Jennifer Dulski has often made the less expected career moves, but she believes each decision has helped her get to where she is now. Jennifer Dulski
Jennifer Dulski has worked for 25 years at tech companies, including Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
Today she is the founder and CEO of her own company, Rising Team.
Dulski lectures at Stanford Business School and believes strongly in learning by teaching.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and reviewed by a real editor.
This essay is based on a conversation with Jennifer Dulski, founder and CEO of Rising Team and a lecturer in management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She previously held leadership roles at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. The text has been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to work in technology and I wanted to work in business. So, like many others, I got an MBA. When I left Cornell Business School in 1999, I had the choice between traditional paths like consulting or brand management.
Instead, I chose a marketing job at Yahoo, a much smaller company in the early days of tech, with a salary half of the other two positions I was offered.
Most of my colleagues didn’t understand my decision at the time, but I was excited about entering the technology industry. I chose the unexpected or less obvious career option at many points along the way.
Since then, I have spent 25 years working in leadership positions at technology companies, including Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
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Sometimes a demotion can be the right decision
I’ve had these sort of crossroads moments at different stages of my career. The first was when I decided to take the job at Yahoo. The second came during my time at Yahoo. I decided to move into a general management position. When I made that move, I was demoted.
But I knew I wanted to try running a company. There was only one opening, which happened to be two levels below the position I had in marketing. We found a compromise in the middle, so I was only demoted one level.
That was a great move for me. It set my career on a different path. I ended up getting promoted. And within about 18 months I was put in charge of six companies.
Many will question your decisions
Then I left Yahoo and joined Dealmap, a small startup that allowed people to find local coupons and deals.
Many people wondered why I would leave a company where I already had so much experience to move to a much smaller company.
Eventually we sold Dealmap to Google, where I decided to stay. Two years later, I left the much better-paying Google job to become President and CEO of Change.org, a petition website, before spending a few years managing groups and communities at Facebook.
A career is a learning curve
In 2020, I started my own company, which feels like the pinnacle of my career.In all the jobs I’ve had — big companies, small companies, big roles, small roles — what I found most exciting was building high-performing teams of people who love working together and are motivated by what they do.
I was fortunate to receive great training on team leadership from executive coaches, but I didn’t have the tools to apply what I learned to my team.
That’s what we’ve built at Rising Team. It’s a platform that enables managers at any level to deliver skills development training to their employees, regardless of their work environment.
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Everything I learned about starting a business came from my previous roles in tech.
I also gained experience as a coxswain on the high school rowing teams and as a teacher during summers. I got better at writing essays by teaching seventh graders how to write essays. That’s the premise of Rising Team — by facilitating these sessions, the leaders not only teach the content themselves, but they learn it better.
The same thing is happening to me now. I’m a management professor at Stanford University’s business school, so I’m teaching people how to scale businesses while I’m scaling my own business, and I’m teaching people how to be great leaders while I’m building a business that helps people be great leaders.
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What I tell my students at Stanford
When I think about the advice I give to my students, the first thing I say is that nothing is permanent. If you don’t like a particular career choice, you still have plenty of time to do something else, and you’ll have learned a lesson in the process.
Second, relationships are crucial to your happiness at work and for your future career. The deeper your relationships, the better friends you will have. You will then be able to support each other better and help each other over time. We must not forget that we are human beings outside of work too and have lives that do not only revolve around our professional goals.
I also recommend comparing yourself to yourself and not to someone who might be sitting next to you. That is a game that you will always lose. Instead, you should ask yourself: “How can my life be better?” and “How can I be better?”
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