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

(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: Gung Ho,  by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles (1997)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: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__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