Jenny Just has had a lot of success over the years, from profits booked trading options to founding a fintech company with just $1.5 million in seed money that has made her a billionaire. But she says one of the most important skills of her career she learned very late and at considerable cost.
“I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner,” Just said on the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
Just has become well-known for her advocacy of poker as a discipline that far surpasses its association with gambling. She describes it as a training ground for decision-making under pressure and a critical skill for young people, in particular girls, to learn early in life.
It forces players to assess the risks around them without complete information. It requires repeated choices with real consequences. The conditions of a poker game mirror situations Just found herself in while trading and building companies earlier in a career, when mistakes were costly.
Just believes poker would have accelerated her learning curve by compressing years of trial.
“Poker would have just given me more reps,” Just told CNBC Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin in the latest episode of the Changemakers podcast. “When those experiences compound … the more my baseline grows,” she said.
Just says many men begin accumulating those reps long before they enter into their careers, playing poker as young as eight to 10 years of age.
“Limiting my downside in certain scenarios … and opening up the upside,” Just said. “Poker would have just given me more reps.”
Just was named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list.
In 2020, Just and her 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 the years of avoidable losses that poker might have erased, Just says one of the most valuable lessons she learned through the game was patience. Poker forces players to wait, observe, and act strategically instead of emotionally, an approach that she says did not come naturally to her, but she has been able to learn over time how to leverage the “extraordinary amount of patience it takes to be strategic.”
She says that early exposure to structured risk can change career trajectories, and the learning can be particularly important for women who often hit a ceiling when it comes to taking risks, especially with money, because they were never trained to be comfortable with it. “Those money tables are where the power is,” Just said. “And if you want to effect change, you have to be comfortable at those tables,” she added.
Just does not regret the path that led to her successes as a trader, and then later as the co-founder of Peak6, a financial technology firm that supports companies that have become critical to the financial lives of many Americans, including Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment. But she is certain that she would have reached her goals faster, with lower costs, with the help of poker lessons that can be applied across multiple areas of a career.
“I just had to get those reps myself because I had not had them. So as an options trader, I get certain kinds of reps. As a business builder, I get different kinds, and I always talk about this long list of fails that we
have and we make sure all of our senior leaders, they know it. … it’s usually right there, right next to me on my desk, just as a reminder. And I think embedding all those mistakes, if I could have crunched them down in that window sooner, I would just have been in a different place.”
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