A Visit from Jonathan Butler '83

Jonathan Butler ’83 visited St. B’s on November 10 to talk to the eighth grade about his interesting and varied career path.  After St. Bernard’s Jonathan attended Groton and Princeton, but he told the boys that the highlight of his education career was playing Alice in Alice in Wonderland in the fifth grade.

Jonathan moved back to New York after he graduated from college to take a job at an investment management firm but soon found Wall Street life to be unfulfilling.  After a stint as a journalist and two years at business school, he embarked on a series of entrepreneurial pursuits (some more successful than others), including a furniture company, a real estate investment company, and an advisory business.  A failed attempt to get a hedge fund off the ground forced him to retreat back to Wall Street in 2003 while he regrouped.

At about the same time Jonathan bought a brownstone in Brooklyn and was thrilled with his new neighborhood—so much so that he started a blog in his spare time, brownstoner.com.  He looked forward to coming home from work and writing about the Brooklyn real estate market, new houses being built in his area, and the architectural history of homes in his new borough.  (Don't tell anyone at Merrill Lynch this, but he also spent some time at work working on his blog.  “Who needs venture capital when you’ve got a salary!” he says.)  By 2007 his blog was attracting 150,000 readers a month, which allowed him to quit his job in finance.

Jonathan also had a passion for shopping at flea markets.  He noticed that as open spaces became rarer (and pricier) in Manhattan, flea markets were disappearing.  Another spark.  He bicycled around his neighborhood, found a perfect location, talked to his local representative, and founded The Brooklyn Flea (brooklynflea.com).  His weekly flea markets attract 20,000 people and they shop with 200 vendors every weekend.  In addition, there are 2,000 vendors on the waiting list hoping to sell their wares through Jonathan’s venture.

Jonathan didn’t have a straight path to becoming a successful entrepreneur.  The message he imparted to the boys was that it is important for them to use their time wisely in school to explore different interests and discover something that they enjoy and will excel at.