Ex-senior employee of Yahoo, Google, and Facebook says taking a demotion was 'a great move'

Many of Jennifer Dulski's career choices have been unconventional. The founder-CEO of Rising Team and management lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business started her career with a marketing job at Yahoo in 1999. She was fresh out of business school with a degree in MBA and at that time, the Yahoo job was paying only half as much as the other places she had offers from. But the California resident opted for it because she wanted to work in technology and business.

"Most of my peers didn't understand that choice at the time, but I was excited about getting started in tech," Dulski told Business Insider, adding how demotions shaped her career for the better.

"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," Dulski told the publication. "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."

After working with Yahoo for about nine years, Dulski quit to join a small startup Dealmap -- a decision that many questioned because she left as a senior executive.