Studio Conversation: Jennifer Dulski, President of Change.org

This week, Cornell Tech hosted a special Conversation in the Studio with a Q&A with Jennifer Dulski, President and COO of Change.org, the popular online petition platform. Dulski is a double Cornell alumna, having attended Cornell as an undergrad and the Johnson Graduate School of Management for her MBA. Her career highlights include stints at top tech companies Yahoo! and Google.

Dulski offered Cornell Tech students advice from her long history in the start-up world and her own life experiences. When Dulski joined Yahoo! in the 90s after graduating from the Johnson School, she taught herself HTML from a textbook. Today, she leads a multinational organization that is beginning to start operations in Africa and hopes to grow its presence in the Middle East.

For Dulski, Cornell Tech is an ideal language immersion program, with MEng and MBA students both becoming fluent in technology and business that will uniquely prepare them for success. She readily admitted that she will never be a programmer, but she can speak their language and knows enough to understand how hard tasks can be for programmers and developers. Dulski also stressed the need for engineers to understand the business side in order to be truly successful in their careers.

As the first woman to successfully sell her start-up to Google, Dulski also emphasized her commitment to helping women succeed in business and tech. (Fun fact: when Dulski was an undergraduate at Cornell, she successfully petitioned the university to allow women to serve as coxswains for the men’s rowing team although she continued to work with the women’s team.) In her role as President of Change.org, she worked with employees to create the Women Helping Others Achieve co-mentorship program.

Dulski left the Cornell Tech students with several parting pieces of advice: First, that all companies can be a force for good, not only in what the companies do but in how they treat their employees. And entrepreneurs shouldn’t always ask for permission before they try something new – there’s always something to gain from forging ahead and seeing what works, advice that will stick with the students as they continue to make progress on their projects and look ahead to building their own start-ups next semester.