I’ve held leadership roles at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Taking a demotion is what set my career on the right path.

Coming out of Cornell’s business school in 1999, I had a choice between traditional routes like consulting or brand management.

Instead, I chose a marketing job at Yahoo, which was a much smaller company in the early days of tech. It paid only half as much as the other two places I had offers from.

Most of my peers didn’t understand that choice at the time, but I was excited about getting started in tech.

I’ve taken what I consider the unexpected or less obvious career option at many points along the road.

Since then, I’ve spent 25 years working in leadership roles at tech companies, including Yahoo, Google, and Facebook.

Sometimes, a demotion might be the right move

At various stages in my career, I’ve had those kinds of crossroad moments.

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.

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.

People will question your choices

I then left Yahoo to go to Dealmap, a small startup that allowed people to find local coupons and deals.

Many questioned why I would leave somewhere I was already so senior to move to 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.

Your career is a learning curve

In 2020 I started my own company, which feels like the culmination of my career.

In all the jobs I’ve had — big companies, small companies, big roles, small roles — the thing that I have found the most exciting is creating high-performing teams of people who love to work together and are motivated by what they do.

I was lucky to receive some great team-leading training from executive coaches, but I didn’t have the tools I needed to apply what I was learning to my team.

That’s essentially what we’ve built at Rising Team. It’s a platform that helps managers at any level run skill-building sessions with staff, regardless of their work setup.

Everything I’ve learned about creating a business came from all of those previous roles I had in tech.

It also came from my experience as a cox on the high school college rowing teams and teaching during summers. I got better at writing essays by teaching seventh graders how to write essays. This is the premise of Rising Team — by facilitating these sessions, the leaders not only teach the content themselves, but they also learn it better.

The same is happening to me now. I’m a management lecturer at Stanford University’s business school. So, I’m teaching people how to scale companies while I’m scaling my own company, and I’m teaching people how to be great leaders while I’m building a company that helps people be great leaders.

What I tell my students at Stanford

When I think about the advice I give to my students, the first thing I say is that nothing’s permanent. If you don’t like a certain career choice, you have plenty of time to do something else, and you’ve learned a lesson in the process.

The second is that relationships are critical to your happiness at work and your future career. The deeper your connections are, the better friends you will have. You can then be more supportive of one another and help each other over time. We have to remember that outside of our jobs, we’re human beings, and we have lives that aren’t just about our work goals.

Something else I say is to compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to someone else who might be sitting next to you.

That’s always going to be a losing game. You should instead be asking yourself, “how can my life be better?” “how can I be better?”