trading or building a company early in your career.
She believes poker would have accelerated her learning curve by shortening years of ordeals.
“I would have played more poker,” Just told CNBC senior media and technology correspondent Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the “Changemakers” podcast. “When those experiences come together…my baseline gets even bigger,” she said.
Many men start playing poker and accumulating reps at the young age of 8 to 10, long before they start their careers.
“It limits the downside and carves out the upside in certain scenarios,” Just said. “If it was poker, they would have played it more often.”
Named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers List.
In 2020, Just and his daughter Juliette launched the Poker Power platform to teach women and girls how to play the game and how to use the lessons from poker to succeed professionally.
In addition to poker potentially canceling out years of inevitable losses, Just says one of the most valuable lessons he learned through the game was patience. Poker requires players to wait, observe, and act strategically rather than emotionally. This approach didn’t come naturally to her, she says, but over time she was able to learn how to utilize “the extraordinary patience it takes to be strategic.”
She says early exposure to structured risk can change career trajectories, and this learning could be especially important for women, who often plateau when it comes to taking risks, especially when it comes to money, because they aren’t trained to be comfortable with risk. “That money table is the source of power,” Just said. “And if you want to make a difference, you have to be comfortable sitting at that table,” she added.
He has no regrets about his path to becoming a successful trader and then co-founder of Peak6, a financial technology company that supports businesses essential to the financial lives of many Americans. robin hood, SoFiand Betterment. But she believes she could have achieved her goals faster and at a lower cost with the help of poker lessons that can be applied to multiple areas of her career.
“I didn’t have reps, so I had to get reps myself. So as an option trader, you get a certain type of rep. As a business builder, you get different types of reps. I always talk about this long list of failures.
We make all of our senior leaders aware of that. …It’s always there, right next to me on my desk. Just as a memory. And I think if I had been able to embed all these mistakes and knock them down sooner, I just would have been in a different place. ”
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