When I left Cornell University Business School in 1999, I had the choice between traditional paths like management consulting or brand management.

Instead, I chose a marketing job at Yahoo, a much smaller company in the early days of technology, where I was making half as much as the other two places I had received offers from.

Most of my colleagues didn’t understand this decision at the time, but I was excited about the idea of ​​getting into the technology industry.

Along the way, I have often chosen career options that were, in my opinion, unexpected or less obvious.

Since then, I have spent 25 years in leadership positions at technology companies, including Yahoo, Google and Facebook.

Sometimes a downgrade can be the right step

I have experienced such turning points at different stages of my career.

The first time was when I decided to take the job at Yahoo, and the second time was during my time at Yahoo. I decided to move into a general management role, and when I made that move, I was demoted.

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 a compromise in the middle, so I only got demoted one level.

It was a great move for me – it set my career on a new path. I was promoted and within about 18 months I was put in charge of six companies.

People will question your decisions

Then I left Yahoo and joined Dealmap, a small startup where people could find local coupons and deals.

Many asked why I would leave a job at a company where I already held such a high position and move to a much smaller one.

Eventually we sold Dealmap to Google, where I stayed. 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 managing groups and communities at Facebook.

Your career is a learning curve

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

In all my jobs – at companies large and small, in roles big and small – what I found most exciting was building high-performing teams of people who enjoy working together and are motivated by their work.

I was fortunate to receive great training on team leadership from leadership coaches, but I lacked the tools needed to apply what I learned to my team.

That’s exactly what we’ve developed at Rising Team. It’s a platform that helps managers at all levels conduct skills development sessions with employees, regardless of their work structure.

Everything I learned about starting a business I learned from my previous jobs in technology.

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

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

What I tell my students at Stanford

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

Second, relationships are crucial to your happiness at work and your future career. The deeper your connections, the better friends you will have. You will then be able to support each other better and help each other over time. We need to remember that we are human outside of work too and our lives do not only depend on our work goals.

I also say: compare yourself to your yesterday and not to someone who may be sitting next to you.

This is always a losing game. Instead, you should ask yourself, “How can my life be better?” “How can I be better?”