Short answer: Jennifer Dulski started as a high school teacher, then spent 25 years in tech at Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Change.org. She says she founded Rising Team in 2020, bootstrapped, because coaching and training for large teams did not scale.
Watch this answer from Episode 52 (starts at 1:42) · Episode 52 notes and transcript
From Episode 52: She Sold Her First AI Company to Google in 2009. Now She Is Fixing How Teams Work., starting at 1:42.
Jennifer Dulski [1:42]: Sure. Nice to be here with all of you. I'm Jen Dulski. I'm the founder and CEO of Rising Team. We have that part of our name in common, and I come from a little bit of an a traditional, atypical background, to my to the world in tech, which is that I started my career as a high school teacher and the founder of a nonprofit to get help first gen students become first gen college graduates. And it is not typical for most of people I've worked with in big tech, but it does come in handy, as it turns out, to have taught high school, and a lot of difficult, challenging teams are not that different from difficult, challenging teens, as I have found sometimes. And then I spent the next twenty five years working in tech. So I got into tech. My first ten years were at Yahoo back when Yahoo was the coolest thing on the internet, and then several years each at Google and Facebook, five years helping to run change.org, and yeah, a lot of experience, and it's really amazing the times we're in now. I mean, I've seen so much tech change and nothing like we're seeing right now.
Sam Nadler [2:50]: Totally. And I would love to get into Rising Team from a 30,000 foot level, but before we do, do you just mind showing us a little bit how it works?
Jennifer Dulski [3:01]: Sure. So the way to think about it, and maybe I'll share a few slides just to give you a sense of what that of how that works, but maybe at the very highest level before I start jumping into it, my career so I spent most of my time as a division leader, which meant I, ran big organizations, and I had a ton of support. I got human executive coaches, and I was sent to incredible trainings. And the problem was then when I came back to Teams of hundreds or sometimes thousands of people, I just didn't have anything that would scale. It was, like, too expensive, and we didn't have the bandwidth in our HR teams, and I knew there had to be a better way. And so in 2020, I spun off and decided to create Rising Team, bootstrapped by myself, and the idea was how do we scale high touch, really amazing support to people at all levels of an organization without having to do the actual really expensive high touch version of that. And what has come out of it, Rising Team now, is what we call an AI leadership and effectiveness personal trainer, It's like taking a fitness trainer for your physical muscle and, adapting it to your leadership and effectiveness muscle at work.
Sam Nadler [4:17]: Super cool. And when you started this, AI didn't really exist. So was there, like, a different approach?
