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Jennifer Dulski
American technology executive
Jennifer Dulski is a prominent technology executive and the CEO and founder of Rising Team, a company dedicated to enhancing team performance through innovative tools and methodologies. She has a rich background in leadership roles across several major tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!.
Education
Dulski holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University (1993) and an MBA from the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell (1999) .12
Professional Experience
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Rising Team (2020 - Present): As the CEO and founder, Dulski leads a platform that helps organizations improve engagement and develop leadership skills among managers. The platform provides science-backed tools for conducting interactive team development sessions .246
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Facebook (2017 - 2019): Dulski was the Head of Groups and Community, where she oversaw the development of Facebook Groups, which engage over 1.5 billion users monthly. She also led a significant redesign of the Facebook app in 2019 .35
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Change.org (2013 - 2017): As President and COO, she played a crucial role in expanding the user base from 18 million to 180 million, establishing a profitable business model and enhancing technological infrastructure .34
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Google (2011 - 2013): After co-founding The Dealmap, which was acquired by Google, she served as a product leader .5
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Yahoo! (1999 - 2007): Dulski held various leadership positions, eventually becoming Group VP & GM of Local and Marketplaces .35
Publications
In addition to her executive roles, Jennifer Dulski is a bestselling author. Her book, "Purposeful," published in 2018, focuses on how individuals can become catalysts for change .24
Current Roles
Apart from her role at Rising Team, Dulski is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she teaches management courses .34 She serves on several boards, including that of WW International (formerly Weight Watchers) .23
Dulski's extensive experience in tech leadership and her commitment to fostering effective team dynamics position her as a significant figure in the industry.
Highlights
In my 30+-year career, no leader has ever left a more powerful first impression on me than Cammie Dunaway.
When she joined Yahoo to lead our marketing team, she transformed the way I think about leadership introductions altogether.
From her very first meeting, Cammie demonstrated an exceptional skill for blending personal storytelling with professional vision. In her first all-hands meeting, she shared anecdotes and family photos and introduced her goals for us using a memorable acronym (anyone who knows me knows I love a good acronym 😉).
She also used her introduction to make two things clear: 👉She had a bold, clear vision for our organization 👉She was open to and eager for our input
Cammie demonstrated that great leaders don't just arrive with strategies; they connect to their teams as people first and invite a dialogue.
Throughout her time at Yahoo!, Cammie continued to lead with powerful impressions. Her attention to detail even extended to her clothing, as she always wore the company’s signature purple. Her example taught me the importance of leaders connecting to their brands and inspired me to collect my own brand-colored wardrobe for every new organization I've joined since.
I am so grateful to Cammie for the impact she has had on my career. She was my first female manager (one of only two in my 31-year career) and the first leader to promote me amongst my peers. Yet, what I value most is how she profoundly influenced the pillars of my leadership style.
Thank you, Cammie, for teaching me how to: ✨Show up as a whole person and build trust with my team first ✨Clearly communicate core leadership values and vision ✨Fully embrace a brand and mission
— This post is part of a Gratitude Series where I thank the people who have made a difference in my life.
Leaning into gratitude makes us happier and more resilient. If you’d like to do this with your team, you can do this as a fun and easy team development exercise using our Rising Team free Gratitude Kit: https://lnkd.in/gx4_iynN.
👂I want to hear from you: Was there a leader in your career who left a powerful first impression?
— Like this post?
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#gratitude #teamdevelopment #leadership
I had no idea how hard it was to lose a pet.
I never had a pet growing up, unless you count a few goldfish. When my daughter, Rachel, was five, she wrote a letter to the tooth fairy (and many other letters) asking for a puppy. Kaleb was her first pet—and mine, too.
He lived with us for 17 years, a long time for a dog. It was his last four years, though, when I appreciated his presence most. In the depths of the pandemic, I found myself a new empty-nester. He was my daily companion. He was there every day, for every virtual meeting.
Like any pet, his health declined with age. Still, the decision to say goodbye to him came up somewhat unexpectedly. One day, the vet told us it was time, and the next day we had an appointment.
I could barely focus at work that day. I had a call with a customer, who commented how cute Kaleb was sitting on the pillow behind me. I was a wreck, so I told her what was happening. She confided that she had lost a pet recently, too. I was surprised at what a relief it was to share our stories with each other.
Two things occurred to me in that moment:
1️⃣ My team didn’t have an easy way to share challenges from our personal lives:
- The fact that it was such a relief to share this news made me realize that our team didn’t have any obvious space to do that. So we created a new Slack channel called #Resilience-Support. I started by sharing my story about Kaleb and people have been sharing challenges there ever since. It is a deeply supportive space.
2️⃣ I didn’t have enough empathy for experiences that were unfamiliar to me:
- This experience made me realize I hadn’t truly had full empathy over the years for people on my teams who had lost a pet. While I knew it was hard, I didn’t really know until I experienced it. It reminded me how critical it is to try to put ourselves in others’ shoes, and to admit that sometimes we can’t truly understand. In those moments it helps to just listen.
At any given time, our team members may be facing heartbreak of one kind or another in their personal lives. The more empathy we can foster on our teams, the better we can support each other and bounce back together.
Last week, one of our customers Rising Team reached out because they had an unexpected loss on their team and wanted to know if we could help them create a safe space for conversation around it. We built them a new Rising Team kit about navigating grief and loss, and they were able to help their team start to process this together. If anyone else’s team needs this right now, please reach out and I’m happy to share it with you at no cost.
Our culture doesn’t always validate the pain of losing a pet and often minimizes many other types of pain and struggle. We as leaders can create safe spaces for our teams to process and get support in these moments.
If anyone wants to share stories of their beloved pets, including photos, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
#teamdevelopment #resilience #vulnerability
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.