Blog & Press | Whistler Partners

Denelle Dixon on Her Journey From Litigator to CLO to CEO

Written by Whistler Partners | Jun 16, 2022 8:57:57 PM
 
We'd like to preface this by saying that we don't think that all attorneys secretly aspire to go business-side. We've gotten in trouble in the past for suggesting this (even though, let's face it, a lot of you do). We love attorneys who love what they do.

But for those of you who do have aspirations taking your love of problem-solving business-side, we want to introduce you to Denelle Dixon, CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit organization building, sustaining and growing the Internet for payments using blockchain technology.

Denelle started her career as a litigator at Folger Levin & Kahn (where she happened to have been a young Sean Burke's mentor and "the only person who ever got me excited about a case"), before going in-house to Yahoo! She went on to serve as in-house counsel at Terra Firma and Mozilla, where she began leading global business development and eventually served as their Chief Operating Officer.

The common thread throughout her career: "I'm never comfortable not learning something, even today. One of the things I loved when I was in trial practice was I would get to work with these expert witnesses that would really dig deep into a particular area of the business, or this litigation, and then I would learn about the business. That was the most fun."

Watch the full interview with Denelle below: