A Wall Street Banker Turned to Comedy for Happiness and a Career Change
She is an accountant by day, but she makes comedy.
In fact, she is such a self-described “data nerd” on the side that she’s turned her accounting skills to making people laugh.
“When I was going to the University of California, I realized I had to be creative,” says Jen Wold, co-founder and CEO of the Los Angeles comedy club StandUp In L.A.’s first female owner.
“I knew I had to make people laugh.”
Wold is a former Wall Street accountant.
But after she graduated from Stanford, her passion for comedy grew and she enrolled in the standup comedy class at UC Santa Cruz. After that, she worked as an accountant for several years while honing her craft.
Eventually, she felt there was a creative outlet she could pursue outside of the corporate world. She decided to make comedy her full-time job, but her passion for accounting didn’t pass away as she pursued her dream.
She quit her jobs, built her first standup comedy club in her garage, and has since turned her accountant skills into comedy. She opened StandUp In L.A. in 2013 and in 2016, she opened a second comedy club in her home studio, Stand Up Comedy Club. Since then, she has launched Stand Up Comedy Club in Chicago, and currently is gearing up for a standup comedy tour.
She also is the co-founder of Stand Up Comedy Club, a company that owns Stand Up Comedy Club and other comedy venues around the country, and is a judge on the Comedy Central Stand Up Stand Up! reality show, in which she selects the best standup acts from each city she runs a venue in.
She is also a judge on the CBS summer comedy series, Comedy Bang! Bang! (CBS, July 20; 8 p.m., ET/PT) in which she selects the best standup acts from each city she runs a venue in.
But Wold says her dream for her future is even bigger than what her standup