Growing in Skill with a Growing Firm
With help from Vanderbilt, Poole’s career in e-commerce blossoms
Adrianne Mayshar Poole
Senior Director, Global Customer Education & Community, Klaviyo
Vanderbilt Executive MBA 2016
Our Stories
Adrianne Mayshar Poole’s career has grown with growing companies. Before coming to Vanderbilt, she had worked four years for HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads and close customers. Since joining the tech industry, Adrianne watched HubSpot grow from 150 people to a publicly traded company with more than 1,300 employees and offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and Dublin.
As the company grew, so did Adrianne’s responsibilities. Within eight months of joining HubSpot in a business development role, she was promoted to account executive — then, seven months after that, to a consulting position where she worked closely with the company’s partner marketing agencies.
The career opportunity also created a career challenge. “We grew so fast, I received amazing on-the-job experience,” she says, “but I wanted to feel more comfortable with some of the foundational business curriculum, especially on the financial and operational side of the business. As we’ve grown, scaling up and becoming more efficient have been critical. I wanted to learn from people in a business environment with experience rather than just the start-up exposure I’d had up till then.”
She chose Owen for her MBA. “I was so engulfed in the Boston tech scene, I thought Vanderbilt would give me a more well-rounded school experience and exposure to a lot of different classmates from a variety of backgrounds,” she says. “As much as I wanted to learn from the professors, I was very much swayed by having an elite group of executives in my peer group.”
So, for two years, Adrianne lived in Nashville and worked remotely. The effort paid off even before graduation: She was promoted from a senior consulting spot to manager of the consulting and account management team.
In late 2017, her career took another jump. Adrianne accepted a position as Senior Manager with CastleGate Fulfillment, a young and rapidly growing arm of e-commerce giant Wayfair that seamlessly manages logistics and fulfillment for the company’s suppliers and customers.
The expertise she gained at Vanderbilt, she says, had much to do with her career growth. “As a woman in a tech environment,” she says, “that extra bit of confidence that ‘you know as much as they do’ makes a huge difference during my day-to-day interactions with colleagues.”
As the company grew, so did Adrianne’s responsibilities. Within eight months of joining HubSpot in a business development role, she was promoted to account executive — then, seven months after that, to a consulting position where she worked closely with the company’s partner marketing agencies.
The career opportunity also created a career challenge. “We grew so fast, I received amazing on-the-job experience,” she says, “but I wanted to feel more comfortable with some of the foundational business curriculum, especially on the financial and operational side of the business. As we’ve grown, scaling up and becoming more efficient have been critical. I wanted to learn from people in a business environment with experience rather than just the start-up exposure I’d had up till then.”
She chose Owen for her MBA. “I was so engulfed in the Boston tech scene, I thought Vanderbilt would give me a more well-rounded school experience and exposure to a lot of different classmates from a variety of backgrounds,” she says. “As much as I wanted to learn from the professors, I was very much swayed by having an elite group of executives in my peer group.”
So, for two years, Adrianne lived in Nashville and worked remotely. The effort paid off even before graduation: She was promoted from a senior consulting spot to manager of the consulting and account management team.
In late 2017, her career took another jump. Adrianne accepted a position as Senior Manager with CastleGate Fulfillment, a young and rapidly growing arm of e-commerce giant Wayfair that seamlessly manages logistics and fulfillment for the company’s suppliers and customers.
The expertise she gained at Vanderbilt, she says, had much to do with her career growth. “As a woman in a tech environment,” she says, “that extra bit of confidence that ‘you know as much as they do’ makes a huge difference during my day-to-day interactions with colleagues.”
Fun Fact: Adrianne was a Division I college basketball player at Bryant University.
“As a woman in a tech environment, that extra bit of confidence that ‘you know as much as they do’ makes a huge difference during my day-to-day interactions with colleagues.”