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From Adobe executive to social entrepreneur
Long before becoming a card-carrying Spartan, Melissa Dyrdahl, '82 Advertising, was familiar with the byways of campus. A San José native, she spent her early years in a house on Twelfth Street -- and a lot of time walking around with her mom.
"Walking around downtown, walking around campus. Since my parents only had one car, that's how we did things," Dyrdahl explains.
Undergrad career woman
On those strolls, the young Melissa was already pondering what she wanted to be when she grew up. The professions primarily available to women at the time didn't appeal. She wasn't drawn to teaching or nursing, so that left … what? By the end of grammar school, she'd decided she wanted a career that incorporated travel and offered a paycheck that would fund a "nice house and nice clothes. In the seventh grade, those things were really important," she reports, laughing. By high school, she'd become smitten with the idea of advertising. And then, "as Silicon Valley began to emerge, it became clear there were lots of jobs in the communications field, marketing and promoting products, and that appealed to my creative side. I didn't look like a typical student," Dyrdahl admits, "because I was trying very hard to be a career woman. Those were the days when women wore a skirt and blouse with a bow at the neck to work"--and, in Dyrdahl's case, to many of her SJSU classes.
Still an undergraduate, she jumpstarted her professional career by working at Grinels & Associates, an ad agency owned by fellow Spartan Sam Grinels, '72. (Dyrdahl and her first boss, who have remained friends, are both current members of the SJSU Alumni Association Board of Directors.) "Early on, I learned that hard work paid off," Dyrdahl recalls. "Maybe I wasn't always the smartest person in the room, but I was willing to be one of the hardest-working people in the room. I had a lot of drive and ambition. I never said no to responsibility. People ask: 'How did you climb the corporate ladder?' and I say: 'With a lot of hard work!'"
Climbing the corporate ladder in stilettos
Dyrdahl held management positions at Hewlett-Packard and Claris, Apple Inc.'s software start-up, before joining Adobe's Home and Office Product Division in 1994. When she left Adobe in 2006, as senior vice president of corporate marketing and communications, she led the company's global marketing organization and supervised a team of 500. Named Best Marketing Executive in 2004 by the American Business Awards, Dyrdahl was part of the executive team that shepherded Adobe's growth from an $800 million company to a $3 billion company.
Not only did she successfully "break through the glass ceiling in three-inch stilettos," as she wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, she refused to allow her function, marketing, from being undervalued within the company.
"When a company exists because of technological innovation, any department that is not technical tends to receive a secondary priority. It's easy to get marginalized," she says.
Generous about sharing what she's learned, for many years Dyrdahl served as a mentor with WOMEN Unlimited, a year-long program tailored to help exceptional women learn the skills necessary to become leaders within their companies. The peninsula companies that participate -- Adobe and Bank of America, among others -- recognize, Dyrdahl emphasizes, "the importance of providing extra guidance and support to talented women in their organizations so that those talents don't get lost in the shuffle."
The "What Next?" question
Dyrdahl simultaneously describes her 25 years in the corporate world as "great" and "enough." Unwilling to retire altogether, she longed to take on "something significantly different. When I knew I was going to leave Adobe, I was mentally fast forwarding."
A very small percentage of her job at Adobe had been to expand the company's corporate philanthropy program. "But I really enjoyed that five percent," Dyrdahl says. While helping to build corporate giving to levels that more adequately reflected Adobe's stature in Silicon Valley, Dyrdahl began to work with, and sit on the boards of, nonprofits -- the Humane Society of Silicon Valley, The San José Museum of Art, and others.
Again and again, the same fundraising problems cropped up. Raising money was expensive. Direct-mail campaigns were not only monetarily expensive, they cost the environment. Even in Silicon Valley, the nonprofits were "technologically behind," lacking both the funds and the expertise to produce robust Web sites or undertake significant online marketing. With a bit of marketing, technology and business savvy, Dyrdahl believed such problems could be solved.
www.bringlight.com
The quicker money gets to the charities, the quicker that money can be put to work.
Bring Light, the online philanthropic network launched by Dyrdahl and Drew McManus last May, takes its name from a phrase Dyrdahl's yoga instructor uses to close a session: "Where there is darkness, may we bring light." Originally, Dyrdahl and her co-founder considered Bring Light a code name to be used only during the development process.
"But we got such great feedback," Dyrdahl says, "the name was so universally embraced, we decided: why go through the exercise of naming a company that already has a name that describes our mission so perfectly?"
Dyrdahl serves as CEO; she and McManus are the only full-time staff; the company has been in operation less than year, and already nearly 150 U.S.-based charities with 501(c) (3) status have found donors for their national and international projects via Bring Light.
The company's project-oriented design means charities list specific projects in need of funding and donors "know exactly where their money is going," Dyrdahl explains. Donations as small as $5 are accepted -- and welcomed.
Following the recent earthquake in Peru, Southern Cross Humanitarian, a charity that provides homeless shelters and orphanages, contacted Bring Light.
"They needed to get the word out right away. So very quickly we created a project that specifically addressed the needs of the earthquake victims and sent out an e-mail to our user base. Within eight hours, we'd raised $4,000 for this particular organization," Dyrdahl reports.
A satisfying experience for the donors and an efficient, cost-effective means of raising funds for the charities.
"The quicker money gets to the charities," she says, "the quicker that money can be put to work."
Social entrepreneur/new radical
Since transitioning from the corporate sector, Dyrdahl has picked up a couple of new code names herself.
"'Social entrepreneur' is a term that has emerged in the last few years to describe people who have left the business world and are applying their business skills to social change," Dyrdahl explains. "At the time I was leaving Adobe and trying to start Bring Light, the term seemed to fit what I was trying to do."
Dyrdahl is featured in Julia Moulden's book, We are the New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World (weraretheradicals.com). Dyrdahl's interpretation of social entrepreneur meshes with Moulden's definition of new radicals: "mid-lifers who are reinventing their work lives to create a better world."
Although Dyrdahl is fine with being called a new radical, initially her mother had reservations.
"After reading Julia's book, my mom said: 'You know, I think the book is really good, but I have a bit of trouble with that 'new radical' term.' Because for her, it's a '60s term with lots of negative connotations," Dyrdahl explains. "So I said: 'Mom, what you have to realize is that in this day and age people think of 'radical' as a positive.'"
And did she succeed in convincing the skeptic?
She did.
"Yeah," Dyrdahl reports, laughing. "Mom got over it."
-Kat Meads
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of SJSU Washington Square magazine.