“I have had a curated personal board of directors my entire career,” Catherine Dunleavy told me. “I intentionally ask people if they’ll be on my personal board of directors, and then I use them every quarter to help me with all my big decisions.”
One of the big decisions Dunleavy asked her personal board about was pivoting from a career as a CFO at Fortune 500 companies to focusing on startups. “I wanted to find founders that I could help and that ideally were women,” Dunleavy says. In October 2020, she took on the CFO role at the fashionable luggage and travel startup Away, which has raised $100 million in its Series D.
Two years later, after steering the company through the pandemic, Dunleavy is hanging up…