There wasn't a women's restroom. That's the detail Jenny Just keeps returning to — not the noise, not the testosterone, not the shoulder-to-shoulder crush of men in colored jackets screaming bids into the void — but the simple infrastructural fact that when she arrived on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange in the early 1990s, nobody had thought to install a bathroom for someone like her. The oversight was not malicious so much as architectural: the building had been designed for the people who had always occupied it, and those people were men. To relieve herself, Just had to leave the trading floor entirely, navigate hallways, find a facility that acknowledged her biological existence, and then fight her way back to her post — a logistical indignity that, compounding across months and years, functioned as a kind of metabolic tax on being female in the derivatives business. She paid it without complaint. She also, apparently, developed an unusual capacity to hold both her bladder and her convictions for longer than seemed reasonable.
This is a story about what happens when someone who was never supposed to be at the table decides not only to sit down but to redesign the table itself — its dimensions, its rules, its assumptions about who belongs there. It is a story about options, in every sense of the word.
By the Numbers
The PEAK6 Empire
$1.5MSeed capital at founding in 1997
57%Average annual return (reported)
0Losing years in the firm's history
2xFemale fund managers vs. industry benchmark
~$1B+Jenny Just's net worth (Forbes billionaire)
1MWomen targeted by Poker Power initiative
The Floor
The Chicago Board Options Exchange in the early 1990s was, by any reasonable accounting, one of the most hostile environments for women in American finance — which is saying something about a profession that had made hostility toward women practically a form of institutional art. The pit was a Darwinian theater: hundreds of traders jammed together, using hand signals and lung capacity to execute contracts on options whose value decayed by the minute.
Speed mattered. Volume mattered. Nerve mattered. Height, which helped you catch a broker's eye across the pit, mattered. What didn't matter — what had never, in the exchange's institutional memory, mattered — was whether any given participant happened to be a woman.
Jenny Just walked into this world not as a tourist or an observer but as a participant who intended to stay. The specifics of her early biography are the kind that, in retrospect, acquire a narrative inevitability they didn't possess at the time: she came from modest circumstances, was not the product of a legacy finance family, and arrived at the CBOE through the pipeline that flowed from O'Connor & Associates, the legendary Chicago options-trading firm that had pioneered the application of mathematical models — specifically the Black-Scholes framework — to options pricing. O'Connor was a hothouse for quantitative talent, a place where the prevailing ethos was that markets could be understood through disciplined intellectual effort rather than gut feel. It was also, by the standards of Wall Street at the time, relatively meritocratic. If you could trade, you could trade.
Just could trade. The details of her early career at O'Connor have been compressed by time into the essential narrative: she learned options theory from the inside, developed an intuition for volatility and risk that was rooted in mathematical discipline rather than bravado, and — crucially — absorbed the lesson that technology was the real edge. The human body, standing in the pit, screaming and signaling, was merely a wetware interface for calculations that could eventually be performed faster and more reliably by machines. This insight would become the central organizing principle of everything she built afterward.
But what O'Connor also gave her was a partner. Matthew Hulsizer — Matt to anyone who'd worked with him — was a trader on the same floor, a man who shared both Just's appetite for risk and her conviction that options trading could be systematized, scaled, and ultimately extracted from the physical theater of the pit. Mary Callahan Erdoes, the head of JPMorgan's Asset and Wealth Management business, would later introduce them at a 2021 webcast as "a fabulous couple that came from the original days of O'Connor, where they were traders." The characterization was both warm and slightly misleading — "fabulous couple" suggests a glamorous ease that obscures what it actually took to do what they did next.
$1.5 Million and a Theory
In 1997, Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer left the relative safety of institutional employment and founded PEAK6 Investments with $1.5 million in seed capital. She was in her late twenties. She was a single mother with a young child. Asked years later whether this made any sense — the risk calculus of abandoning a steady income while responsible for a dependent — Just offered a characteristically unvarnished assessment: "I don't think it made sense, and I did it anyway."
The honesty of that admission deserves a moment's attention. The mythology of entrepreneurship, particularly in its American telling, tends to launder risk into inevitability. The founder always knew. The founder saw something others didn't. Just refuses this framing. She was, by her own account, "naive enough to think, like, why not?" In 1997, she noted, entrepreneurship "wasn't even a sexy thing to do." There was no glorified startup culture, no breathless podcast ecosystem anointing founders as cultural heroes. There were just "small pods of trading groups that would pop up," and Just and Hulsizer figured they could be one of them. If the venture failed to become anything more than a modestly profitable two-person shop, "that's okay too because lots of people can make good money."
This is a revealing frame of mind. The firm that would eventually generate a reported average annual return of 57% and never post a losing year was born not from grandiose ambition but from a species of pragmatic fearlessness — the willingness to step into uncertainty without needing to narrate the uncertainty into destiny.
The name PEAK6 itself carried a quiet aspiration. The firm's original focus was proprietary options trading — the same discipline Just and Hulsizer had learned at O'Connor — but with a critical difference. Where the old model had relied on human traders standing in pits, PEAK6 would invest heavily in technology from the start. The thesis was simple and, in 1997, ahead of its time: the future of trading belonged to firms that could build superior technology platforms, not firms that employed the loudest voices in the pit. The pit was dying. Computing power was cheap and getting cheaper. The edge would go to whoever could process information, model risk, and execute trades with the least latency and the most precision.
When you take an entrepreneurial journey in 1997 it's so different than today because there's so much talk about it. It wasn't even a sexy thing to do. We're just gonna go from there. We're gonna go sit over here instead.
Another person who had decided not to make the leap — Just's would-be third co-founder — had backed out precisely because he had a young child and couldn't stomach the risk. Just, who had the same obligation and arguably fewer resources, went anyway. The asymmetry is instructive. It says something about risk tolerance, certainly. But it also says something about what she later identified as the critical skill gap between men and women in finance: not intelligence, not work ethic, not analytical rigor, but the willingness to act under uncertainty. The willingness to sit down at a table where you don't know what's going to happen.
Technology as Theology
The central insight of PEAK6 — that technology, not human talent, was the durable competitive advantage in trading — proved to be more than a business strategy. It became something closer to a theology, an organizing belief that shaped every subsequent decision the firm made.
From its founding, PEAK6 invested disproportionately in building proprietary systems. While many trading firms of the late 1990s and early 2000s were content to use off-the-shelf platforms and compete on the basis of trader intuition, PEAK6 built its own infrastructure. The bet was that in a world where markets were becoming increasingly electronic — where the physical trading floor was giving way to servers and fiber optic cables — the firm that controlled its own technology stack would have an asymmetric advantage. It could iterate faster. It could adapt to new market structures more nimbly. And it could, over time, transform that technology from an internal tool into an external product.
This last move was the crucial one. PEAK6 didn't just use technology to trade; it eventually began licensing its technology to other firms. The pivot from proprietary trading firm to fintech infrastructure provider happened gradually, but its implications were enormous. By building systems robust enough for its own trading operations — systems that had to function under the extreme demands of real-time market execution — PEAK6 had inadvertently created technology that other financial firms needed. The result was a kind of productive duality: the firm was simultaneously a trader and a toolmaker, a player and a platform.
By the 2020s, PEAK6's technology had become embedded in the infrastructure of some of the most prominent names in consumer fintech. The firm's systems powered integrations across eToro, SoFi, Betterment, and Robinhood — platforms that, collectively, served tens of millions of retail investors. Jenny Just, the former options trader who'd had to leave the floor to find a bathroom, was now operating the plumbing through which a generation of democratized investors accessed the market.
Among its more recent innovations: an overnight trading platform, launched to capture the growing demand for after-hours market access. The move was characteristically PEAK6 — identifying a structural gap in market infrastructure and building the technology to fill it before competitors understood the gap existed.
The Arithmetic of Absence
Here is a number that tells a story: less than 5% of casino poker players are women. Here is another: in the world of professional fund management, women remain a distinct minority, with industry-wide figures hovering far below parity. The numbers rhyme because the underlying dynamics rhyme — both poker and asset management are domains where risk-taking is the primary skill, where capital is the language, and where the cultural architecture has been built, over decades, by and for men.
Jenny Just noticed the rhyme. More precisely, she lived it. As a woman who had built a multibillion-dollar financial services firm from a $1.5 million stake, she occupied an almost impossibly rare position: one of only 23 self-made female billionaires in the United States. The smallness of that cohort — 23, in a country of 330 million — was itself an indictment. Not of women's capabilities, Just argued, but of the systems, cultural signals, and accumulated structural disadvantages that prevented women from getting to the table in the first place.
"There is no reason women can't be equal at the job of allocating money," she told CNBC in 2022. The sentence is notable for what it doesn't say. It doesn't say women are almost as good. It doesn't hedge. It offers no caveats about biological difference or personality type. It makes a flat empirical claim: the gap is not natural. It is constructed.
The question, then, was what to do about it. And here Just did something unexpected — something that, depending on your perspective, was either brilliantly lateral or charmingly eccentric. She turned to poker.
Cards on the Table
In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic that had shut down offices, schools, and most forms of in-person gathering, Jenny Just and her daughter Juliette launched Poker Power — a platform designed to teach women and girls how to play poker, and through poker, how to develop the strategic and psychological skills needed to succeed in business and life.
The premise was deceptively simple. Poker, Just argued, was a near-perfect laboratory for the competencies that women were systematically denied the opportunity to practice: risk assessment, capital allocation, decision-making under uncertainty, reading opponents, managing emotional reactions, and — perhaps most importantly — the simple act of sitting down at a table surrounded by people who might not want you there and playing anyway.
"That poker table has a forcefield around it," Just told CNBC. "It feels an awful lot like the meeting room."
The analogy was precise. In both poker and the boardroom, the dynamics are the same: information is incomplete, stakes are real, and the cultural expectation is that women will be cautious, accommodating, and reluctant to bet big. Poker, Just believed, could reprogram those expectations. Not through lectures or workshops or motivational seminars, but through the experience itself — the visceral, repeated act of putting chips at risk, reading a bluffing opponent, and making a decision when you couldn't possibly know all the variables.
Juliette Just, Jenny's daughter and co-founder of Poker Power, represented the generational dimension of the project. Where Jenny had learned risk tolerance the hard way — through decades on trading floors and in boardrooms — Juliette embodied the possibility of teaching it earlier, of giving young women the psychological infrastructure for risk-taking before the professional world had a chance to teach them timidity.
That poker table has a forcefield around it. It feels an awful lot like the meeting room. ... Practice going to the table.
The goal was ambitious: teach one million women to play poker. The number sounded like marketing — a round, aspirational figure designed for press releases — but Just's execution was systematic. Poker Power developed a curriculum, trained instructors, and partnered with universities and corporations. The program wasn't about creating professional poker players. It was about using the game as a training ground for a specific set of cognitive and emotional muscles that, Just believed, would transfer directly to professional contexts.
The evidence, at least at the anecdotal level, was compelling. Women who went through the program reported increased comfort with financial risk, greater willingness to negotiate, and — perhaps most tellingly — a diminished fear of making the wrong decision. In a world that punished women for being bold and rewarded them for being careful, poker offered a controlled environment where boldness was not just permitted but required.
The Patience Problem
Asked what she had learned from studying poker that she hadn't known despite decades of success in finance, Just gave an answer that was, for a self-made billionaire, remarkably self-critical.
"I learned patience," she said. "The extraordinary amount of patience it takes to be strategic. I'm not known for my patience at all."
The admission cuts against the popular image of the decisive, action-oriented entrepreneur. Just was saying that her instinct — the very instinct that had driven her to leave O'Connor, start a firm as a single mother, and build a multibillion-dollar enterprise — had a shadow side. Speed, aggression, and bias toward action were virtues in the pit. But poker revealed that they could also be liabilities. The game punished impatience. It rewarded the ability to fold hand after hand, to wait for favorable odds, to resist the temptation of action when action wasn't warranted.
"You have a lot of self-awareness when you start to play poker about your physical self, about your mental self," Just said, "and you don't test yourself in that way anywhere else."
The second lesson was even more striking: "I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner."
Ten years. From a woman whose firm had never posted a losing year, the claim that she had endured a decade of avoidable losses was startling. What she meant, presumably, was not financial losses but strategic ones — the deals she'd pushed too hard, the decisions she'd made too fast, the moments where a more patient assessment of the situation would have produced a better outcome. The insight was characteristically rigorous: Just was applying the same analytical framework to herself that she applied to options pricing. She had identified a systematic error in her own decision-making, traced it to a root cause (insufficient patience), and found a training regimen (poker) that addressed it.
The Architecture of a Firm
To understand PEAK6, you have to understand what it is not. It is not a hedge fund, though it trades. It is not a pure technology company, though technology is its engine. It is not a venture capital firm, though it makes investments. It is not an asset manager, though it manages assets. What PEAK6 is, more precisely, is a platform — a multi-tentacled organism that has evolved, over nearly three decades, from a two-person options trading shop into a diversified financial services and technology enterprise.
The evolution happened in stages. First, proprietary options trading. Then, technology development. Then, licensing that technology to external clients. Then, strategic investments and acquisitions. Along the way, PEAK6 acquired and operated businesses that ranged from financial services to insurance to sports — an eclectic portfolio that reflected not a lack of focus but a specific theory of value creation. The common thread was complexity: PEAK6 gravitated toward businesses where technology could unlock value that human judgment alone could not, where systematic approaches to risk management could produce asymmetric returns.
The firm's investment portfolio in the 2020s reflected this thesis. PEAK6 made an anchor investment in a new early-stage venture fund supporting generative AI companies — a bet that the next wave of technological disruption would follow the same pattern that Just and Hulsizer had exploited in options trading: superior technology, applied systematically, would outperform inferior technology and human intuition.
📊
PEAK6: From Trading Floor to Fintech Platform
A nearly three-decade evolution
1997Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer found PEAK6 with $1.5M in seed capital as a proprietary options trading firm.
2000sFirm invests heavily in proprietary technology infrastructure, building systems for electronic trading.
2010sPEAK6 pivots to fintech platform model, licensing trading technology to external financial firms.
2020Jenny and daughter Juliette launch Poker Power to teach women strategic risk-taking.
2024Technology platform powers integrations for eToro, SoFi, Betterment, and Robinhood; firm launches overnight trading platform.
2024PEAK6 makes anchor investment in early-stage generative AI venture fund.
2025Jenny Just named to CNBC Changemakers list; recognized as one of America's self-made female billionaires.
The firm also employed twice as many female fund managers as the industry benchmark — a statistic that, in the context of an industry where women remained radically underrepresented in capital allocation roles, amounted to a quiet revolution. Just didn't treat gender parity as a corporate social responsibility initiative or a PR talking point. She treated it as an investment thesis: if the market systematically undervalued female talent, then hiring that talent at scale was an arbitrage opportunity. The same logic that governed her options trading — find mispricing, exploit it — governed her approach to human capital.
Money Isn't Everything, but Everything Is Money
Jenny Just has a saying she returns to with the regularity of a mantra: "Money isn't everything, but everything is money." It sounds, on first encounter, like the kind of aphorism that decorates the walls of motivational speakers' offices. But in Just's usage, it carries a harder, more structural meaning.
"What I've learned is that money isn't just about wealth accumulation or material possessions; it's about agency, autonomy, and the ability to shape one's destiny," she has said. "When I say 'everything is money,' I'm not just referring to dollars and cents; I'm talking about the power dynamics, opportunities, and constraints that money represents in our society."
The statement is, in its way, a feminist argument rendered in the language of finance. The gender pay gap, the underrepresentation of women in investment management, the reluctance of female entrepreneurs to raise capital — these are not, in Just's framing, separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are all manifestations of the same root phenomenon: women's exclusion from the exercise of financial power. Money is the medium through which agency flows in a capitalist society, and any serious effort to achieve gender equity must, by definition, be an effort to achieve equity in the deployment and control of capital.
"In any industry, it doesn't matter just in finance, that money at the table is incredibly important," Just told CNBC. "Even in the smallest ways, getting to the table ... the first lesson is about courage knowing how much it takes for a woman to sit at that table."
The word "courage" is doing important work in that sentence. It acknowledges that the barrier is not primarily intellectual or even structural — it is psychological. Women have been acculturated to treat money as someone else's domain, risk as something to be minimized, and assertiveness as unfeminine. Overcoming that acculturation requires not information but practice, not education but experience. Which is, of course, why Just turned to poker: it is a mechanism for producing courage through repetition.
The SPAC and the Signal
In April 2021, Just and Hulsizer appeared on a JPMorgan webcast alongside Joanna Coles and Jonathan Ledecky of Northern Star Investment Corp. II, discussing special purpose acquisition companies — SPACs — and the logic of bringing private companies to public markets. The event itself was of a particular moment: SPACs had exploded in popularity, with $100 billion raised year-to-date by mid-April, more than all of the previous year, and 297 SPACs versus only 74 traditional IPOs.
Mary Callahan Erdoes — a towering figure in the asset management world who ran JPMorgan's Asset and Wealth Management business, overseeing trillions in client capital — hosted the event and framed the discussion around a question that was, at the time, genuinely open: why would a private company choose to go public via SPAC rather than IPO, or stay private altogether? Erdoes had known Just and Hulsizer through their O'Connor days, and her introduction was telling. She described them as people who, in 1997, "decided that they would take all of the stuff that they were doing and" — the transcript trails off, but the implication was clear — go build something of their own.
Joanna Coles, the former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan who had reinvented herself as a SPAC operator, brought a different lens. She represented a new breed of SPAC sponsor: media-savvy, culturally fluent, and attuned to consumer-facing businesses that traditional finance might overlook. The pairing of Coles with Just on the same webcast was itself a kind of argument about the expanding definition of financial sophistication — the options trader and the magazine editor, both operating in the same capital markets infrastructure, each bringing a form of expertise the other lacked.
What the webcast revealed about Just was her comfort operating at the intersection of high-frequency trading and strategic investing, of building infrastructure and backing companies. PEAK6 wasn't merely a trading firm that happened to make investments; it was an organism that thought about capital allocation across multiple time horizons and multiple asset classes simultaneously. The SPAC discussion was, in a sense, just another manifestation of the firm's central question: what is the most efficient way to deploy capital into an opportunity?
Risk as a Muscle
"Maybe I'm unusual in this way, I don't know," Just once reflected. "When I think about taking a risk, I usually don't think about it until after the fact. I usually think about getting through the risk to the other side so then the risk gets downplayed in the journey. It's just something that has to be done in order to get there."
The framing is telling. For Just, risk is not an obstacle to be weighed and deliberated over — it is terrain to be crossed. The destination matters more than the difficulty of the crossing. This is not recklessness; it is a particular orientation toward uncertainty that treats fear as noise rather than signal. Where most people experience risk as a reason to stop, Just experiences it as something to be passed through on the way to somewhere else.
This orientation, she believes, can be taught. It can be practiced. It is, in her formulation, a muscle — and like any muscle, it atrophies with disuse and strengthens with exercise. Women, she argues, have been given fewer opportunities to exercise this muscle. They are steered away from competitive games, discouraged from financial risk-taking, and rewarded for caution. By the time they reach the professional world, the muscle has atrophied. Poker Power is, in essence, a gym.
The physiology metaphor is not accidental. Just is relentlessly concrete in her thinking, grounding abstract concepts in physical, experiential terms. She doesn't talk about "empowerment" in the vague way the word is typically deployed; she talks about the specific sensation of pushing chips into a pot when you're not sure you have the best hand. She doesn't talk about "confidence"; she talks about the feeling of sitting at a table surrounded by men who assume you don't belong and playing anyway. The abstraction is always rooted in the body — the body that, decades ago, couldn't find a bathroom on the trading floor.
The Forcefield
There is an image Jenny Just returns to — the forcefield around the poker table. She describes it as something almost physical, a barrier that women can feel but cannot see. It is the accumulated weight of cultural expectation, historical exclusion, and self-doubt that prevents women from sitting down at tables where decisions are made and capital is allocated.
The forcefield operates in boardrooms, in venture capital pitches, in salary negotiations, in the annual reviews where promotions are determined. It operates in the way women are socialized from childhood to prioritize safety over risk, consensus over assertion, accommodation over ambition. It operates in the statistical reality that women control an enormous and growing share of household wealth but remain dramatically underrepresented in the profession of managing that wealth.
What makes Just's analysis distinctive is that she doesn't locate the problem primarily in external discrimination — though she acknowledges it exists — but in internal acculturation. Women, in her view, have been systematically trained to be risk-averse, and this training is so effective that it feels like nature rather than nurture. Poker, by providing a structured environment for practicing risk under controlled conditions, offers a way to reprogram the acculturation. It is cognitive behavioral therapy disguised as a card game.
"By teaching women how to be more comfortable with risk in the game of poker, we're ultimately teaching them how to be more comfortable with risk in life," Just has said.
The strategy is, in a sense, a bet on transferability — the idea that skills practiced in one domain will migrate to others. It's the same logic that underpins military training exercises, flight simulators, and business school case studies: you rehearse the decision in a low-stakes environment so that when the real decision arrives, the neural pathways are already laid. Just is building a simulator for financial courage.
By teaching women how to be more comfortable with risk in the game of poker, we're ultimately teaching them how to be more comfortable with risk in life.
A Billionaire in a Locker Room
When CNBC named Jenny Just to its 2025 Changemakers list — an annual roster spotlighting women who have left "an indelible mark on the business world" — the accompanying profile opened with a line that captured the paradox of her position: "When it comes to OG 'masculine energy' and a locker room-meets-boardroom mentality in the markets, there is no niche better (or we should say worse) than the world of financial trading."
The word "OG" — original gangster, repurposed here as a marker of entrenched culture — was apt. The trading floor that Just entered in the early 1990s was not merely male-dominated; it was male-defined. The norms, the language, the physical space, the rhythms of work — all had been established by men for men over the course of decades. A woman entering this world didn't just need to be good at the work; she needed to be good at the work while navigating an environment that had not been designed for her, did not expect her, and in many cases did not want her.
Just navigated it. And then she rebuilt it. PEAK6's employment of twice as many female fund managers as the industry benchmark was not the result of a DEI initiative grafted onto an existing firm; it was a founding principle, baked into the organization's DNA from the beginning. The logic was both moral and mercenary: if the market for talent was systematically undervaluing women, then a firm that could identify and deploy that talent would have a structural advantage. It was, in the truest sense, an arbitrage.
The recognition as a billionaire — joining the rarefied list of 23 self-made female billionaires in the United States — was a milestone that Just seemed to wear with characteristic pragmatism. There was no public victory lap, no magazine cover proclaiming a rags-to-riches narrative. She had been, as the Fearless Creative Leadership podcast put it, "the most successful businesswoman you've never heard of." The anonymity was partly by design. PEAK6 operated in the infrastructure of financial markets, not in the consumer-facing world where brand recognition accrued naturally. But it was also partly temperamental. Just's instinct was to build, not to perform.
The CNBC Changemakers ceremony in 2025 placed Just alongside Bela Bajaria of Netflix, Jennifer Garner of Once Upon a Farm, and dozens of other women reshaping American business. The juxtaposition was instructive. Garner, the actress-turned-food-entrepreneur, had just taken her company public at a $724 million valuation, raising $198 million and watching shares jump 40% from the listing price. Her story was legible, cinematic, exactly the kind of founder narrative that attracted attention: celebrity builds mission-driven brand, takes it to market, rings the bell at the NYSE while employees' children celebrate nearby.
Just's story was none of those things. It was opaque, technical, set in the invisible machinery of financial markets rather than the brightly lit aisles of a grocery store. There were no pouches of organic baby food to photograph. There was no "Farmer Jen" persona. There was only the quiet, relentless accumulation of technological and financial advantage over the course of nearly three decades, executed by a woman who had started as one of the only females on a trading floor without a women's bathroom and ended as a billionaire whose technology powered the platforms through which millions of Americans invested their money.
The contrast raises a question that Just herself has spent decades thinking about: why do certain kinds of female success become visible while others remain hidden? The answer, she would likely argue, has everything to do with the forcefield — the set of cultural expectations that makes a woman selling baby food more legible than a woman building trading infrastructure. The first fits a narrative we know how to tell. The second does not.
Somewhere in the infrastructure of American finance, in the millisecond latency between a Robinhood user tapping "Buy" and the order being executed, the technology that Jenny Just built hums along — invisible, reliable, profitable. And somewhere, at a table that might be in a boardroom or might be green felt under fluorescent lights, a woman who has never been taught to bet is pushing chips into the center for the first time. The forcefield shimmers. She sits down anyway.
