PayPal Stories Archive

This month, we are featuring Kirsten Wolberg as part of our Women Leaders at PayPal series. Kirsten joined PayPal in June 2012, and is now in a 12-18 month executive rotation as the VP, Talent at PayPal.

 

I’ve had a few different roles since I joined PayPal back in June 2012. Currently, I lead the Talent Team, which includes Global Talent Acquisition, Development and Performance, and PayPal Learning.

 

I had the honor and privilege to be the PayPal Separation Executive, where I oversaw the the PayPal/eBay separation program. It was incredible seeing how everyone at PayPal and eBay came together to accomplish the seemingly impossible goal of achieving separation in such a short period of time. We had 18 to 24 months-worth of work that we compressed into about eight months. Before we even had the language of PayPal’s new values – which include collaboration and inclusion – we saw these values at work solving a really challenging problem.

 

I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California. After graduation, I moved back home to look for a job. Unfortunately, the country was in the middle of the oil crisis that led to a recession, so finding a job in Alaska – a state that is very dependent on the oil economy – was challenging. I ended up moving back to LA, where I got a job as a product manager at First Interstate Bank.

 

It’s interesting to think back to that time in my life. It seemed like such an unfortunate time – I was struggling to find a job and feeling kind of hopeless. But the lack of summer jobs in Alaska drove me back to LA for the summer and that is where I got my start in banking and technology. That experience taught me an important life lesson: things in life that initially seem like obstacles may end up being blessings. It’s all about your frame of mind.

 

After several years of working in Product Management and Operations at banks, I decided to go back to school to get my business degree. I received my MBA with a focus in finance and Management Information Systems (MIS) from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. From there, I moved to San Francisco, where I worked in consulting for several years. My clients were all in the financial services and payments industry (fintech before fintech was a “thing”).

 

When I left consulting, a group of seven of my colleagues and I started a payments startup called InnoVentry, which was focused on providing payments services to the under-and-unbanked. Our product replaced the check-cashing outlets that charged exorbinent fees and really took advantage of the unbanked. We created a machine that was similar to an ATM – where people could cash checks, issue money orders, and send wire transfers. We used facial biometrics for identification and authentication. Our customers could cash their checks at a self-service device in under a minute while paying a very reasonable rate for the service. In the US, we had over 1,000 machines deployed in nearly all major grocery and convenience store chains.

 

At InnoVentry, I led all product development and operations. We had a great product and quickly grew from eight to 500 people – but we ran into a capital problem. The machines were very expensive – we had them stocked with upwards of $80,000 in cash at all times. The machines weren’t generating enough revenue because we were still a young business. So we didn’t have the capital or cash flow we needed to get through the initial stages of the business, and eventually had to shut down operations. I’m happy to say that being at PayPal, with our vision of democratizing financial services, is sort of like a homecoming for me because of the overlap in vision and mission.

 

There have been several life changing moments in my life, but one of the most personal ones was finding out my husband had cancer. I was working as a product manager at Charles Schwab in San Francisco when my husband was diagnosed with Stage Four non Hodgkins Lymphoma. At the time, I was five months pregnant with our second daughter, and we had an 18-month-old as well. I took a seven month leave of absence from work to take care of my family. My husband finished up treatment just as I was having our baby, and thankfully he’s doing well today.

 

The timing of my husband’s illness and recovery brought me back to work right after the first internet bubble had burst. Schwab hadn’t been able to keep my job open, but I had the opportunity to interview for other jobs at my level within the company. I was lucky to find a job that was a perfect fit for my ambition to be closer to technology with a job in Schwab Technology. I loved my role. But after four years in tech, the company made a strategic cost cutting decision to move all of their tech and operations to Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona and Denver, Colorado. I didn’t want to move family out of San Francisco, so I began looking for a new job. That job search ended when I accepted the job as CIO of Salesforce.com.

 

The advice I would give other rising women leaders is something that I had to learn from my own experience, and it actually helped me take my career to the next level. My advice is this: Don’t try to out man the men. I’ve been in financial services and technology my entire career. I’ve been one of the few or only women in the room. To try to compensate for my differences and to try to compete in this world, I used to dress like a man, talk like a man, and act like a man. It actually worked for a while, but it only got me so far. I finally realized that I wasn’t being my authentic self and that I had to honor myself as a woman and embrace the diversity of thought that I brought to the table and the inherent strengths I have because I am a woman. Being a woman in male dominated environments wasn’t a weakness, it was a strength. In that ah-ha moment, I gave myself permission to lead as a women and be true to myself. And that is when my career really began to take off. Ultimately, this advice is that leaders of any gender have to be authentic and true to who they are to be successful in the long run.