Though Peter Jasterboff's college interests seemed to span a variety of areas--from computer science and neural networks to world religion and even DJing on the college radio station--at the core is a lifelong interest in the nature of human interaction. Ultimately, he found himself where technology and finance interact but, true to his north star, learned that it was the human side of the business that appealed as much as the technology. Find out how searching for a sense of belonging and listening to the nuances of culture can sometimes be the key to everything.
Guest Peter Jastreboff had considered a variety of paths to travel at college, from politics to medicine. When he actually started, his interests remained varied, diverging from those early thoughts and staying seemingly scattered. He ended up melding computer science and psychology into a major to better understand neural networks and minoring in religion. Put those pursuits together with his extensive time at the college radio station and it’s clear that at the core of his interests lies a fascination with the nature of human interaction.
Ultimately, after college, he found himself where technology and finance interact—first creating his own company with a college classmate and then taking on a number of technology management roles at financial firms large and small. Over time, though, he learned that it was the human side of the business that appealed as much as the technology.
In this episode, find out from Pete how searching for a sense of belonging and listening to the nuances of culture can sometimes be the key to everything…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Peter Jasterboff is a global technology leader who has spent a career in the finance industry. He is currently VP of Client Services at Talos, helping provide institutional-grade technology infrastructure for digital assets trading. Though he's been in all the world's financial centers, he’s recently moved with his wife and children to London.
For another story about moving around the world and finding the core meaning in what you’re doing beyond the industry, listen to our episode with Shuhei Sekiguchi.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Peter Jastreboff: The main thing is because technology changes so much, then it, you keep reinventing yourself. You keep reinventing the things you do and the technologies that you use. But what I've found over the years is what I do ends up being more about building teams and building people and building organizations than about just what I do, which is probably what I enjoy doing the most.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Though Peter Jastreboff's college interests seemed to span a variety of areas--from computer science and neural networks to world religion and even DJing on the college radio station--at the core is a lifelong interest in the nature of human interaction. Ultimately, he found himself where technology and finance interact but, true to his north star, learned that it was the human side of the business that appealed as much as the technology. Find out how searching for a sense of belonging and listening to the nuances of culture can sometimes be the key to everything...on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Pete Jastreboff and we are going to talk about taking to the airwaves and taking to the air and where things land you ultimately on this journey. So thanks so much, Pete, for being on this journey with us today.
PJ: Sounds great. Looking forward to it.
LJR: All right. So I start this the same way every time with two questions and there are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
PJ: I've listened to a few of the podcasts, so I was expecting this, but I still don't have a good answer. I think when I came to Dartmouth, I was looking to belong to something or a place or a group, I guess. And I did quite a bit of that through different clubs and activities from freshman crew. I was a lightweight at the beginning of the year, and by the end of the year I was not because of beer, cuz I actually didn't drink at all, certainly freshman year. So I gained a bit of weight and that made me a very small heavyweight. So I was not gonna be in a boat with Andrew Webb or Jaime Hutter. [LJR: That’s right.] So that was the end of that one. But along the way what I did find is the radio station and that's a place that really gave me a way to feel a part of something. So that was my connection to WDCR, WFRD FM, so the FM station where I worked throughout my time at Dartmouth, which was a great experience all around.
And I guess when I was leaving? Yeah, I think we were lucky. We were leaving at a time when the kind of the technology was expanding and as the beginning of the dotcom craze. But it wasn't just dotcom, it was really using the use of technology. So blitzmail was the ubiquitous thing that we all used and loved all the time, but that didn't really exist outside of the environment we had. We were a big Macintosh Apple school, but people didn't have computers or smartphones or even an Nokia brick phone was a fairly new thing. So I think for me, the, when I was leaving it was the excitement of trying to play in that space and there was a lot of accidents along the way, how I ended up doing what I did. As random as the work that Richard Claire and I did started based on his mother, I believe, being in a grocery queue with the guy that hired us as interns at Morgan Stanley during our junior and senior year. So it's things like that. I guess sliding doors. It was a lot of the experience that we had leaving school.
LJR: So when you were in school though, Pete, you were a computer science major?
PJ: Yeah, I was a bit of a mutt. I did a computer science major, kind modified with cognitive science, so kind of neural networks and psychology and such. And then I have a minor in theology or religion, whichever you wanna call it. So I did quite a bit of stuff on Eastern religions, so Taoism Buddhism. So Robert Hendricks is one of my favorite professors at the school. And I spent quite a bit of time working with him. And then I actually ended up doing a foreign study in Scotland, which is where the religion theology one was, where we did quite a bit of work around the Scottish Enlightenment and sort of topics around philosophy and religion and God or gods, depending on how you wanna look at that. So yeah, a bit of everything.
LJR: Yeah, probably a good mix for that burgeoning technology world. I mean, we worship lots of gods now that are very technologically manifested. But how did that first step though…you said there were lots of happy accidents…What was the first path for you, and did that feel like it was taking one thread [PJ: Yep.] of your mut identity or did it feel like it was encompassing lots of things?
PJ: I think…So when I came to Dartmouth, I was focused on medicine or pre-med as an area of focus, largely because of my family. So my, both my parents are PhDs or research scientists. My sister after me ended up in medicine. So it was sort of in the family in many ways. And I did quite a bit of that freshman year, but I found that it was a bit too much around memorization. Sort of rote learning, which I just really didn’t are for. But it wasn't the only thing I was studying. I didn't have to do a language study cuz I had cheated and used my Polish language fluency as a way of not doing a language thing, which I actually regret now. I probably should've really stuck with either French or picked up Spanish. Would've been really, really quite useful. But it gave me a lot of time to take different courses. So I took everything from geography to history, to astronomy, to, you know, pick your favorite. And I did that mostly because I didn't have any idea what I was doing as far as after college. So I ended up, I didn't pick a major until my sophomore spring, so the last term that I think we technically can pick it. I took a computer science course and I'm like, huh, I kind of like this. I did this in high school. I like the structure and the sort of the deterministic outcome of things. And that sort of started me on that path of doing things in that space.
LJR: Okay. And so was the first job after you had an experience as an intern, but did you, what happened after graduation?
PJ: So, yeah, so what ended up happening is I was an intern after Rich at Morgan Stanley, and then I came back for the summer and I did the second part of it and he joined me as well. So we kind of cycled through and the folks we worked for sort of said, you know what, yeah, you can come and join an analyst program and be a techie, but you know, you guys are doing some really interesting stuff. We'll get you started on some projects internally. A lot of people were leaving Morgan Stanley to go to make their millions in California, so there was a bit of a gap of resources and they gave us a start with some projects. So that grew from, I guess, two people in the company, him and I, to about 25 by 2000, and we spent you know I guess years trying to figure out how to actually run and build a business, which we had no right or idea how to do.
LJR: What babies you were, right?
PJ: Yeah. We had no clue what we were doing.
LJR: You were just kids.
PJ: No idea. No idea. No idea. Which is, which is the fun part of it. Yeah. [LJR: Yeah.] But it was a good partnership. Rich was an engineer by trade. I was a computer scientist. We had complimentary skillsets in many ways. His dad worked in financial services for many years, so he was a good sounding board and in fact was an advisor on our board. And that was the experience instead of starting in the traditional path of do your corporate interviews and end up in tech job or banking job or something else. We ended up trying to build something together, which was a great experience. It had a bit of a downturn in the dotcom downturn, even though it wasn't that really a dotcom business, but it was, it was a great way to sort of start a career, perhaps backwards in many ways. Instead of starting as a junior. You're asked to, here, go run this thing. But it was a great experience.
LJR: In that tech finance hybrid space.
PJ: Yep, yep. So we basically were doing projects for the big old banks, mostly kind of custom software, so they needed systems to do this or that and, and we, we were building that for them. It was a unique opportunity and it was a unique time as well. It was a, you know, early days of Internet stuff. And Mosaic was a browser and Netscape was a thing, and that's all obviously died and changed. But you know, Mark Andreessen was there and then he had started that company and that world. And ironically you know, fast forward 30 years I guess, and the company I worked for is in fact VC funded by, well one of the VCs is in fact Andrewsson Horowitz, which is where he still runs stuff.
LJR: Yeah. So you've always kept that being in the nexus of the tech and the finance. What were the parts of it that were like, I'm developing this skill or this expertise that kind of kept it going for all of those years for you? [PJ: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm.] What was the part of it that kind of fired up the I wanna take everything because it sounds interesting kind of…
PJ: I think the main thing is because technology changes so much, then you keep reinventing yourself. You, you keep reinventing the things you do and the technologies that you use. And it's every day you're learning. Even these days, I'm still not, it's not same job every day. It's actually, well how about this? And how about this technology and how about this software as a service? Or this vendor can provide this. So you are actually thinking about how to incorporate things that otherwise you wouldn't necessarily get to see or think about unless you have to kind of poke it and try it. So I think that was a large part of it, but what I've found over the years is what I do ends up being more about building teams and building people and building organizations than about just what I do, which is probably what I enjoy doing the most. Which is ironic for generally speaking, an introvert, which is why I sat out in front of a microphone on the radio. You know, I'm there, no one can see me, but yet I can be who I want to be in front of an audience that's, you know, somewhere in the upper valley.
LJR: Right. But the very first thing you said was you were somebody who was looking to belong. And when you're building teams, yeah, you might be on that introverted side, like, I'm gonna be over here and the team is over there, but you're building that, right? And so it's a building a sense of belonging for other people that you get to be part of as well. So that makes sense to me.
PJ: Yeah. And, and I…look, I've loved it. Whether or not it was the small company that, you know, we had with Rich or further on at the different banks I worked at over the years or even now. I've kind of gone from my own little company to working at companies that have 50,000 people to joining a crypto exchange last August, so 2021, which is about 250 people, and now working at a company even smaller, they're about 120 and really enjoying that experience because you get to build things in a very different way than you do at a very established institution that has a lot of structure and protocol and process and bureaucracy and things that we see in, you know, Office Space or The Office TV show, which is unfortunately more true than we would care to admit. So we find an escape sometimes.
LJR: Right, right. So the role that you're in now and the environment you're in now, is that crypto being like the new technology thing? [PJ: Yep.} Or is it something you…
PJ: No, so this is in the crypto ecosystem. Without being too technical, the company I work for essentially provides access to crypto exchanges for hedge funds, so big institutional investors that want to trade crypto. They provide a means to connect to those exchanges and trade. But I look after the client or customer service side of things. So I basically interface with all of the clients in my team across Singapore, London, I guess New York. Essentially interface with those clients, and then follow the sub model to make sure that they get the right level of service around what we're doing and then how it all works. It's quite fun cause a lot of it's, again, it's puzzles, like things break and you don't know why. And sometimes it's because, you know, something broke downstream. Sometimes it's because the client did something silly. Sometimes it's because gremlins happen and things break, and what you do is you restart it and then magically it works. Same with your phone half the time, but you get the idea.
LJR: Yeah. The deterministic outcome that you talked about before, like there is, there is a reason and there is an outcome, but it's like the puzzle and the sleuthing that probably takes a lot of talking to people, which is [PJ: Yep.] another thing that you're interested in. Yeah. So a lot of these moves require you to be in various big financial centers in the world. [PJ: Mm-hmm.] So you've had a bit of a peripatetic life between Hong Kong and London and New York. And so how has that allowed you to hone that sense of belonging, either with the people that you drag along with you or in communities that you're a part of?
PJ: So New York is a melting pot culturally, even though everyone has their own little pocket they hang out in for historical reasons. I think Hong Kong is, is a close proxy in, in the Asian context, but, but is also extremely cosmopolitan in nature and has a long tradition and history of, of visitors from abroad, some more welcome than others. I think that the key thing that the travels have given me a chance to do is to really understand and appreciate nuances in culture and people and being really comfortable with those differences. You see that quite a bit when you go to Hong Kong or Japan. Japan's probably the quintessential example of a place that is Soma, amazingly unique and, and special. But it's so hard to understand until someone actually starts explaining the pieces to you because it's not readily apparent when you're looking at it and you're experiencing it. I guess there was a movie about that. Was it Lost in Translation? I guess [LJR: mm-hmm.] I think. But you know, the concepts are all true. When you actually go to a place and you actually see how people think and do things, there are culture and nuances to those environments and they're unique and special and awesome. And when you bring people from lots of different places to a place, how they interact is also very unique and different. You know, we were in, so I was born in Poland. I was there for eight years. Then, you know, we were in the states for 30 and I guess I worked in New York for about 15 and then 12 years in Hong Kong and along the way I got married, have two kids now. One was born in New York, one was born in Hong Kong. So we kind of have things all over the place and, you know, their grandmother or one of their grandmothers lives in India, which is where my wife is from. So, kind of bounce around. Lots of different places.
LJR: That's cool. So when we were in college and you were trying to figure out kind of how to both do everything and find a way…is this a path that you would've expected if the now version of you came back and said, Hey, I'll give you the preview of how life's gonna turn out?
PJ: Not, not even close. I think originally when I was leaving high school. I was either up at a place like Georgetown and do something in political science and sort of foreign policy. I really like that, that domain a lot. I love reading a lot of the books in that space. So like Fareed Zakaria has a lot of great texts in that space. Or, you know, some of the consensual reads like Guns, Germs and Steels another one, or Clash of the [Civiliazations]. Like they're really interesting books and really interesting topics that talk about sort of the nature of human interaction and the like. But I am, I ended up not doing that. I was gonna look at maybe going to Rensselaer and becoming a proper engineer, like full on, that's what I'm gonna do. But I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. And I think that that's the amazing thing that Dartmouth gave me is you don't have to decide. And based on the people you meet, the relationships you develop, the opportunities you have, whether or not that's radio or crew or whatever else, you kind of find a path. I would've never expected that it be where it is now. But I think it's the unique nature of the place that's made that possible in many ways.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And kind of the lifelong learner in you, you're still able to read and dabble and do those things. [PJ: Yep.] It sounds like you need, you need your own podcasts though, to get back into the radio.
PJ: I do miss the radio. It's actually one of my favorite parts of the college experience was that. In fact, a lot of the friends that I developed were tied to the radio station, cuz at that time, the radio station was largely the whole SAE fraternity crew. And that's where I landed up because it was a crew of guys that really enjoyed radio and it was more the 93s and 94s. So a lot of the guys that were you know, that crew is sort of a connection to what gave me a community as well. And the combination of the radio and SAE are actually at this point, those are probably the main folks I still keep in touch with from college over the years.
LJR: And talk about having their own nuances of culture. I think probably both of those camps have quite the nuance in them. But I guess the last thing I would ask though, Pete, is when you do think about kind of the next chapter of things, you've just moved to London, kind of a new job, what are the things that excite you about this nexus of technology and finance [PJ: Mm-hmm.] for you, for the future and where do you see yourself going?
PJ: Well, I, so I think the crypto or internet three, whatever you wanna call it, ecosystem, is actually very interesting because it's very misunderstood. And, you know, you can read lots of shock articles around FTX or whatever else. And, and yeah, there's gonna be Ponzi schemes or scams or whatever you want to call it, that occur in any nascent new thing that's coming up. But it is a real thing. And I think the interesting thing to think about is how do all these lovely global regulators think about this stuff? Because there are values to consumers around being able to have much lower friction around moving assets and money around it. Right now they don't have that option very easily. You're paying a lot for Western Union to do it for you or you have to have accounts across different countries. But to have that, you have to have a level of wealth where it's actually worth having a bank account in five different currencies in five different countries, which is not something that most people have. So, I think what I'm most interested in is how that all evolves and being a part of that ecosystem, which is one of the main reasons I left, kind of the big old, big old bank jobs. Because I can continue learning and I can continue learning not just about technology, but about different things that are within this ecosystem that, that otherwise, you know, people are not exposed to necessarily.
LJR: Well, I have no doubt you'll continue learning whether it's about this or about all the other things that spark your interest. Kind of a true Renaissance man, I feel. So, Pete, thanks so much for walking us through where you've been and we'll look forward to seeing you where you end up next.
PJ: Awesome. Thank you.
LJR: That was Pete Jastreboff, a global technology leader who has spent a career in the finance industry. He is currently VP of Client Services at Talos, helping provide institutional-grade technology infrastructure for digital assets trading. Though he's been in all the world's financial centers, he's recently moved with his wife and children to London.
No matter where in the world you move, you'll always be able to find our stories at RoadsTakenShowDOTcom. While there checking out the archive of over 120 episodes and bonuses, you can also check out some great then-and-now photos, read the show notes, and access the transcripts. You can even give us your thoughts on past and future episodes by using the contact us link and drop a note to me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.