Jennifer Dulski has made many unconventional career choices. She is the founder and CEO of Rising Team and a management lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 1999, she began her career with a marketing job at Yahoo right after earning her MBA. Even though the job paid only half as much as her other offers, she chose it because she wanted to work in both technology and business.
“Most of my peers didn’t understand my decision at the time, but I was excited to start in tech,” Dulski told Business Insider, also noting how demotions helped shape her career for the better.
“The first came when I chose the job at Yahoo, and the second came during my time at Yahoo. I decided I wanted to transfer into a general management role, and when I made that move, I took a demotion,” Dulski told the publication. “People looked at me and said, ‘what are you doing?’ But I knew I wanted to try to run a business, and there was only one role open, which happened to be two levels below the job I had in marketing. We compromised in the middle, so I only took one level of demotion. That was a great move for me — it set my career on a different path. I ended up being promoted. And in around 18 months, they gave me six businesses to run.”
After nearly nine years at Yahoo, Dulski left her senior executive role to join a small startup called Dealmap, a decision that many people questioned.
“We ended up selling Dealmap to Google, where I decided to stay. And two years later, I left that much higher-paying Google job to become president and CEO of Change.org, a petition website, before running groups and communities for a few years at Facebook,” she told Business Insider.
After 25 years in leadership roles at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, Dulski started her own company, Rising Team.
“I’ve taken what I consider the unexpected or less obvious career option at many points along the road. In 2020 I started my own company, which feels like the culmination of my career,” she said.
