Send this story to a friend
4 top CFOs, 4 different paths to success
Photo: Dino Vournas
Guidewire Software CFO Karen Blasing said she wasn't sure what
she wanted to do careerwise, even after getting her undergrad degree in
economics. She was convinced to get her MBA because it had the broadest
possibilities but even armed with that, her first job was landed through the
Manpower temp agency. Fortunately it was with a Silicon Valley company that
began her climb to several successful CFO jobs.
- Cromwell Schubarth
- Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- Email | Twitter | Google+
But Karen Blasing of Guidewire Software, Bryan LeBlanc of Jive Software, Anup Singh of Nimble Storage and Janette Sutton of Team San Jose recounted very different paths they took to becoming a CFO.
Blasing said there were few women business executives in the 1970s for her to model herself after when she was in college. A love of math and economics led her to her undergrad major but she decided to stay in school "because I was pretty good at school."
The problem was that she "pretty indecisive: about what her grad degree should be: law, business or economics. A key professor advised her to get an MBA because that would give her the broadest range of possibilities and she went for it at the University of Washington.
She moved to Silicon Valley in the 1980s, which she described as a "pretty depressing time" after the defense industry shut down much of the operations here. She took a job through the Manpower temporary employment agency "with my MBA" which got her foot in the door at Syntex Pharmaceuticals.
Blasing has since been CFO at three other companies in addition to Guidewire, which she helped to lead to a successful IPO in 2012: BT Counterpane, Nuance Communications and Force10 Networks.
Team San Jose's Sutton said she became a CFO "by accident and with a lot of luck." She recounted being a 23-year-old single mother in Amarillo, Texas, who was working two jobs.
"I quickly realized that is not the way I was going to be able to take care of my child," she said. After research in the library and scouring newspapers, "because that is how you did it back then"
Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.
No comments:
Post a Comment