Joe Spector had arrived in the US with “nothing but a suitcase and some clothes” at the age of 10 — spending over a decade in “survival mode”. He had worked constantly to graduate a year early from UC Berkeley and gone into investment banking because it was “the best-paying job” one could land after college. Spector had been convinced he was “living the American dream” as he joined JPMorgan in 2002. But it would only take a few years for life to become “massively unfulfilling” and eventually lead Spector into the start-up route.
“When my family arrived in California from the Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan) in 1990, I was 10 years old and in survival mode. In the Soviet Union, no amount of smarts or effort would allow a Jewish person like me to rise to the top of a profession. America seemed like the land of opportunity,” he told Business Insider.
Spector recalled arriving in California with “nothing but a red suitcase and some clothes” at the age of 10. The family had moved into housing and lived on food stamps for a long time. His goal, he told the publication, was to one day support his parents while theirs was to get him into a good school.
Living the American Dream
He recalled working extremely hard to graduate from UC Berkeley a year early — shunning travel and exploration of college life. The movie Wall Street had inspired him to become an investment banker. Spector said he had considered a job on Wall Street the “epitome of success for a college graduate” at the time. He had eventually turned to startups after “realising that there was more to life than money — or at least more ways to make it than the rinse-and-repeat routine of investment banking”.
“When I started at JPMorgan in 2002, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m living the American dream’. I started with a base salary of $55,000, growing to six figures over the years. It wasn’t uncommon to get bonuses of 100% or more, and they made up a large portion of my total pay…I enjoyed the critical thinking, but the work became repetitive, and the hours were crazy. It was like a boiler room,” he explained.
Spector revealed that he had eventually resigned after four years at JPMorgan to pursue an MBA. His first start-up was a dating website that shuttered within two years but left a lasting impression. He told Business Insider that his parents had spent nearly eight years wondering if she should go back to a ‘safe’ job at JPMorgan.
“My get-out-of-jail-free card was a place at the Wharton School for an MBA in Finance and Real Estate in 2005. I was 25. Meeting people who were businesses — not just seeing them on TV —stripped away the mystique around entrepreneurship and was a turning point in my journey. They were real and making things up as they went along. It made me realize that I could do it too,” he recounted.
The perseverance eventually led to the co-founding and success of Hims at the age of 37. He had later launched Dutch — a telehealth platform that connects pet owners with licensed veterinarians.