Getting to know Persefoni: Meet Kira Mulshine

1. And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?" (Tell us your journey?)

I grew up in New York near the foothills of the Adirondacks – typically, I refer to my hometown as “near Lake George and Saratoga” or “real upstate New York”. I grew up with 3 other siblings, all of us two years apart, and we spent a significant amount of our childhood outdoors or focused on artistic endeavors, primarily because our parents restricted us from video games or TV (thank you, parents, retrospectively!).

As I became a teen, I forgot how much nature meant to me. We made a NYC trip for one of my birthdays where I dramatically declared atop the Empire State Building that I would leave our small town behind and move there someday. Which I did, after a few years in Massachusetts and graduating from Boston College in 2013 with my Bachelors in Psychology.

After completing a Masters in Product Development & Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, I got a Product Management job at IBM. Over the course of my time at IBM, my most exciting role was being a Product Lead for an Innovation Incubator that focused on all sorts of technology problems. I was able to dig into the problems that industries like Retail and Aviation experience, and became fixated on their carbon impacts & how minuscule changes to their operations could significantly reduce their footprints. I had a mentor who recognized this and looped me into supporting IBM with their Sustainability Strategy and related products. I’m eternally grateful to that mentor and IBM for growing me as a product manager and opening the door for me to peek into how technology was being developed to help save our planet.

If I ever left IBM, I always hoped it would be to work for a smaller company where I could learn how to help grow and lead a product team focused on something that will also help make the world better. When I learned about Persefoni it sounded like the right place for me to do just that. The incredible leadership team convinced me soon after. Now, I get to use and grow my skills to help scale a product team focused on building technology to help save our planet. And it’s a remote job, so I recently left the city and moved closer to nearby mountains. What a dream!

2. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. (What do you do at Persefoni?)

I’m the Product Team Lead at Persefoni. My role has touched almost all areas of the product development life cycle over the past year. I’ve led the product development and launch of new critical strategic products, overseen the priority and growth of our more mature core platform product, overseen the spin down of a product team, and supported in the design and kick off of innovation work. As Persefoni itself has grown and we’ve hired more product talent, I’ve been able to form my own product management team of leaders as well. In my role today, I aim to guide execution and support by providing strategic direction to my team while also looking into the future and helping leadership determine the next focus(es) for product implementation.

3. And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" (What are your hopes for your time at Persefoni?

I want to help train, grow, and scale a “best in class” product team to execute on some of the world’s biggest climate problems. And I want to design this problem-solving technology to be so cool that people want to use it, more than feeling like they have to use it because their company told them to.

4. And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?" (Why is Persefoni a great home for you?)

Let’s start with the basics. Persefoni lets me live and work from a place that I love: Beacon, NY, a lovely mountain-river town in the Hudson Valley that is perfectly situated both near New York City and halfway between the parents of my partner and I. Working somewhere that makes it easier to have the personal life I want makes it easier to do my best work.

It’s also easier to do my best work when it's inherently focused on the problems I find important and interesting. Focusing on helping companies accelerate their decarbonization journey is right in that wheelhouse. And of course, working alongside intelligent and passionate people is always inspiring – and Persefoni is full of them. The team assembled to focus on these problems is matchless and I’m honored to work among them.

5. And you may find yourself in another part of the world... (Tell us about your life/hobbies away from work?)

These days, when I’m not working, I spend most of my time at my Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym. My partner, Jordan, and I both train jiu-jitsu; in fact, we met “fighting each other” at a gym, and now he and I enable each other to indulge in this hobby pretty seriously. When we’re not both working remotely for our respective start-ups, we make time for it in our day-to-day lives.

Otherwise, we hike or ski (depending on the season) and spend time just generally doing outdoor activities together. We live near most of our family members and make time to see them and friends too. On my own, I can typically be found writing/reading fiction or sketching people. And when I run out of energy for even my hobbies, I’m working my way through the latest sci-fi shows and whatever else Netflix or my friends convince me to watch.

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