“Most of my colleagues didn’t understand my decision…”: Former Google, Yahoo and Facebook executive tells how the “demotion” helped her career

Jennifer Dulski has made many unconventional career choices. She is the founder and CEO of Rising Team and a lecturer in management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She started her career in 1999 with a marketing job at Yahoo, right after completing her MBA. Although the job paid half as much as her other offers, she chose it because she wanted to work in both technology and business.

“Most of my colleagues didn’t understand my decision at the time, but I was excited to get into the technology industry,” Dulski told Business Insider, also noting that demotions helped change her career for the better.

“The first time it came when I decided to take the job at Yahoo, and the second time it came during my time at Yahoo. I decided to move into a general management position, 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 running a company, and there was only one position open, which happened to be two levels below my job in marketing. We agreed to compromise in the middle, so I just took a demotion. That was a great move for me – it put my career on a different path. I ended up getting promoted. And in about 18 months, they gave me six companies to run.”

After nearly nine years at Yahoo, Dulski left her senior executive position to join a small startup called Dealmap—a decision that many people questioned.

“We eventually sold Dealmap to Google, and I decided to stay there. And two years later, I left that much better-paying job at Google to become president and CEO of Change.org, a petition website, before spending a few years running groups and communities at Facebook,” she told Business Insider.

After 25 years in leadership positions at Yahoo, Google and Facebook, Dulski founded her own company, Rising Team.

“At many points along the way, I have chosen what I thought were the most unexpected or less obvious career option. In 2020, I started my own business, which feels like the pinnacle of my career,” she said.