Making History By Breaking Tradition

Your Juno, a financial education platform focused on the empowerment of women and non-binary people. 

Meet Margot de Broglie. Margot de Broglie is the co-founder of Your Juno, a financial education platform focused on the empowerment of women and non-binary people. Dubbed “the Duolingo of money”, users can learn about any financial topics via its app, including negotiating a raise, buying a property, and becoming an investor – with a community of over 15,000. Before founding Your Juno, Margot was the founder of Secret Sunrise, a global movement centered around dance and mindfulness, in 14 cities around the world. 

We dive into building confidence into finances, recognizing your power to change history, and gendered language in how the media treats money.

What was your first investment?

It was crypto. I tell everyone, you should only consider crypto once they’ve got the fundamentals in place. But it’s what got me most excited. It was Bitcoin completely at the start. It was a tiny amount of money, but I often see that first step being one of the most important ones. Once people realize that they can see themselves as an investor, identity shifts. The financial confidence that comes through that moment is really quite incredible. 

I used Coinbase. It’s funny now, looking at the history of my assets. It’s like a tiny blip just ages ago. It was just on Twitter or on social media in general, I was hearing people speak about it and I was curious about it. I didn’t really understand how it worked or anything, but I felt like just making that jump. 

How/why did you get into your space?

During the pandemic, investing became a really popular topic. And there was the whole GameStop thing. I had too much time on my hands and I was trying to figure out what was going on. And I was just super curious about understanding the dynamics at play.  

I really quickly fell into a rabbit hole of that and started speaking to my friends about it. I realized that the conversations I was having with my female friends were very different. A lot of the guys were actually investing already for years. And they were somehow all beating the market. And a lot of my female, non-binary friends, were actually saving a lot more money and were lot better with financial management. But they were just keeping those savings in this savings account. Because they felt they didn’t know enough. And were just too risk averse to really start and make that leap. And it was absurd for me because some of these friends were like lawyers. Some of the smartest women I know. And we’ve been so conditioned to believe that the stock market is rocket science and that it’s impenetrable for them. We thought, how can this still be? And, and that there was really something that needed to happen. 

And for me personally, I started thinking about learning about finance as a new language. There’s all these words like DeFi and ETF and all these acronyms that can be overwhelming because it’s full of jargon. But if you think about it like you’re learning Spanish or Portuguese, sure, there’s a bunch of words that you don’t know about, but it feels manageable. It feels like you can crack it. I like to think of it as this whole new language that you’re going to be learning, but they are ways that you can learn about this in a way that’s engaging and actually really supportive. So that’s what got me super passionate about this space. 

What role do you play in the wealth space and why is it important?

We see ourselves as an educator and a community space.

So similar to Eve. For a long time, the incentives in the wealth space have been slightly distorted. It hasn’t been the incentives of the person at heart, but actually the commissions and the making the most money out of them. And we see it a lot at the moment. If you Google how to invest in the stock market, the first pages that will pop up will be from some of the big banks who have created blogs for SEO purposes to end up selling you their product. They’ll write you this beautiful article and at the end there’ll be a call to action, to open an account or something like that. So the information is completely biased because they have a clear incentive to write that. So for us, it’s really been about, “How can we be that bigger sister that we never had that knows a lot about finance?” That makes it cool, that makes sense, but she’s not trying to sell us anything at the end of the day, she’s just giving us the tools so that we can make that kind of decision. And that’s how we position ourselves, we often call ourselves the Duolingo of finance. And that’s quite a unique positioning. 

What do you believe is the most exciting thing you’ve learned and want others to know?

I’m fascinated by the whole crypto and web3 space in general, but I often try to bring myself back. And just at the moment, for example, in the UK, we’re experiencing a crisis of living costs and just budgeting and making ends meet has become really difficult for a lot of people. I often find myself split between these two different areas where web3 and crypto is super exciting and interesting, but actually the basis of financial education that needs to happen on a fundamental level is also crucial. 

Too few people know about that, know about emergency funds, know about the best place to put the savings and just maximizing pensions, like the really basic stuff is boring. And so for me, that’s been a really strong focus. How can we make those fundamentals really interesting? And we can all have those foundations to go into the spaces that might be more wealth generating like web3, like crypto, but making sure that everyone gets a chance. 

Who is a person or company that inspires you in the space and why?

Ellevest did something pretty amazing already years ago before anyone else. So I think Sallie Krawcheck is definitely someone that inspires me in the space. There’s a lot of personal brands on TikTok, and I find it really fascinating to look at younger generations and GenZ and how they’re breaking down those topics. 

I still don’t really get TikTok. But just seeing how they’ve taken these topics and made them so digestible and interesting – I find it fascinating because it really opens up the conversation for them and breaks down this taboo. I love thinking about the impact that it can have. For those people, they start engaging with those topics when they’re 13, 14. They haven’t yet built up those mistakes. They have this opportunity to build a completely different life for themselves. If they start investing with their first pocket money, they can retire millionaires easily. And so, I find that fascinating to look at how the younger generation is appropriating that content and making it. 

What advice would you give to someone getting started?

I think the financial confidence piece is a big one. And seeing what beliefs you hold around money, I’ve been conditioned to see money as a scarce resource, as something that isn’t abundant and something that we need to protect and hold on to.
There’s one study. That I find mindblowing, which was done by Starling Bank. They looked at the language that was used when speaking about finance in the media. And what they found was that 70% of finance articles targeted to men focus on investing and growing their wealth. It’s this idea that there’s more money and you can bring it in and how are you going to grow wealth? 

Whereas for women, 70% of finance articles focused on reigning it in and stopping excessive spending and budgeting and “Don’t buy the expensive shoes and the latte”. And, I think that really creates a mentality of scarcity, this idea that there isn’t enough money that it’s limited and you need to hold on to it and make sure that it doesn’t disappear. The biggest piece of advice? Start noticing that conditioning that we’ve all obviously taken on because it’s so strong in the messaging around us and start questioning it.
“I am bad with money,” is a thing that I used to say, and it was kind of a joke at the pub with friends like, I’m just terrible with money. I’m always going to be broke. But that’s an identity you can shift. Then it’s like saying I’m bad at yoga. Then you go to yoga classes and you get good at yoga. 

Have the confidence that things can change and to question the beliefs that you’ve been given around you. I think so much of the personal finance space has been around shaming and blaming. And this is all your fault. You’re in this situation, you’re a bad person. We really associate our self-worth with our net worth. Like I’m not in a financially comfortable situation, therefore I’m bad. Or I haven’t done anything good. And realizing that there’s so much. The system is broken clearly, but as I said, there’s such a huge history of gender roles that have played out over centuries. Realizing that it’s not your fault, and yet it can stop with you and you have the power to change it.
I think that’s for me, the most important piece. 

How can we stay in touch?

You can find us on social media, @YourJuno. We share a lot about just what it’s like building the business as well in that very male-dominated space. Join the community, say hello!