How Jenny Just Went From Humble Beginnings To Becoming A Fintech Billionaire

my beginning was not visionary at all i grew up in wisconsin and i wanted to work in chicago so when i graduated from the university of michigan i we got one in the crowd all the way here i interviewed at three firms a bank an advertising agency and a company called o'connor and associates which fortunately for me was one of the best in the options industry and when i went to the firm it was the first time people were dressing casual so they were there and jeans and whatever and i was like this is awesome and they had beer in the fridge and haagen-dazs in the freezer so i i was in um and from there i went to the trading floor which most of you probably have seen in movies before they're exactly like the movies huge rooms like this with round circles with tons and tons of very large men who are trying to scream over each other and then and then a handful of us so i actually didn't know that was going to be my job i'm not sure if i had known would have happened um but then i worked my way through you know the company for several years trading in different aspects and when swiss bank came in to do a joint venture with the bank i moved into something called over-the-counter equity derivatives which is basically non-exchange traded product and i was really lucky to help build a business in my 20s inside the business so there was two of us a gentleman they brought in from goldman sachs and we started calling on corporate clients like intel and oracle and general motors and we were 20 somethings that they shouldn't really want to talk to but they wanted to talk to us because o'connor was sort of uncloaking for the very first time and people knew they were the experts so we were lucky to be part of that process so you capitalized on the moment either knowingly or unknowingly and you've done that again right your your company peak six operates as an umbrella of companies so to speak and i love um from the interview you did with forbes the opening line is it should have been a movie you get this alarming call from the sec tell us what happened sure so i i'll just back up a little bit our core trading our core business the heart and soul of peak six is an options trading firm and it's proprietary so it's not that we take outside money but we we started with a million six in 1997 and sort of never looked back and the fortunate thing about that kind of business is it spins off money hopefully if you're good at what you do but it's hard to redeploy it doesn't need a ton of capital so we started doing other things we had a hedge fund at one point that did have customers and we built sort of the previous generation retail broker dealers so today we talk about someone like robin hood well at the time it was tradeking trademonster zetco and we were one of them called options house and so we had customers who would use our technology to buy and sell stocks and the technology behind options house that we used was a company called pensin which was public and on a friday we got a call from the ceo and asked if he could borrow money and if your bank ever calls and asks if they can borrow money from you that's not a good sign that's probably not gonna happen you gotta run right so all weekend we're waiting like what's going to happen this is a public company so the securities exchange commission sort of our our regulatory body calls on the money and says we need 70 million dollars by friday or pensin is going away which meant then all of our clients were going to go away as well as these other sort of middle if you think about e-trade and fidelity the other big guys at the time all those other middle tier broker dealers were going to go away as well and you also i mean this was 2012. it's a huge amount of money and by the way why are you calling us there must be somebody else or some consortium that's gonna well nothing happened in 13 days later there's announced fraud as a side note trying to buy one of those businesses and see but there was announce fraud and we bought it and we were really lucky honestly the way it turned out we put our heads down and started rebuilding the technology and when we rebuilt the technology for ourselves we just built what we wanted what we as the customers of that kind of business would have wanted robinhood wealthfront betterment came around and they needed that technology and we were the only ones who had had built it at that point so vlad and bijou on their their skateboards in a strip mall in san francisco um needed somebody to do all the other work they did the brilliant front end work and now here we came up and brought up the backside