Jennifer Dulski began her career with a marketing job at Yahoo.
Jennifer Dulski, the founder and CEO of Rising Team and a management lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, recently shared how demotions shaped her career for the better. Speaking to Business Insider, Ms Dulski revealed her unconventional career choices. In 1999, she began her career with a marketing job at Yahoo right after earning her MBA. At that time, her job was paying only half as much as other places she had offers from. However, the US resident said that she opted for 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,” Ms 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,” Ms Dulski said.
“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,” she added.
Further, Ms Dulski shared that after nearly nine years at Yahoo, she left her senior executive role to join a small startup called Dealmap, a small startup that allowed people to find local coupons and deals. But many people questioned her decision as she left a senior position to join a “much smaller company”.
“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 the outlet.
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After 25 years in leadership roles at Yahoo, Google and Facebook, Ms Dulski revealed that she started her own company Rising Team – a platform that helps managers at any level run skill-building sessions with staff, regardless of their work setup.
“I’ve taken what I consider the unexpected or less obvious career option at many points along the road,” she said. “Everything I’ve learned about creating a business came from all of those previous roles I had in tech,” she added.
“In 2020 I started my own company, which feels like the culmination of my career,” Ms Dulski told the outlet.