At 38, Jonathan Sabbagh went back to school. First, however, he had to qualify to go back to school. He had spent roughly two decades in finance, built businesses, and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. He had also left high school unfinished. Before the next chapter could begin, there was the small matter of a GED.
He took it in Far Rockaway, New York, alongside other adults making their own return to education. In his telling, the people around him were what made the experience memorable: adults taking charge of their lives and moving forward. A classroom can rearrange the meaning of achievement. Here was someone accustomed to building businesses, impressed by people doing something far less likely to earn a congratulatory press release.
The episode offers an unusually useful entrance to Sabbagh’s story. His career has moved through finance, university, company building, and now a board leadership role. The connecting question is what to carry into the next room. Experience travels readily; certainty deserves a more thorough luggage inspection.
A career that started before the credentials
Sabbagh grew up in Switzerland and built his early working life in finance. His professional background spans Switzerland and New York, with hedge funds occupying much of those first two decades. He describes having built two businesses from the ground up. That makes the return to education more interesting: he arrived with considerable experience of starting things, even while returning to the formal beginning of something else.
His New York finance history has a concrete administrative trail. He was registered with Gottex Brokers Alternative USA from March 2014 to August 2015, then Tangent Capital Partners from October 2015 to May 2021. His employment history includes managing partner at Fenrir Advisory Services and a 2018 spell as managing director at Element Capital Group. These are substantial working chapters, rather than a decorative reference to a previous life on Wall Street.
At Fenrir, his responsibilities encompassed marketing, client development, and execution. The range matters. Building a business means moving between the pitch and the work required to make the pitch true. A founder who has already done both comes to a new project with practical habits, even when the vocabulary of the project changes.
The beginner with a business background
At The New School, Sabbagh studied clinical psychology as an undergraduate. He has also spoken about being accepted into a master’s program. His publicly listed education dates are 2019 to 2023. The transition brought an experienced entrepreneur into a setting where the point was to learn, a combination that gives his biography its particular shape.
Returning to study in adulthood puts two kinds of authority beside each other. There is the authority that comes from having done difficult work for years, and the authority that comes from knowing a subject well enough to ask better questions. Sabbagh’s next business emerged while he was making that transition. His previous experience remained available to him.
That is a useful distinction when reading a career like his. The familiar version of a second act asks for a clean break: old profession, new identity, credits rolling. Sabbagh’s actual sequence is messier and more practical. He returned to formal education, then found himself building again. The entrepreneur had accompanied the student.
Six hundred conversations before the company
Before starting Journey Clinical, Sabbagh and Myriam Barthes interviewed 600 therapists about the challenges in their working lives. The number deserves attention because it describes effort before a product had its own momentum. Six hundred conversations leave plenty of room for a founder’s favorite theory to become inconvenient.
Customer research rarely supplies the glamorous part of a startup story. It asks people to explain their routines, repeat their frustrations, and correct assumptions. A polished presentation can get through an afternoon without anyone changing their mind. Hundreds of interviews make that considerably harder. For Sabbagh and Barthes, listening became part of the company’s origin.
Their venture took shape around supporting independent professionals through a shared platform. The founding account also includes a shift from a service provider toward a technology company. In business terms, that is a change in what the founders chose to build: a system that others could use in their own work.
There is a recognizable continuity here with Sabbagh’s earlier career. Client development had already been part of his job. This time, the conversations came before the operating model was settled. His story becomes more revealing when the interview count sits alongside the funding count. One describes how the founders learned; the other describes the resources they later secured.
Sabbagh and Barthes spoke with therapists while developing Journey Clinical’s model.
Two founders, one household
Barthes is Sabbagh’s wife as well as his co-founder. Her professional background includes strategy consulting and artificial intelligence; his brings finance and entrepreneurship. Together they built Journey Clinical, with Sabbagh serving as CEO and Barthes as COO during the company’s earlier years.
The pairing gives this story a different texture from a solitary founder biography. Two careers meet inside the same company, and a working partnership shares space with a marriage. Their public appearances have included conversations together about company building. The plural belongs in any account of how Journey came about.
A photograph of the couple with their dog, Banksy, supplies a welcome interruption to the professional chronology. Both founders crouch beside him; Banksy occupies the middle of the frame with admirable composure. The photograph gives a face to the partnership without needing to turn their private life into a business lesson.
The ordinary work behind a funding announcement
In January 2023, Journey Clinical announced an $8.5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures. Other investors included AlleyCorp, Fifty Years, and Able Partners. Sabbagh’s announcement thanked the investors and acknowledged the team’s work in reaching the milestone. The company had acquired resources and a larger set of expectations.
Union Square Ventures partner Rebecca Kaden wrote about backing Jonathan, Myriam, and the Journey team as the firm led the round. Her account described a network business and a team being built to support its growth. The investment placed the founders in a familiar startup situation: the company had to recruit people while continuing to develop what those people would help run.
A financing announcement freezes a moving business into a tidy number. The work resumes immediately afterward. A larger team requires judgment about roles, communication, and responsibility. The founders’ understanding of the business has to become something colleagues can act on without having lived through every early conversation.
For a former finance entrepreneur, that passage has a certain symmetry. Sabbagh’s earlier career involved building businesses and developing clients. At Journey, he was again responsible for an organization whose ambitions had to survive contact with hiring, budgets, and execution. A new field still comes with calendars.
“It is inspiring to see our vision become theirs.”
Jonathan Sabbagh, on the Journey Clinical team, January 2023
That brief observation about the team is one of the more revealing lines in his funding announcement. A founder starts with an idea attached to a small number of people. A functioning company needs others to understand it, question it, and take responsibility for parts of it. Sabbagh chose to recognize that transfer when he could have devoted the whole announcement to the money.
A different place in the room
In October 2022, Sabbagh and Barthes spoke at the Horizons conference in New York. For Sabbagh, the invitation had personal significance: he had attended as a student and imagined speaking there himself. Returning as a founder meant that two ambitions, building a business and addressing that audience, had met in the same occasion.
It is a smaller milestone than a financing round, but it helps explain the person. Professional progress can be measured in capital raised or titles acquired. It can also mean taking a different place in a room you remember. The distance between attendee and speaker is particularly tangible when the earlier version of yourself is still easy to recall.
He expressed gratitude to the audience for that opportunity. The moment sits neatly beside the GED story: first he joined other adults pursuing a new beginning; later he stood before an audience he had once belonged to. Neither scene requires an invented dramatic flourish. The change in position does the work.
Making room for the next CEO
The partnership has since changed its distribution of responsibility. Sabbagh publicly announced that Barthes would lead Journey Clinical into its next stage of growth, while he would continue as executive chairman of the board. He named her strengths in execution, scaling operations, and building teams as reasons for the appointment.
His own stated focus shifted to strategic initiatives, partnerships, and the company’s long-term direction. That gives the transition a clear business shape. The two co-founders remain involved, with a different allocation of leadership. Sabbagh’s career now includes the experience of supporting a company he helped create while someone else holds the CEO role.
Founder stories often linger at the point where someone takes charge. This one has another useful moment: the point where responsibility moves. His public message gave Barthes the foreground and described how he intended to contribute from the board. The next chapter belongs to the partnership as much as the first did.
Look back from that handoff and the career becomes less like a sequence of reinventions than a series of changing seats. Switzerland and New York. Finance and university. Student and conference speaker. CEO and executive chairman. Sabbagh has continued to build, while the position from which he builds has changed.
The GED remains the scene that holds the others together. Before the company, the investors, and the board title, there was an experienced adult doing the work required to enter a classroom. A new beginning can be remarkably literal. Sometimes it comes with an examination.