Credit rating agency Moody’s has maintained Belgium’s federal authorities’ rating at Aa3, surpassing expectations amid ongoing budget negotiations. With the government set to present its 2026 budget and a multiannual budget soon, key questions revolve around the magnitude of cuts needed and their impact on public services, reports 24brussels.
During a parliamentary session last Thursday, Prime Minister Bart De Wever expressed optimism that recent government measures aimed at reforming pensions and unemployment benefits would prevent a downgrade in the credit rating.
However, these initiatives have not alleviated the projected budget deficit, which stands at 4.2 percent of GDP for the current year and is expected to rise to 5.8 percent by 2030.
The Aa rating signifies that Moody’s perceives Belgium’s credit risk as very low, but the designation of “3” indicates it is at the lower end of this category. A downgrade could lead to increased borrowing costs for the government to manage budget deficits.
Moody’s attributed its favorable rating to the Belgian government’s focus on structural reforms necessary to address persistent issues, including low employment rates, an aging population, and rising budget deficits, while noting that Belgium’s elevated debt ratio remains a significant challenge.
1,000 euros per person
In a statement from the Prime Minister’s office, officials acknowledged that while the implemented reforms have been positively received and have bought time, further efforts are essential for significant budget improvement by the end of the government’s term. “It is clear, however, that new efforts are needed to improve the budget significantly by the end of the term. We are fully committed to this,” they stated.
The European Commission has laid out a seven-year plan requiring structural reforms and budget cuts. De Wever aims to galvanize coalition partners and the public with the reminder that Belgium will incur €11 billion in interest on its sovereign debt this year, equating to approximately €1,000 per citizen.
“It is clear that new efforts are needed to improve the budget significantly by the end of the term. We are fully committed to this.”
As De Wever prepares to unveil the 2026 budget and multiannual budget to parliament on Tuesday, and subsequently to the EU Commission the following day, the specific measures and the extent of cuts remain unclear.
Return to work
In recent discussions, De Wever has proposed four potential measures to address the looming deficits.
The first entails suspending the indexing of wages and social benefits. This automatic indexation tied to inflation serves to balance the cost of living and labor; thus, a pause could reduce expenses across both public and private sectors.
A second option would involve increasing VAT rates on certain goods and services to boost government revenues. The remaining proposals focus on health insurance, suggesting that patients might need to shoulder higher costs, or unemployed individuals on sick leave could be encouraged to re-enter the workforce.
National strike
The viability of reaching a detailed and ambitious agreement by Tuesday’s deadline is uncertain. Trade unions have organized a national demonstration for the same day, expressing discontent with proposed pension cuts for civil servants. Further budget cuts could exacerbate these tensions.
Compounding the social unrest are budgetary reductions implemented by regional governments, with all regions facing fiscal challenges, except for Brussels, which has yet to form a government following the June 2024 elections.
The Brussels authorities are expected to receive their credit rating from Standard & Poor’s next week, likely reflecting a more negative outlook than that of Moody’s for Belgium, due to the region’s more severe financial issues.
Moody’s has emphasized that addressing Belgium’s financial challenges requires coordinated efforts from both national and regional governments.
Mark Cuban and his Cost Plus Drugs are having a moment on Sora 2 after the billionaire investor gave users permission to deepfake him.
Disney/Christopher Willard
Mark Cuban is going viral on Sora after the billionaire investor gave permission to use his likeness.
Cuban has a baked-in plugin ad for his affordable drugs company in every video with his likeness.
“It’s been a blast,” Cuban told Business Insider of his Sora experience so far.
Mark Cuban and his affordable drug company are having a viral moment — and the billionaire entrepreneur said he is having a “blast.”
On Thursday, the former “Shark Tank” judge and billionaire investor gave open permission for those on Sora to “have at it” if they would like to make AI videos featuring his likeness.
Within a day, as one of the first major public figures to openly welcome being part of OpenAI’s product experiment, Cuban’s face is taking over Sora and X.
However, there’s a catch.
If you use Cuban’s likeness in an AI video, you are also making an ad for his company, Cost Plus Drugs.
“It’s been a blast,” Cuban told Business Insider of his Sora experience. “I was just curious what people would come up with, and I wanted to experiment with the plug for costplusdrugs.com. So far it’s worked out great.”
Sora 2 is an OpenAI social media platform, featuring AI-generated audio and video. At the moment, it’s invite-based and only available in the US and Canada. In it, you can give permission to your friends or to other users to use your Cameo, or your likeness, to make videos.
In one video, Cuban appeared in a bright yellow cardigan with an apple on it, sitting in what looks like a kindergarten classroom, to rapidly deliver lines like “Cost Plus Drugs is clear and fair, shows the number right then and there” to the rhythm of cheerful music. Others depict Cuban on a vacation in Madrid, making dance moves to the styles of different eras, and performing onstage as a pop star. The line “Brought to you by Cost Plus Drugs” always appears toward the end of these clips.
He has been actively reposting his own Sora deepfakes on X. Each of these videos is now racking up tens of thousands of views on X alone.
“Sora has done a great job keeping the creepy stuff out,” Cuban said. “Which makes it all the better.”
Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, and Bill Peebles, head of Sora, both took notice of Cuban’s advertising move and talked about it on Friday’s “TBPN” podcast.
Co-host Jordi Hays said that while Cuban used to be a vocal opponent of AI in advertising, he is now “leveraging the feature to the max.”
“I think there’s gonna be all these weird new dynamics that we see emerge that weren’t possible in previous kinds of video,” Altman told Hay’s after the comment on Cuban. “This is like a fun period, because it’s all going to be so different every few days.”
Cars lined the Taneytown Senior & Community Center parking lot Thursday morning for a vaccine drive-thru clinic for seniors, run by Finksburg Pharmacy and the Carroll County Bureau of Aging and Disabilities. The pop-up clinic was held over five days at Mount Airy, North Carroll, South Carroll, Taneytown and Westminster. This is the clinic’s 10th se…
Interior designer Claire Zinnecker shared common design mistakes she sees in home listings.
They include displaying personal photos and over-furnishing rooms.
The key to a good home staging? “Buyers need to be able to visualize themselves in the home,” she said.
Whether you paint, buy new furniture, or simply rearrange what you have, sprucing up your home before listing it can boost its appeal. But the way you stage it can leave either a good or a bad impression on would-be buyers.
Claire Zinnecker, an Austin-based interior designer with more than 16 years of experience in residential and commercial design and the co-host and designer on the NBCUniversal children’s series “Get Out of My Room,” has some design advice for home sellers.
The key to staging? “Buyers need to be able to visualize themselves in the home,” Zinnecker told Business Insider.
But sometimes, design can get in the way.
Here are five common mistakes homeowners make when staging their homes for sale, according to Zinnecker.
1. Displaying personal photos can be a turnoff.
Ondrooo/Getty Images/iStockphoto
When Zinnecker designs homes, she recommends keeping personal photos in hallways and bedrooms. The same rule applies when staging — it’s best to limit them to those areas, or better yet, put them away entirely in a closet.
“Having personal photos throughout the house can be a mistake,” she said. “If you’re staging a home, maybe lessen those entirely so people can really visualize themselves being in that home.”
2. Loud or eccentric wall paint can be off-putting to buyers.
Boris SV/Getty Images
When it comes to wall paint, play it safe, Zinnecker said.
“If possible, neutralizing paint colors is a smart move,” she said. “Unfortunately, people are very, very visual. Even though it’s just paint, and can be a simple fix, when people walk into a room, the paint can be a make-or-break factor.”
“I really just think bold colors anywhere — accent colors and walls — is not the way to go,” she added. “You don’t want people to feel super overwhelmed.”
3. An ‘overstuffed’ room isn’t a good look.
alvarez/Getty Images
Sometimes less is more — especially when it comes to furniture.
“A mistake people make is overfilling a house with furniture,” Zinnecker said. “You want to make the spaces feel large, and you also want people to feel inspired and creative, and visualize their own lives happening in the house. Editing and paring down is really smart.”
4. Ignoring the little details can cost you.
Workers cleaning a home.
South_agency/Getty Images
Zinnecker said not to overlook small fixes, like baseboard repairs, addressing scuffs and scratches, and touch-up paint.
“It would behoove sellers to spend a little on those items to make the home feel fresh and new, and less lived-in,” she said.
She also recommends hiring professional cleaners and investing in small updates, such as fresh pillows and kitchen decor.
“Anything to make the home feel almost like a boutique hotel,” she added. “It’s an easy way to make it feel more upscale than it might actually be.”
5. Harsh artificial light in listing photos can make a home look less inviting.
AndreyPopov/Getty Images
A home’s online presentation is as important as its in-person presentation, Zinnecker said.
“My husband’s a realtor, and he might disagree with me, but I love photos with natural light,” she said. “A lot of the time, real estate photos blast artificial light in the house, and that can feel not very inviting when you’re looking online.”
Starship, Robot.com, and Avride have emerged as the primary competitors for campus robot deliveries.
Starship
Food delivery robots were once a novelty on college campuses. Now, they’re more common than ever.
Starship leads the space, operating on 60 college campuses, along with Robot.com and Avride.
As robot providers aim to take the delivery vehicles nationwide, college campuses may serve as a model.
Peyton Perry heard a rumor that delivery robots would be coming to campus when she was a student at Fairfield University.
Soon after, she saw her first robot at a campus Starbucks. She ordered food delivered by the robots multiple times during her junior year before her initial excitement wore off. By her senior year, she said, the robots had become a regular part of campus life.
“Every single day, I’d see multiple robots,” she told Business Insider. She said Starbucks and cafeteria workers were “constantly loading up the robots.”
A few years ago, food delivery robots were infamous for being kicked and vandalizedby students on college campuses. Then the market matured, the robots got better, and the programs expanded to more colleges. Major university food providers, including Sodexo and Aramark, began partnering with the robot companies. By now, at least 78 American universities have delivery robots roaming their campuses, based on figures three leading robot providers shared with Business Insider.
Delivery robots have now extended far beyond colleges, as big companies like DoorDash enter the game. But universities offered an early testing ground for many of these companies, and could provide a model for nationwide expansion.
The college robotic delivery market is bigger — and more competitive — than ever before.
Starship leads the pack
If your kid is getting robot deliveries at school, there’s a good chance it’s from Starship.
Created by Skype cofounders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis in 2014, Starship is the biggest campus provider, providing robot fleets to 60 universities. The company said it has over 2,000 robots deployed on campuses, delivering to 1.5 million students. It’s raised $230 million, and was valued at $151 million in its Series C round in 2024, according to PitchBook.
Starship said it’s turned a profit on each delivery for over three years.
“We have optimized costs a lot,” Heinla said, adding that bettering the technology means less money spent on repairs and maintenance. “We are now at the point where the unit economics work.”
Starship’s UCLA fleet of delivery robots
Don Liebig/Don Liebig/ASUCLA
Starship has partnered with food delivery app Grubhub to grow. About half of the campuses Starship works with use its app, while the other half place ordersthrough Grubhub. Starship isn’t Grubhub’s only partner; the food service app also works with Starship’s biggest direct competitor, Robot.com, and the rapidly growing Avride.
Over 40 of Grubhub’s campus partnerships now include robots. Steve Iarocci, senior director for Grubhub Campus, said some robots are better for city streets, and others are better for pedestrian-only campuses. “But, in general, it’s pretty ubiquitous technology at this point,” he said.
There’s no singular business model here. Contracts are signed between the robot companies and the food providers, though Grubhub sometimes functions as an intermediary. Some campuses pay monthly costs that are incorporated into students’ dining plans; others charge students a per-order delivery fee.
Robot.com and Avride race behind
While Starship is leading by its campus footprint, Robot.com is racing behind it. The company — formerly Kiwibot, as its robots are named — was founded in 2017 at UC Berkeley, and is now active on 16 campuses.
Cofounder and CEO Felipe Chavez said that the college campus has been “our sandbox.” The company is also expanding into major cities and golf courses.
Robot.com raised an estimated $33 million, according to PitchBook, though the company declined to comment on that figure and said it’s in the middle of a fundraising round. It also said its unit economics are positive, with an average gross margin of 40%.
Robot.com’s Curry College fleet of Kiwibots.
Robot.com
Robot.com recently acquired an ad company and introduced robotic advertisements. Advertising makes up 35% to 40% of its revenue, Chavez said.
Behind Robot.com is Avride, a US-based startup spun out of the Russian company Yandex, which faced international sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine. The publicly traded Nebius Group, Avride’s Dutch parent company, sold off Yandex’s Russia-based assets in 2024 while keeping some of its AI-focused businesses.
The company mainly operates on two college campuses, Ohio State University and the University of Arizona, where it has deployed 165 robots.
Chris Krnich, Avride’s business development manager, said that food providers saw the value in the robots when they began bringing in thousands of dollars a day.
Starship, Robot.com, and Avride have minor differences in tech. Starship said its robots are the most adaptive to different environments; Avride also makes robotaxis, and said that it shrunk the self-driving technology into their delivery bots. Much is the same, though. They all offer four-wheelers with cute eyes.
The challenges ahead
For Robot.com‘s Chavez, the industry’s real scaling point was when the “big three” university food providers — Sodexo, Aramark, and Compass — got on board with delivery bots.
Drew Nannis, Sodexo’s SVP and CMO of its campus segment, has watched robotic delivery grow since joining the company in 2019. He initially worried that robot deliveries would give students an excuse to hide in their rooms and not attend in-person dining. That hasn’t panned out, though.
“When the students are using them, they’re not replacing anything,” Nannis said. “They’re just supplementing and complementing.”
Avride’s fleet of delivery robots at Ohio State University.
Avride
There are still bumps in the road. When Starship launched at Miami University in 2023, graduate Meredith Perkins noticed that the robots struggled to cross the street. The issue never fully went away, she said.
“So many students I know joke about the fact that these robots are very slow,” Perkins said.
Fairfield’s Perry once ordered coffee with her friend from the Starbucks across campus. They watched the robot stop moving on the tracking map and went out to find it. The robot was stuck on the curb.
“We found the robot, helped it up, but it was programmed, of course, so we had to follow it back to my friend’s apartment,” she said. “As we opened it, the coffee spilled all over it.”
Then there’s the question of payment. The average Starship delivery fee is $2.49 — less than a human courier’s, but still a tough sum for some college students to stomach. Perkins said that Miami University’s $2 delivery fee kept most students from using the robots.
Sodexo’s Nannis said that, when an additional charge was added per robotic delivery, usage fell drastically.
“The subscription model is the one that works,” Nannis said. “Making them part of the meal plans that we’re selling, I think that’s the most important piece of how we’re making this work financially.”
Who’s actually using the robots?
While delivery robots are expanding to more and more campuses, they’re still niche.
At UNC Charlotte, the robots opened up a whole new 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. dining period, said Ben Kolnos, Chartwells Higher Education’s senior retail director. Kolnos estimated that late-night orders made up 15 to 20% of UNC Charlotte’s 40,000 deliveries a semester. That’s not a high volume for a campus with 24,868 undergraduate students.
Students mainly use them when they’re sick, hungover, or holed up in the library studying. They’re not coming close to replacing the dining hall experience.
But with 200 deliveries a day at UNC Charlotte, the college campus may serve as a model for other companies looking to expand nationwide.
“People used to think of this technology five years ago as futuristic, or that companies were piloting something,” Starship’s Heinla said. “We’re not testing anything anymore. We’re not piloting anything anymore. We know that it works.”
Biztoso Launches India’s First Social Platform for Businesses
Bangalore, October 11, 2025 – Biztoso has officially launched as India’s first social media platform tailored for businesses, offering entrepreneurs a unique space to create profiles, showcase products, and network. The platform is now accessible on both Android and web, reports 24brussels.
Unlike traditional marketplaces and consumer-centered social applications, Biztoso specifically targets the needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in India. It features tools such as Virtual Storefronts, Messenger, Multi-Lingual Support, and Lead Generation functionalities, aiming to empower India’s 63 million SMEs with a comprehensive digital presence.
“While marketplaces focus on sales and social apps on engagement, Biztoso combines both—visibility and conversion—in a single experience,” said Venkatesh Irkal, Founder and CEO of Biztoso. The origin story of Irkal, who transitioned from assisting in his father’s wholesale kirana shop to developing this platform, exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit thriving in India. His vision crystallized in 2023 when he recognized the digital invisibility of many SMEs, leading to the creation of Biztoso.
The platform was launched after two years of development, with a goal to bring every Indian business online. “Our mission is simple,” Irkal added. “We want to give every Indian business—no matter how small—a chance to be seen, heard, and connected. Biztoso is built to help business owners who were once invisible online find their space in the digital economy.”
With over 63 million SMEs contributing nearly 30% to India’s GDP and employing over 110 million individuals, less than 20% maintain a consistent online presence, a gap that Biztoso seeks to address. The platform intends to serve as the primary digital ecosystem for SMEs, where businesses can create authentic profiles, engage with customers, collaborate, and discover new opportunities.
Biztoso’s core user groups include:
SMEs & Manufacturers: Showcase products and connect directly with verified buyers, cutting out reliance on agents.
Retailers & Wholesalers: Build visibility and connect with nearby buyers or suppliers through an easy-to-use store format.
Service Providers: Create verified profiles to attract direct inquiries from local customers.
Resellers & Small Online Sellers: Sell directly to consumers without commissions, promoting products via social sharing.
Wanna-be Business Owners: Establish an online presence with a free store setup in minutes.
Since its pre-launch, Biztoso has garnered significant traction, with over 1,500 sellers on the waitlist and 50 stores created during its internal beta. The initial launch focuses on Bengaluru and Mumbai, offering services in Hindi, Kannada, and English, with an ambitious goal to onboard 100,000 small businesses within the next 12 months.
Biztoso envisions linking entrepreneurs across India—from major urban centers to smaller towns—on a unified platform that aims to build reputation and growth for millions of SMEs. The platform is live now, urging Indian businesses to create their profiles and enhance their digital footprint.
Web: biztoso.com Google Play: Download now on Android.
Media Contact: Biztoso Technologies Pvt Ltd, [email protected] Bangalore, India.
Belgium will turn out the lights on Saturday for the Night of Darkness, an initiative aiming to raise awareness of the need to combat light pollution, reports 24brussels.
The event will feature activities across Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia. In Brussels, participants can join a night walk in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, alongside activities such as sky observations, storytelling walks, lectures, crafts, and face painting at the Rouge-Cloître in Auderghem.
Fourteen Flemish cities and municipalities are set to switch off their street lighting, with Antwerp planning to darken around 50 of its buildings and monuments.
Normal darkness
“Light pollution occurs when artificial lighting is so prevalent that it interferes with normal and desirable darkness,” explains the Association for the Protection of the Night Sky and Environment (Ascen), which organizes the initiative in Brussels and Wallonia.
The impact of light pollution extends to nocturnal species. Insects, butterflies, bats, amphibians, and migratory birds are all adversely affected by various forms of artificial lighting. Furthermore, it disrupts the natural cycles of several plants and negatively impacts human sleep patterns.
Ascen highlights the energy and financial costs associated with illuminating empty spaces, such as vacant car parks and monuments. The organization advocates for a more rational use of lighting, promoting the practice of illuminating only what is necessary, when it is necessary, and how it is necessary.
Details of all activities can be found on the websites of Ascen and Leve(n) de Nacht.
OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman has had an exceptionally busy past few weeks.
Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images
Altman’s OpenAI recently made a flurry of announcements, including blockbuster deals with AMD and Nvidia.
Several tech CEOs Business Insider spoke with said they were impressed by Altman’s ambition.
Others said they’d prefer if he took his foot off the gas in the interest of consumer safety.
Sam Altman’s breakneck pace has some tech leaders awed and others uneasy.
In the past few weeks alone, the OpenAI cofounder and CEO signed blockbuster computing deals with AMD and Nvidia, bringing his startup’s total dealmaking this year to about $1 trillion.
The company launched Sora, an AI video app that gained more than 1 million users in its first five days, as well as Instant Checkout, a shopping feature for its ChatGPT chatbot. OpenAI also unveiled new AI-powered workplace tools that its employees are using internally, signaling a potential move into the enterprise software market.
And that’s just a sampling of the San Francisco-based juggernaut’s latest announcements.
Altman “is one of the most ambitious founders out there,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud-storage company Box, who likened today’s AI boom to the formative years of the internet and mobile computing. “He understands that these platform shifts come around once every decade or two decades. This is probably going to be the biggest one we’ve ever seen in tech.”
Levie and other tech leaders observing Altman from afar told Business Insider that success in entrepreneurship demands constant momentum. Yet even by startup standards, they said Altman’s torrent of activity stands out, with some calling it bold and others reckless.
“I can’t imagine moving the speed that they’re moving,” said Joel Milne, CEO of AutoUnify, a startup that makes AI-commerce applications for dealerships, marketplaces, and other vendors in the automotive industry. “It’s never been seen before.”
‘AI is a phenomenon’
Going full throttle makes sense for Altman as AI is advancing at an extraordinary clip, said Bipul Sinha, CEO and cofounder of cybersecurity firm Rubrik.
“You have to run fast to capture the opportunity,” he said. “AI is a phenomenon. It has a super exponential trajectory.”
Altman’s efforts appear to be paying off. San Francisco-based OpenAI expects to surpass $13 billion in revenue by year’s end, and its first mainstream product, three-year-old ChatGPT, has more than doubled its weekly active users in the last four months to about 800 million.
Still, OpenAI has significant expenses. The company is on track to spend $155 billion through 2029 due to the massive amount of power it needs to operate.
By timing several major OpenAI announcements close together over the past few weeks, Altman demonstrated strategic savvy, said Ross Finman, CEO of Augmodo, a startup maker of smart badges for retail workers that have 3D cameras and AI technology baked in.
“Each individually might not make a big splash, but collectively they do,” said Finman, who, like Altman, attended the Silicon Valley accelerator program Y Combinator. “It creates a network effect across multiple industries.”
Negotiation 101
Altman also deserves kudos for securing critical compute power for OpenAI for years to come with the AMD and Nvidia deals, said Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group, the parent of job platforms Dice and ClearanceJobs.
“He is diversifying the data centers he is going to use for the future,” said Zeile. “Negotiation 101 is to have many suppliers so you can get the best price.”
Amid the frenzy, Altman played up his personal branding by inviting people to use Sora to create videos of him doing whatever they can imagine. Some followed through by making ones showing the tech founder shoplifting and rapping.
Joshua March, another Y Combinator attendee who leads the financial-services AI startup Veritus Agent, described the move as a clever way for Altman to make himself more likable.
“Most successful companies today have a strong CEO persona,” March said.
Hero or villain
Not all tech leaders are admirers of Altman. Some say they would prefer if he took his foot off the gas in the interest of consumer safety, as lawsuits allege that ChatGPT and other chatbots have harmed some users.
In August, a family sued OpenAI in Californiastate court, alleging that ChatGPT “actively helped” their son explore suicide methods over several months before he died by suicide on April 11.
OpenAI is “moving fast and breaking things in an effort to chase a ton of revenue,” said Kate Doerksen, founder of the startup Sage Haven, a messaging app for kids that has AI components. “They’re not doing enough for safety.”
A spokesperson for OpenAI noted that the company last month rolled out parental controls to help keep teens safe and a parent resource page.
“Our work to make ChatGPT more helpful and strengthen its safeguards is constant and ongoing,” she said. “We’ll keep improving safety as we build and scale the infrastructure needed for the future.”
Jill Popelka, CEO of AI cybersecurity company Darktrace, sees Altman as a leader who’s stuck in a unique bind. She said that slowing down could enable his rivals to catch up to OpenAI, but moving too quickly could result in mistakes or oversights.
“I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be in his shoes,” Popelka said, “to be the hero or the villain of this technology that everyone is talking about.”
Joe Spector, from Soviet Uzbekistan, felt like he was living the American Dream working at JPMorgan in the ’00s.
He said he found working in startups more fulfilling, and cofounded the telehealth company, Hims.
Spector left Hims in 2021 to launch Dutch. He said these experiences taught him about risk-taking.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joe Spector, 45, the founder and CEO of Dutch, a veterinary telehealth company. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I decided to become an investment banker after watching the movie “Wall Street.” It was the early 2000s, before working in Big Tech was sexy, and I thought a job onWall Street was the epitome of success for a college graduate.
That’s when I realized there was more to life than money — or at least more ways to make it than the rinse-and-repeat routine of investment banking.
Then I found startups. I gave up my comfortable salary to cofound Hims, and later launched Dutch, a telehealth platform that connects pet owners with licensed veterinarians. As someone from an immigrant background, I’m used to making something from nothing.
In the process, I learned how important it is to be really honest with yourself and open to feedback from others, to truly understand if a risk is worth taking.
I worked hard at college and graduated a year early
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.
I arrived in Fremont, California, with my family, with nothing but a red suitcase and some clothes. We moved into low-income housing and lived on food stamps for a long time.
My goal was to one day support my parents; theirs was getting me into a good school.
I started my undergrad at Berkeley in 1998 and busted my butt to do well. I didn’t allow myself to travel or explore college life. I graduated early, in three years instead of four, and was still in survival mode.
I asked myself: “What’s the best-paying job I can get after college?” The answer, then, was investment banking.
Going to business school made me realize I could be an entrepreneur
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. People used to get angry over misplaced spaces or grammatical errors in PowerPoint presentations. It was unnecessarily intense, in my opinion, and massively unfufilling. I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this.
Many of my colleagueswere in the “work hard, play hard” mindset. We’d spend a ton of money on the weekends to try to feel better about the awful week we’d had.
In 2004, I decided to leave, but I stayed for another year to prove to myself that I wasn’t a quitter. 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.
My parents wanted me to go back to my safe job at JPMorgan
My first startup out of Wharton was a dating website and it failed: it launched in 2006 and shuttered in 2008. But it taught me that you can only learn by doing. Most of all, I realized how much I loved startups — they were thrilling and showed me how fulfilling it could be to create products that improve people’s lives.
I didn’t cofound Hims until 2017, when I was 37. That was more than eight years of my parents asking, “Why don’t you go back to that safe job at JPMorgan?”
I have three kids, aged 8, 11, and 13, and there were times when I had to take a job just to get health insurance. In my heart of hearts, though, I knew that I loved early-stage entrepreneurship and wanted to create something out of nothing.
Hims started trading publicly in January 2021.
illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Hims was a classic Bay Area story. I was back in California and people I knew connected me to other founders. The idea for Hims came from a whiteboard brainstorm.
I helped found the company that connects consumers with licensed healthcare providers, and very early on, we could see traction. We raised a seed round, and the rest is history.
I’ll never forget getting our first billion-dollar unicorn valuation in 2019. From then on, I was making about $214,000 a year. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d ring the New York Stock Exchange bell, like I did in 2021 with the other co-founders and members of the executive team.
Joe got a puppy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Courtesy of Joe Spector
During COVID-19, like so many other American households, I got a pandemic puppy and faced veterinary bills in the thousands, like when we had to take our dog, Eddie, to urgent care after he atesome trail mix.
As a problem solver who runs to the fire, I decided to leave Hims behind in 2021 and start Dutch. It’s scary — and not great — to bring your salary down to zero, especially when you’re married with young kids. But I believed in myself and so did a bunch of other people.
We’ve raised tens of millions of dollars, and I’m earning six figures again. It’s amazing, and I’m very proud of our team.
Joe Spector’s dog, Eddie, helped inspire Dutch.
Courtesy of Joe Spector
Have honest conversations before taking big risks
I’ve learned this about taking risks: It’s really important to have honest conversations with yourself, the people you trust, and others.
Talk to your customers and potential customers. They have answers for you. That can help you understand if your idea is a gimmick or something that could make things cheaper or faster, or make people happier.
Don’t take a risk just because you’re unhappy and want to do something else. Be honest with yourself and open to honest feedback from others to really understand if the risk is worthwhile.
JPMorgan did not provide a comment when contacted by Business Insider.
