Over the course of her career, Jenny Just has achieved remarkable success. She built her reputation first as an options trader who consistently generated profits, and later as a fintech entrepreneur who turned a modest $1.5 million seed investment into a billion-dollar enterprise. Yet, despite these accomplishments, she believes that one crucial skill arrived too late in her professional life — and the delay cost her years of setbacks.

Speaking on the CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast, Just reflected on this missed opportunity. She explained that if she had learned poker earlier, she might have avoided nearly a decade of costly mistakes. In her view, the game is far more than entertainment; it is a powerful training tool for decision-making, risk assessment, and strategic thinking.

Just has become a strong advocate for teaching poker, particularly to young people and especially to girls. She argues that the game teaches players how to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information — a skill that closely resembles the challenges she faced in trading and entrepreneurship. In both fields, choices must be made quickly, uncertainty is constant, and errors can be expensive.

According to Just, poker would have given her more opportunities to practice these skills in a concentrated way. Each hand played sharpens judgment, builds resilience, and strengthens intuition. Over time, these small lessons accumulate, raising a person’s overall level of confidence and competence.

She also pointed out that many men are exposed to poker from a very young age, sometimes as early as eight or ten. Through informal games with friends or family, they begin developing comfort with risk, probability, and strategic thinking long before entering the professional world. By contrast, many women are never given the same exposure.

In 2020, Just and her daughter Juliette launched Poker Power, a platform dedicated to teaching women and girls how to play poker and how to apply its principles in business and life. The initiative aims to close the gap in risk literacy and empower women to feel more confident in high-stakes environments.

One of the most important lessons Just gained from poker is patience. The game requires players to wait, observe, and act deliberately rather than impulsively. She admits that this did not come naturally to her, but mastering it has fundamentally changed how she approaches both investing and leadership.

Just also believes that early training in structured risk-taking can reshape career paths, particularly for women who are often discouraged from financial risk. She argues that real influence often lies in financial decision-making spaces, and anyone seeking meaningful change must feel comfortable operating in those arenas.

Although she does not regret her journey — which includes co-founding Peak6, a firm that has supported widely used financial platforms such as Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment — she is convinced that poker would have helped her reach her goals more efficiently. Looking back, she wishes she had acquired those “reps,” or real-world practice experiences, earlier in life.

Even today, Just keeps a written record of her past failures on her desk as a reminder that mistakes are part of growth. She believes that if she had been able to compress those lessons into a shorter period through poker, her career trajectory might have been even stronger and smoother.