Jennifer Dulski: "To Join (Your First) Public Board, Someone Needs to Bet on You"

Boardroom Governance with Evan Epstein

(0:00) Intro.

(1:21) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.

(2:08) Start of interview.

(2:41) Jennifer's "origin story."

(3:41) Founding a non-profit at the start of her career: Breakthrough Pittsburgh.

(4:15) The start of her tech career with Yahoo!

(7:12) Her roles post Yahoo!: founding and selling The Dealmap to Google.

(9:20) Her transition and tenure as president & COO of Change.org (scaling from 18 million to 200 million users). About her Motivational Pie Chart.

(11:07) About Change.org (a social impact campaigning platform) and non-profit and PBC corporate structures.

(14:18) Her time at Facebook (now Meta), leading the Facebook Groups product.

(16:00) About Rising Team, the company she founded and where she currently serves as CEO.

(22:10) On her board journey, and distinctions among different types of companies: non-profits, startups (Little Passports), public companies (Move, TEGNA & WeightWatchers) and VC/PE backed companies. "The truth is to join a public board, somebody needs to take a bet on you if you've never been on a public board."

(32:19) On serving in a VC/PE backed company as a lead independent director and comp committee Chair (Arcadia). On board observer roles. Setting board norms.

(36:55) On the benefit of boardroom diversity.

(39:17) On dealing with the politicization of the boardroom, including DEI and ESG matters.

(42:06) On the benefits of teaching (at Stanford GSB) for her CEO and board roles .

(39:17) On dealing with the politicization of the boardroom, including DEI and ESG matters.

(44:15) Three things top of mind on boardroom matters: 1) Setting up boards for success (norms, board evaluations, etc), 2) Keeping up with new technologies, and 3) Crisis scenario planning.

(49:00) Books that have greatly influenced her life:

1. Gung Ho, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles (1997)
2. The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2018)

(51:14) Her mentors.*Reference to her LinkedIn Post: 5 Mentor Archetypes.

(51:57) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by.

(53:15) About her book: Purposeful: Are you a Manager or a Movement Starter? (2018) The 3 Cs: 1) courage, 2) community, and 3) commitment.

(54:40) An unusual habit or absurd thing that she loves.

(56:00) The living person she most admires: Simone Biles.

Jennifer Dulski is a Silicon Valley based executive and board member. She is currently CEO and founder of Rising Team, a company that provides tools, data, and community to turn managers into amazing coaches that build happier and more successful teams.

You can follow Evan on social media at:

X: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/

Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/

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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License