Mastering the Art of Calculated Risks: Kathryn Ekloff ’10 BSBA (Finance) ’11 MSF

During the career of Kathryn Ekloff ’10 BSBA (Finance) ’11 MSF, only one thing has been certain: change. Step by step, Ekloff has jumped across industries and dipped her toes in a variety of diverse corporate experiences, only sometimes related to her degrees in finance, which she earned from the Eller College of Management. The result is a unique career path, unimaginable to young undergraduate Ekloff, who wanted to pursue a career on Wall Street. 

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“As I started to network with professionals on Wall Street, I quickly realized that it wouldn’t be a good fit for me,” says Ekloff. “I then decided to go with the corporate finance route and moved to Seattle shortly after graduation.” 

While working as an intern for an investment company in the Seattle area, Ekloff set her sights on Boeing, securing a full-time role at the company...but not in finance, in business operations.  

“I had recently met a Boeing employee who helped me work on my resume,” says Ekloff. “She told me that the key was to find an entry point into the company that I wanted to work for, even if it isn’t in the field I wanted, because then I could navigate to where I wanted to be.” 

Ekloff took that advice to heart—throughout the next year, she used her business operations role to work closely with the finance department and got to know the finance staff, which subsequently resulted in her joining the finance team at Boeing for around four years.  

She then transitioned to work at Amazon, first in retail finance for consumer electronics and then global financial planning for Amazon Fresh, the company’s grocery delivery service. 

In a department made up mostly of men, Ekloff became close friends with two other women on her team, often meeting up after work for happy hour. “The topic of the difficulty of working in a male-dominated field had come up more than once in our conversations,” says Ekloff. “One day, we had this fun idea to create a game where women could talk and commiserate over their experiences in the workforce.” 

Together, the three developed Persist the Game—a card game involving a variety of activities including trivia, act-it-out, sharing, would-you-rather and more, all centered around criticizing gender stereotypes and expectations. Through witty jokes and thought-provoking prompts, players are encouraged to learn more about each other and discuss what it means to be a woman in society today. 

A successful crowdfunding campaign for the game caught the attention of some major brands, which led to features in Marie Claire and Forbes. In addition to being offered on Amazon, the group also sold the game in Anthropologie stores after the brand reached out to them.  

“After about three years of balancing our full-time roles at Amazon with managing the game, I think we all started to burn out a little, even though it was a very fun experience,” says Ekloff.  

Slowly the team phased out the game, and Ekloff transitioned to a role at Google—this time in marketing, helping businesses figure out the best ways to use their marketing dollars and measure return on investment (ROI).  

Though new to marketing, Ekloff had a secret to success in this role—her education and experience in finance.  

“Suddenly I found myself on the opposite side of finance—I was the one reaching out to finance departments to convince them to loosen their budgets or targets,” says Ekloff. “Coming from finance, I knew how to help finance professionals to better understand the value of their marketing dollars.” 

Through a program at Google that allows employees to use a portion of their work hours to explore projects that interest them, Ekloff used her time to learn about YouTube measurement, which led her to the role she has today, as a measurement lead for YouTube’s advertising team. 

And while it hasn’t been a linear path, Ekloff wouldn’t want it any other way. “I have done a lot of horizontal moves in my career,” she says. “While taking risks and moving across industries has not helped me move towards a specific goal or point in my career, it has helped me to become more well-rounded and acquire new skill sets and networks.”