This crypto trader is bullish on her career in comedy.
Brooklyn-born Staten Island raised Elyse DeLucci is a digital marketing officer by day and a standup comedian at night, and will be headlining at Caroline’s on Broadway on Sept. 29.
“I don’t go on and talk about bosses. I do talk about how at my last job, I was going for drinks, and next thing I know I’m at a little hole-in-the-wall bikini bar in the Financial District with a bunch of coked-out traders,” said the 38-year-old.
When she started working on Wall Street in 2010, the Italian-American wasn’t taken seriously with her big hair and outer-borough accent thicker than Sunday sauce.
Elyse DeLucci struggled to be taken seriously early in her career.Helayne Seidman“I think Hollywood loves Italian New Yorkers … but is Marisa Tomei gonna get hired as the CEO of a company, even though she knows everything about cars?” she said.
Her former company, a global stock exchange, where she worked as head of digital revenue, even suggested she get an accent-neutralization coach.
“I had a voice coach … a Shakespearean actor. He basically was like, ‘The only jobs you’re gonna get in life is if you want to be the spokesperson for Ragu,’” she recalled.
The firm also set her up with a personal shopper at Brooks Brothers “because apparently leopard isn’t a color.”
DeLucci outside the New York Stock Exchange. Helayne SeidmanBut’s she’s laughing all the way to the bank: “I bought my wall-to-wall leopard carpet with Ethereum.”
Raised in a “blue collar” household in Brooklyn and Staten Island, DeLucci’s mother is a nurse practitioner and her late father, an import-export trucking company owner. “He was a street-smart connected guy with lessons like follow the code of silence … and people at work are not your friends,” she said.
And to succeed in the business world, she used those “hard and fast rules” to climb the corporate ladder — starting as a sales executive in a Wall Street boiler room at 21 to becoming a chief digital officer for a commercial bank. She’s now writing a book about her experiences, titled, “Wise Girl: Everything I Learned From the Mafia, I Used to Succeed on Wall Street,” to be released in February.
The idea for the memoir came after she started an Apple podcast “Crazing F—ing Mommy” in 2020 about her life as a divorced working mom, and told stories about feeling inadequate early on in her early career.
DeLucci used her NY street smarts to make it in the business world while doing comedy in the clubs at night.Helayne SeidmanA lot of women, including many Italians from the tri-state area, send her DMs saying they can relate to feeling underrepresented in the business world.
“When I got my job on Wall Street, I was meeting people who were like, ‘Oh, my parents invested $100,000 in mutual funds for me.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, my mother spent my Confirmation money on an above-ground pool.'”
