How I left accounting

And pivoted into tech

I spent the first few years of my career in audit and accounting. Month ends were miserable. Year ends were worse. It was the path I had studied for. I remember driving to clients in the early mornings of winter, working in windowless meeting rooms hunched over a laptop, and driving home late at night, only to repeat it again the next day. Is this what I worked so hard for? It was financially stable with a tried and true career path, but it wasn’t rewarding.

I looked to the partners in my firm, the directors I worked with, and envisioned a world where I eventually climbed the ranks to those high ranking roles. I knew it wasn’t for me.

What I did know was that I wanted to work in tech. I audited technology and software companies while in accounting in my formative years and learned about those companies and how they operated from the inside.

Leaving accounting to a finance role was my first step. It was a leap at the time and recruiters even told me it would be a challenging jump as I lacked the directly relevant experience. I thought I would find the work to be more interesting as I’d be building financial models and providing strategic financial guidance to drive growth. I learned about recurring revenue, different financial levers to pull, and improved my modeling skills, but it still wasn’t what I wanted. The repetitive monthly, quarterly, annual cycles of accounting and finance were still present and those leadership roles were not ones I could envision myself in.

In moving to pricing strategy, I began to feel some amount of progress. While I had distanced myself from the world of IFRS and quarterly cycles, I was now sitting in a new kind of uncertainty. Each move had less certainty than staying put, but each one felt directionally right. I wasn’t after promotions, raises, or specific job titles. Each move was close enough to my last role that I could sell myself, but far enough that I was building something new.

Along the way, it became clear to me that working my day job wouldn’t be enough. I needed to learn more. Around this time, a friend on a similar path referred me to a bootcamp designed to help people transition into tech jobs. It was $1,000, and I immediately knew it was a no-brainer. The bootcamp was a 6-week program designed to help you level up technical skills with SQL and Tableau with a business case to be presented to a mock leadership team. At the time, I remember I took it seriously as I knew it was the opportunity I was looking for to learn skills that I couldn’t unlock at work. I ended up taking the lead when the group fell behind, rallying everyone to hit our deadlines. I wanted to be proud of what we presented, even if the stakes were just a classroom exercise. Six weeks later, our team presented a case that I was proud of and I thought I had learned a lot. Ultimately though, nothing came of it - or so I thought.

About a year later, while working in pricing strategy, someone reached out to me on LinkedIn about a pricing role at DoorDash. As part of my research to understand the role, I reached out to my mentor that I met at the bootcamp. I didn’t know it at the time, but that conversation would change my whole career.

I realized the invisible thread across all my roles at the time was subscription economy. At KPMG, I learned how subscription revenue worked from the inside. At Rogers, I built financial models to forecast and analyze trends around it. By the time I worked in pricing strategy, I was testing levers to drive subscriber growth. I could feel I was moving closer towards tech, I just didn’t know subscriptions would be the through line until I looked back.

That conversation with my mentor ended up turning into a reference to a role on another team, DashPass. While I’ve thought about how this moment played out and the luck involved, this was the moment where my years of preparing and quietly working towards this north star had finally paid off.

Today, I’ve been on the DashPass team for over 3 years now. It really has felt like all my experience led me here.

I never had a perfect plan. I still don’t know what’s next. But I had direction, and I trusted myself to figure it out along the way. If you happen to be in a period of transition, you don’t ever know the right answer in advance. Find a direction, even a fuzzy one, and trust yourself to keep moving toward it.