From Career Break to CLO: How Shanti Ariker Rebuilt Her Legal Career

In this podcast, we cover
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^00:00 Introduction and career overview
^02:41 Stepping away from full-time work and returning after six years
^05:47 Re-entering the legal workforce in Canada and taking a step back
^12:50 Breaking into Salesforce through networking and early contributions
^15:30 Building the Salesforce Canada legal team and launching pro bono work
^19:20 Becoming General Counsel at salesforce.org and leading through learning
^22:17 Innovative legal models and lessons from the salesforce.org structure
^24:56 Transitioning back to for-profit legal roles and rebuilding GC credentials
^33:44 GC role at Zendesk: From steady start to activist investors and take-private
^37:35 Managing governance, communication, and morale during high-stakes transitions
^43:03 Joining JFrog and leading through the Israel crisis
^47:07 Evolving leadership style through personal and professional challenges
^51:45 Rapid-fire Questions

Tyler Finn

When you build a legal career across startups, nonprofits and public companies, you pick up more than just technical skills. You learn adaptability, leadership under pressure, and how to carve your own lane in spaces that weren't always designed for you. Today, on the Abstract, I'm joined by Shanti Ariker, Chief Legal Officer at JFrog, a NASDAQ, listed Israeli software company. Shanti’s path has taken her from in-house roles at E-Trade to leadership roles at salesforce.org, Autodesk, Twilio, Zendesk, and now at JFrog, with a lot of reinvention, resilience and intentionality along the way. We're going to dive into how she's built a career defined by adaptability, pivots and finding leadership in complex, high stakes environments. With that. Shanti, welcome to this episode of the Abstract.

Shanti Ariker 

Thank you so much, and it's great to be here.

Tyler Finn 

And I think you were a referral from someone one of my previous guests. I can't remember if it was Ron bell or someone like that, so I love that. Maybe you'll have some recommendations for me after we were if you had a good time after we record together?

Shanti Ariker 

Yeah, I think it was Dana Rao.

Tyler Finn 

Oh, it was Dana Rao, yes, that's a great episode. Folks should listen to that one if they haven't yet. I'm actually, I'm hoping to have Dana back for a part two at some point this year, because he has so much to talk about, and you do as well. Okay, so, you know, I don't want to give sort of like short shrift to your early career, but one of the things that I think is really interesting is, you know, you spent like, eight years working across law firms, E-Trade startups. You're in California and Wisconsin, and something that I think is unusual, especially when you talk to folks who end up then really sort of like at the pinnacle as a CLO at some point is you stepped away from full time work for six years to focus on your family and raising your children. Yeah, let's explore that. Was that a tough decision for you to make at the time? Were you nervous about that?

Shanti Ariker 

You know, if you would have asked me, when I was a first or second year, do you plan on taking time off, having kids, getting married, etc, I would have said, No. And in fact, I think people ask me that question. I said, Well, that's never gonna happen, and I don't cook, and I don't do anything, and I don't do it, I don't tend to learn. And so it was a huge leap of faith, and it was also a major change. And part of it was I fell in love. And, you know, things change, my husband, who's still my husband today, after almost 25 years, you know, he we needed to move for his career. And I, I never thought about having to do that before, having to put somebody else's career ahead of my own, but I did it, and then I had children, and, you know, they had special, some special health needs for a while, and didn't make sense between all the moving that we did for my husband's career and for the kids needs that I go back to work. So I took a backseat and being the type a person that I am, I continued to learn and do different things as a non-working mom, and I did learn how to cook and how to, you know, bake and and do different things with the PTA and other and use my skills in other ways that I wasn't even aware that I could do at, you know, when I when I took off from the working world. So I would say the thing that I learned the most is that the skills that you bring to the table as somebody that you're working those are the same skills you need as a parent, networking with the other moms has always been helpful. And in fact, that's how I got my job at Salesforce in Canada, which we'll talk about in a little while, was through a mom's group.

Tyler Finn 

We did a prep call. I didn't know that. That's great. We will talk about that. I mean, this is not foreign to me. My mom was a kindergarten teacher before she had me, and I don't think any of that training to be a kindergarten teacher went to waste whatsoever because she, you know, spent her time with me and my sister, and, like, already knew how to work with kids. And I think, you know, I think it's a it's, it's a great decision, and it's a different sort of life experience, but not an easier path by any stretch of the imagination. When you were thinking about reentering the workforce, what was that process like? How did you decide that it made sense for you? I guess also, you know, from a sort of like, wider lens perspective, do you think there are things that we should do? A lot of folks who are listening to this are leaders at companies to improve that process for parents who might want to reenter the workforce.

Shanti Ariker 

Yeah, so first when I thought about reentering the workforce, I really I needed to sit down with my husband and talk about it, because things were going to have to change, you know. And we did it in phases. I had to take a series of exams because we were then living in Canada. In order to re-qualify, I first had to take these prerequisites before I was even allowed to think about sitting and writing the bar there. So in order to do that, I hired somebody to oversee the kids and to pick them up from school, and that allowed them to start to see something a little bit different than they were used to, and get comfortable with being around other people to watch them. And after that, I felt more comfortable as well, but I really didn't feel good about the decision about going back to work because I was I knew how I was as a as a lawyer, that I wouldn't be able to go back into work without really giving, you know, so much of myself. And then how was I going to be able to be a mom, and the mom that I wanted to be, and also the worker that I wanted to be and think about my career as I wanted to do. So I really, I sat down with my husband, I talked about, you know, here's what it's really going to be like when I go back to work. And are you willing for that? Are you willing to have that be something that we consider as a family? Because it's not just a decision about me at the end of the end of the day, it's going to affect all four of us. And so how will, how will that? You know? How will you add to that? What's the equation for our family? What kind of help do we need? And that sort of thing. So we ultimately decided that we would all agree that we I should go back to work. And we started out actually with just an after school care program. But you know, those programs require you to be on time to pick up your kids, like $1 or five or $10 every minute you're late, to incentivize you to be on time and out of the third time of it didn't work out well for me to up the ante and get, you know, a full time helper, which is a little bit easier to do in Canada because of the sponsorships that you can get for etc. And so I did realize, and I did have to go through some some differences in order to figure out what the right, you know, help was going to look like for me, and that was affordable and obtainable where I was living. But, you know, I think so. I think it's a really good question. I always tell especially, you know, young people that I'm speaking to when I lecture, or especially young women, but anybody who wants to have life outside of their firm or their further, you know, their in-House position that I took six years off because I want people to know it's possible to take that time off and still get ahead. But it wasn't, it wasn't a, you know, done deal by any means, and I did need a lot of help along the way, not just from helpers, not just for my husband, but also from people who gave me opportunities because I went and told them about what I was looking for and that I needed their help to get there. And so that really was something that I constantly advocate for people to be open about their their career aspirations at any time. I think if you're asking, you know, what people can do to help people who've been out of the workforce, I think it's, you know, networking with people, taking care. I have gotten calls from people even lately, you know, I've been out of the workforce for a few years. What should I consider doing different? What should my resume look like? What courses should I take, etc, you know, can can we have almost like an intern program for people that come back into the workforce? Why not? You know, yeah, what's the difference? Because interns come in without knowing really much about anything. In the middle of college, don't really know how to work in an office. Somebody who hasn't worked for years may have the same issues. You know, haven't haven't used Google suites. They've used Microsoft only. Or, you know, things have changed. They haven't used chat, GPT, whatever it is, and they need to up level their skills, they may need to just know what the differences are. We've automated a lot of processes nowadays. We use Slack. You know, there's a lot of sure we're expected to know how to use that you wouldn't even have any idea about if you weren't. And then, don't even get me started on fishing and cyber security and all those things not be focused on, you know, those kinds of issues. So I think there's a lot we can do to educate people who want to come back into the workforce.

Tyler Finn

Last sort of question on this, you know, when you came back into the workforce, I think it was, it was sort of what folks might describe as like you have to take one step back, sometimes to take two steps forward, like you reentered as a contracts manager, as opposed to as an Associate General Counsel or reporting Straight to the C suite. Or what was your mindset during that transition, and how did you make it happen?

Shanti Ariker 

So, you know, after being off for six years, we had moved to Canada, and I had taken the bar and a series of exams before that, so I was very proud of myself that I got requalified. But it was 2009 and to be practical, there were lots of layoffs and people who weren't going to get jobs, and you know, to be if I wanted to work, I had to be willing to put my foot in the door anywhere. And wasn't as focused on title or salary as I was on getting Canadian background and feeling like I had some sort of stamp of approval from working in Canada. I wasn't sure how long we would live in Canada. We ended up living there for eight years, but, you know, I wasn't sure what the future would bring, and I wanted to have the opportunity to do something with my career, and I needed to take some sort of first step. So I decided it was the right thing to do, and I wanted to, once I got my foot in the door, I tried to prove myself that I was more than a contracts man, not to say that managers have anything wrong with them, but I had that found, and I had the bar exam, and I wanted to be able to do more. And so, you know, I did whatever I could to raise my hand to do additional things in order to try to get more responsibility and to be able to earn that council title back again,

Tyler Finn

you ended up becoming the first lawyer that Salesforce hired in Canada as they were growing. How did you make that happen? I mean, that seems like a big inflection point for you, one because of that, but also because of what comes next, which we'll talk about.

Shanti Ariker 

So back in 2011 which was when I was hired, Salesforce, was not well known like it is today. It was still a smallish company, under 2 billion in revenue, you know. So imagine that was a long time ago, right? Almost 15 years ago, and so first of all, getting in my foot in the door was difficult. I did try through people, contacts that I had in California, but the that didn't really help me, and and I had somewhat given up on the role when I went to a book club that was hosted, that was being hosted at my house for these moms that I had met through this, this mom's club, kids of you know, around the same age as my own. And somebody who worked at Salesforce in the past happened to be there and said, you know, Hey, there's this new role. I know you were interested in Salesforce, and why don't you apply? And I told her, Well, I did apply, and you know, I went sent it to all these people who sent it to the General Counsel in California. But she said, Well, you'd send it to me. Send me your resume. I'll make sure that you get seen. And I said, I'm sorry, but I don't know how that's gonna help. You know? I well these people who like, you know why? Why would this make a difference? And she said, Well, I'll give it to my husband. And I said, Who's your husband? And she said, Oh, he runs the Toronto office, my first question. But you know that, and that only got me an interview, but then sure, I put in the door through the experience I'd already had, and the fact that I did know how to do a lot of the agreements they were talking about, and the fact that I've been working already in Canada, helped as well. So if I had just had the US experience, I'm really not sure I would have gotten the job. In fact, the guy that hired me told me, you know, he wouldn't have hired me without that Canadian experience.

Tyler Finn 

Once you were in Salesforce. I think, as folks often want to do, right, you want to continue to sort of grow. And you know, you might have advocated for yourself and gotten a little bit more than you you bargained for in eventually building Salesforce, is pro bono program, becoming the GC of the foundation, taking on salesforce.org talk us through that, that process, how you started to sort of expand your remit within an organization like Salesforce and what you were proud of accomplishing.

Shanti Ariker

So first, I came in as an individual contributor, but within a few weeks, I was already given managerial and actually, when I interviewed, I was told, you know, maybe we should have gone a different way. We might. I almost had to basically re interview, explaining why I could be a manager. So before the job was even given to me, it was almost taken away, but I managed to convince this deputy GC that I was management material. And so when I first started out, I hired somebody within a few weeks, and it was like the blind leaving the blind, because I still didn't really know what the job was, and I was already training somebody new, but quickly I learned a lot, and I was able to successfully oversee this person. Was also really Christmas. It was easy, and I wanted to manage more people. And eventually I was given the ability to manage a whole team from which oversaw commercial lawyers in all of Canada, and then south, southward So, from Chicago on down through Texas and so. And then eventually it became larger and included some of the West, some of the East, etc. And when I decided I wanted to move back to the US after eight years in Canada, I was given the opportunity to oversee the entire western region, plus the central eventually, I traded Canada for LATAM and South America. But when I got to the US, I had been doing a lot with charitable foundations and in the Toronto office, and I really wanted to continue that. The other thing I didn't mention while I was taking the six years off, I became the head of the PTA for the school. I oversaw the redoing a park in my neighborhood, and a bunch of things that I did kind of in my free time. Yeah, so, you know, wanting to be involved in the community, and also, having done pro bono when I was an associate in law firms early in my career, I really wanted to bring that ability to do that and work with people from across the spectrum and give access to justice to people in the, you know, throughout the department. So I went to the person who oversaw the foundation, and I said, you know, I'd love to start this pro bono opportunity. And she said, Great, nobody else has brought it up, so go and go for it. And then I spoke with the council, and she gave me the green light, and we went forward with it, and it was very successful. We tried to do a lot of local projects, but also global projects and partnering with law firms and aid societies. And I continued to run it for about four years. That got me some face time with the general counsel who I went to regularly. And would say, you know, hey, I feel a little bit behind in my career because I took these six years off. And, you know, having shown her what I could do on some of these side projects, she began giving me more side projects. And one day she showed up in my office, and she said, I really need you to look into this issue, with this tax issue with the founder. And I said, let me stop you right there. I'm not a corporate lawyer. I'm a commercial lawyer. Head up the commercial team, in case you didn't realize that. And she said, that's what you are, and now you're my nonprofit lawyer, because you head up the pro bono Oh, okay, well, I don't I literally said to her, I don't know anything about that. She said, I have faith in you, and you'll figure it out.

Tyler Finn 

That's good leadership, right there.

Shanti Ariker 

And you know, really, I had been harping on on these issues of, you know, I don't have anything exciting. I'm doing the same thing over and over. I want to learn more. I want to do more. I want to be a leader. She came to me with these opportunities, and then when I said, Hey, I don't know what to do, she said, You'll figure it out. And so I started working on a project for her related to the foundation and the.org and they called me and said, we'd like you to be the general counsel. And I said, Whoa, wait, I don't think I can go anywhere, because I've been helping the general counsel, and I don't want to leave her in a lurch. And so I said, No, I'm not doing it. And I contacted her, and I said, Oh, they called me, and this is what happened. And she said, Shaunti, how do you think they called you? Do you think they came out of a hat? I wanted them to call you? And I was like, oh, you know, I did just put my dog on me that she some of the strings and helping doing the things that I had asked her to do. So of course, I ended up taking the position and learning so much, and a lot of it was things that were not within my expertise. And I did speak to her before taking the job about my lack of knowledge, and how can I, you know, what are things I can do to shore up the knowledge I need, how I can work with outside counsel, who can I work with on her team to come up with some safety net on, you know, learning some of the areas that I wasn't as familiar with, and she sat next to me in my first few board meetings and whispered in my ear when I knew, can I get a motion for this? Because I had no idea what, how to do anything. So, you know, I, I really my, you know, always, thank Amy Weaver, who had been the General Counsel, then the CLO then the CFO of Salesforce is today, a CEO of a large relief organization for for really pushing me, you know, beyond my comfort zone, and giving me the opportunities that I could then, you know, take and improve myself with.

Tyler Finn 

It sounds like that was a really formative sort of experience for you in terms of feeling like, you know, you could be the GC, you could take this on. A couple sort of questions for you on that, you know, I mean, salesforce.org, the foundation. This is a unique sort of model environment. Do you feel like that has continued to shape your approach to lawyering? And you know, how did you eventually decide it was time to move on to the next thing?

Shanti Ariker 

Yeah, the model is very innovative. We were a social enterprise, salesforce.org, salesforce.org. Was a 501, c4, which means that it can actually sell the foundation was the granting entity for the most part, and so was a very unique model that actually has been replicated in things like open AI, not Something that I would necessarily recommend, because it fought with danger and risk. With some of the things that we've seen play out in the media with OpenAI, are things that we saw concerns around, and also reabsorbing, which is ultimately what happened to salesforce.org reabsorbing it into a for profit company is no easy feat. Either. You need approval from the Attorney General state. You're operating in like that. So but, but you know, back to your question about looking at this from an innovative perspective. Yes, I think you know that really was an out of the MA, out of the Standard Model, and it did make us think a lot else could we do differently? And I'm constantly saying this about, you know, just today, I had a meeting with some people on my team talking about innovation and saying it doesn't just apply to the company, it applies to all of us. How can we do something different in our own team, that's innovative, that's groundbreaking, whether it's use of AI, whether it's some other thing that allows us to be more pragmatic in our day to day. And it's also around, you know, what can you see as a lawyer operating within your company, where, you know, we often see all the different broken pieces, and people will say, Oh, yeah, we have this issue. But, you know, leadership and awesome often say, Oh, we have an idea about how to fix that. Yes. Why can't we raise our hands and say that I recently did that with an issue that we had. Went to the CEO and he said, That's a great idea, and we ended up implementing it. It had nothing to do with the legal team.

Tyler Finn

As you left Salesforce, as you mentioned, sort of salesforce.org becomes right, like reacquired or brought back into Salesforce. You decided it was time to move on. You know, how did you decide what you were gonna look for, for next in your career? You've been GC now so

Shanti Ariker 

Well, you know, I, I really talked to Amy again. She had been really a great mentor to me and a sponsor. And, you know, I told her, Look, I thought a little bit about what I want to do in the future, and I really would love your job, not type of job. And so what, how do I get there? What do you think? And you know, her, the easiest Avenue would have been to go to a pre IPO company that I thought was going to go public and toil away until it went public, sure, but I, early on, went to a private company that was supposed to go public in the dot bomb era, and I ended up laying off the entire company. So I was always very allergic to doing that again. Wasn't an option for me that I wanted to take that level of risk right now. So I said, you know, what else can I do? So she started to network. You have me network with different people. Think about informational interviews. And I really came to find that being at  salesforce.org and and foundation were great. The fact that I had the General Counsel title was great, but I was branded as a nonprofit lawyer, sure that I wasn't really running a nonprofit legal department, because we were doing deals with customers and partners. We were creating new tech and products and all the things that you would do as a GC of a private company, or, you know, a company that's for profit. And so I realized I needed to go back into a for profit company to prove that I was still in that world so and I realized that going straight from being a non profit to a for profit public company, GC, was unreasonable and unreasonable. So I thought, you know, I'm going to have to take a couple of steps. So one of the steps was to go to a bigger company like Autodesk to oversee a direct sales commercial sales organization and customer support. So they had recently undergone a change where they were starting to sell more subscriptions than more into the cloud, and also moving from just a straight reseller model to more of a direct sales model. So both of them were very new, so we had to change a lot of the terms and conditions and the ways we operated. And so overseeing this team allowed me to, you know, get my footing back, get up to date on things also do this new, you know, change from license to subscription, because being at Salesforce, we were native to the cloud. We didn't have those so it was interesting to see the pivots they had done on their business model and their operating model. So that was interesting. But at the end of the day, having been the GC, running the department and then overseeing this small little part of the department was a little bit it did feel like a step back. And so when I found out that Twilio was hiring for both commercial and corporate deputy GC, I raised my hand for it, although I hadn't been at Autodesk for very long. And, you know, I really did love Autodesk. It was a great company, great products, really great legal department, and I loved my boss, but I just felt like I wanted to do more. But he the minute I told him, he said We knew you weren't there for as long as you were so I left and I went to Twilio, and I oversaw both the commercial, which, you know, at that point, felt very comfortable doing, and then the corporate, which was more of a stretch, because I had done a lot of corporate work around subsidiary management when I was@salesforce.org but I hadn't done the public company reporting or M and A to any real degree, or financings and things like that. So all those things I accomplished in very short order at Twilio, we did five or 6m and A's, including segment, which was like four and a half billion. We did a billion dollar financing, we did all kinds of different things. And so I got a lot of a lot of experience, and it was exactly what I had been looking for to fill my background in. And it's not that, you know, I say that this was the approach, different story on how they got to GC, and I'm sure you hear them all from being Yeah, and some people don't ever fill that in and feel comfortable. I really wanted to feel a little bit about Reg, SK, and ft, and all the things that you typically handle as the GC. But I think the secret sauce that I've continued to have is that commercial background and really be able to pick up a deal from my team, any escalations, and instantly understand, because of so many years I did practice commercial law, so I, you know, eventually got a call from A recruiter about the Zendesk position, and it was really like, Wait a minute. I just, you know, I hadn't been a Twilio all that long. We were the middle of the pandemic, and we had been a pandemic, darling. So you know, our, my, my, my team grew by 20 people during the pandemic. Because it was Wow. Just it was an explosive growth, and we were doing all this M and A, etc. But when I, you know, I had been plodding along, here's what I will do in order to become a public company. GC and Zendesk was a very well thought of software company in, you know, the B to B software space, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity, so I couldn't pass up, at least talking to them. And they moved so fast within, like, had an offer, and I was like, whoa. And, you know, so I, I thought about it for probably, like, five minutes. Yeah, first I have a, you know, I have a decent job. It's Twilio. Twilio is doing really well, but I've always wanted to be a public company, GC, and now I haven't say no to that. And they don't come around every day until 2021 where I do think that they did. We're coming around every day, because there's so much everybody and their mother was becoming a general counsel. But I didn't know that in December of 2020, when I took the position, and I don't think I would have done anything differently, because, you know, I think Zendesk was, and continues to be, a great company, great name in the industry, and I learned so much from that job because of everything that happened right after. You know, within six months of joining.

Tyler Finn 

I will briefly plug I had Mark Khan on as a guest, probably like a year and a half ago, maybe almost two years ago, we didn't talk, you mentioned the segment acquisition. We didn't talk super in depth about that. That wasn't really the focus of the episode, but we do talk about his personal transition through that, and how he got to segment, and eventually, at the time, was an executive recruiter. And if folks like this episode, they might like that one too. There's, there's a lot of overlap in the in the great guests that I'm lucky to get to talk to.

Shanti Ariker 

Yeah, Mark and I we only overlap by a few months, but it was great to get to know him.

Tyler Finn 

Yeah. Okay, it was you've started to allude to this, right? So you become GC of Zendesk in late 2020. There's a proposed acquisition of Survey Monkey that folks may remember, some activist investors get involved in the business. I've had other folks on to talk deeply about sort of dealing with activist investors. We don't have to talk in depth about that. But eventually, then there's a take private, like sort of consortium of PE funds come together and take the business private for a little north of $10 billion this is a big, a big deal, right? How would you describe that whole chapter of your career? Because that sounds like any one of those possible events, or any one of those events would be a lot for a GC to deal with.

Shanti Ariker

I like to say that I, when I first went to the Berkeley Symposium on corporate securities law that I felt like I needed a primer on everything they were talking about, because I didn't really understand any of it. After being us for a few years, I felt like I lived every single thing that everybody spoke about that following year, going from one extreme to the other. True education, yeah, I like to say I got a PhD in corporate governance at Zenda. For the first six months. It was very much the standard GC gig, learning about the team, getting to know the company, putting in place some different changes and things like that. But then once we announced the acquisition of momentum, which was what the company was called at the time, that owned SurveyMonkey, and we immediately had some dissatisfaction in the ranks of our shareholders. And then it got worse, and we had invest activists, and we ultimately received an unsolicited bid. Like so many things happened, so many board meetings already that, you know, I learned a lot about how the process works, about proxy, solicitation and and all of that. But then we began a secret process to what's obviously not secret anymore, but at the time, it was secret to sell, to explore a sale of the company. We started to look around at that. We put that into put the company in play. We had endless amounts of meetings we had, you know, between the momentum and that deal, we did have over 100 board meetings. It was like at least four. Wow. It was pretty crazy and and it was really necessary. With the number of activists we had, the number of things going on, keeping people up to date was important, and it was. It really was a whirlwind of activity. And we kept joking that every corner case that could possibly happen happened so much so that ti was my  and who's selects a deal every year that they teach at Harvard Law School. And they selected Zendesk because it was just so wild. And I got to teach the class with

Tyler Finn 

that's incredible.

Shanti Ariker 

And then they they liked it so much, they asked me to come back and teach at Stanford as well. So I did the same thing at Stanford.

Tyler Finn  36:43

That's amazing. I would love to take that course or lecture series, or whatever they do. That's really cool. I love that phrase, turn of phrase, sort of like a PhD. And in corporate work, you know, 100 board meetings, I think I hear from a lot of GCS who ask, How do I manage my relationship with the board as you're going through this, what is the right sort of relationship look like with your CFO CEO management team? How do you work together in the right way? Any any lessons that you'd have around those sorts of governance dynamics that you would want to share, because you have such practical and comprehensive experience,

Shanti Ariker 

I think it can get difficult depending on the players and what's going on and all the different stakes in play, but as being as transparent as you can with the whole management team, because if you're not, then people feel like the rug got pulled out from under them. You know, as a result, they may not want to sit around. And I think you know the difference in council also was apparent in how we kept the board up to date. So in the momentum deal, we had a special an executive committee that handled most of the information related to the deal and then updates to the board. But walk tells advice was just to have the board involved in every step of the way. And I think although it was more difficult to have board meeting after board meeting, it was helpful because we didn't need to constantly getting people up to date on what happened in the executive committee. So I think part of the process and what I offered to we offered a couple of things. One was kind of an activism 101, class for anybody who didn't feel comfortable. And it wasn't mandatory, but anybody on the board could come. And also the management team, you know, was provided that same information. And then the other thing was just making sure that people could come to me, or anybody you know on my team, to ask no dumb question, you know. So yeah, we could feel like they they could, you know, come to the meeting and understand what was happening.

Tyler Finn

Maybe there's another question in there too, one last sort of question on this, which is, you know, if there are activist investors in particular, right? I mean, there's publicity around this, and there's news coverage, and that's part of the, I don't know if I call it a game, but that's part of the strategy that they're playing right. Things that you learned about, you know, helping your team and helping the company stay focused and like keeping culture up and in the midst of something that you know, you might not want it to be as public of a process as it is, but the folks on the other the shareholders on the other side right, have a strong incentive to make it very public.

Shanti Ariker 

Yeah, so I was very tied at the hip with my head of comms, yeah, and we worked very closely together, and things often broke in the Wall Street Journal, and then they would tell us, this is about to hit the paper and online, and do you have a comment? And we would say we don't even have this letter yet, which is crazy, but I think it is very difficult when you're in the midst of such a giant fight like that to keep your culture and to be transparent, because you can't you can't be transparent. You can't just close without just closing to all your shareholders, so you can't just employees. So that became a difficult and led to some of the decisions we made, like announcing that the deal wasn't going to go through and we were going to remain public, and then, and then deciding two weeks later to take the deal. They wanted to be able to tell the employees. But I think it backfired. So I do think there needs a lot, needs to be a lot of thought into what can and can't you say, and whether you want to make filings just so that you can talk to your employees. Because if you don't, then you're really your hands are really tied behind your back. The other thing is, you know what, what gets put in the press and how much press you get. It's not completely in your control, but how you how you work with, you know, crisis communications firm and maybe taking their advice on things sometimes we didn't always, you know, do that, and I think you can pay the price for that. We were lucky in the fact that while all of this crazy story was going on, there was an even crazier story so people didn't even necessarily notice us, because Twitter was in the middle of their own fight.

Tyler Finn

And that I can imagine, oh, I remember, was getting lots of press.

Shanti Ariker 

I recall having a meeting with a call with a pivotal day with one of my with my lead, Director, independent director, and to make me feel better, he said, Well, I just got off the phone with another GCU who's in the midst of this, and they're feeling really bad. And I said, Who? And he tells me the name. And I said, Oh, you know the GC of Twitter, okay, I feel better.  

Tyler Finn

There is always someone who's having a worse day.  Perspective, right? Well, have a feeling that you're going to be getting a couple calls from public company, GCS asking for some free, free counsel after, after this is released. I mean, how do you feel? You follow this up, right? So, like Zendesk, what was it that drew you to your current role at JFrog? And, I mean, something that is different about this is, JFrog is an Israeli company. I mean, what was it like stepping into a leadership role at a company where, you know, have a lot of employees abroad in Israel and elsewhere.

Shanti Ariker

So something I didn't mention at the beginning is that when I was 18, I moved to Israel and immigrated immigrant, which is called Making Aliyah, and I stayed there for about five years. So while my Hebrews become very rusty, I can't speak Hebrew, and I do have that background. And so I was very intrigued when I was, you know, notified that there was this position, and I just I thought, you know, hey, maybe my worlds are colliding. I've done a lot of work on boards for Israel, Israeli organizations, and, you know, I wanted to check it out, but I really didn't think seriously about it, because it's a much smaller company than Zendesk was. And I thought, you know, if anything, I'll go to the same size or a larger company. But I was really wowed by the company, the culture, the people. I also knew the VP of Finance, who's now our CFO well, and so, you know, I had the ability to ask a lot of questions before I joined, and feel like I really knew the company well enough by the time I started there.

Tyler Finn 

I guess. You know, crisis didn't leave you behind right in this, in this role, if I remember correctly, you started around September of 2023, and then obviously folks remember right a short time afterwards.

How do you think about and my understanding of Israeli companies is that they're very good at this, right? But like, how do you think about sort of business continuity in a situation like that? And I don't know, did you feel like you were able to draw on a lot of your lessons from Zendesk about leadership in crisis, or do you feel like you still had things to learn in a situation like like that.

Shanti Ariker 

I really have things to learn honestly, because it's just a totally different scenario when it's people's well being, their health, their their their stress of that. You know, of the what would happen on October 7, the brutal nature acts and of sometimes the reactions to those attacks on the global basis. And so it was extremely stressful for me as a Jew, but all the stressful for me as a manager and a leader of people who I'd only been managing for a month to to be there for them. And some of them had family members who were affected. You know, everybody in Israel knew somebody who, at least something had happened. Some people had narrow escapes from their family members or for themselves. And so, you know, it was a very stressful time, and I think my main focus was making sure that we could take whatever burden off of their plates and put it on the plates of the US team while they needed the time. Now, I have to say Israelis are so resilient, and so much has happened constantly in Israel that they have to be, but it doesn't mean that they want to be. But often, work is a good distraction from what's happening around you, and I'm constantly in shock by how much they're willing to do work, even in the middle of missile attacks by Iran, I people were working on documents on my team.

Tyler Finn

That's that, doing that myself, but I understand that. I don't know. Maybe you don't know how you would react until you're in a situation like that, or you've experienced that many times over and over. I'm curious if you sort of like, look back and reflect, you know, helping lead these companies through either different crises or sort of different problem sets, too. Do you feel like your approach to leading teams and and leadership and being on an executive team has evolved over time?

Shanti Ariker

I'm sure it has evolved. I mean, I'm more mature every year. And, you know, I I've been through a lot of different things in my life, and I try to be as empathetic as I can. I'm not always able to be and, you know, you try to be both pragmatic and empathetic for the business and for the people. And, you know, see it from different different sides of things, right? It's it's not always easy. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions, but I do try to think through all those different aspects, not just the legality of the situation.

Tyler Finn

Sure, one of the things that I've enjoyed is you write a newsletter on LinkedIn, and I also understand that you have written or you're working on a memoir as well. So tell us a little bit about both of those. And then I'm also really curious. Like, you know, what drove you to want to start to write, share your story more publicly, you know? I mean, I have this, right? I think that you get better, like, the more you practice, the more you make it a habit or routine, right? But you see how it accrues over time. Yeah, tell us about both of these projects and what your experience has been with them.

Shanti Ariker

Sure. So I started in house lawyering and beyond in January, kind of a little bit as a challenge to myself. Could I actually do a bi weekly newsletter? At first, I thought, There's no way this, but I kept seeing in various organizations that I belong to, the same questions coming up over and over. And I saw that, you know, as I as I'm getting on in my years, and I see new people coming in, the same questions keep being asked over and over. And I thought, well, I have a lot of the answers, and then maybe not all the answers, and maybe there's a new way to do things that I can learn as well. So a combination of wanting to continue to network with people and different, you know, people that are just coming up, people, you know, I always like to be meeting new people. Many people that I call are retiring. I want to have the access to people that are in the midst of their careers, and I love to teach, and I also I am been having fun writing, and I wanted to write a newsletter that was a little snarky.

Tyler Finn

I like the tone personally. It feels very authentic. Let's say

Shanti Ariker 

Because I, you know, I people, you know, if you're reading an article about, you know, the do's and don'ts of something, you get a little bored sometimes when you're scrolling through and I think that would be more fun and more engaging. So so far, I've gotten good feedback, and I've been able to keep it going, and that's been great. But I have been, you know, my journey to start writing my memoirs started about six or seven years ago, and I won't bore you with all the details, but you know, it's been a long journey of learning about the publishing industry. Whether I want to Self-Publish or traditional publish, I plan on, I'd like to plan on traditionally publishing, and I'm, you know, making strides towards that. I have a final manuscript. I've had to learn how to write a book proposal. So I've been working on all of these areas, and it's been another thing to learn and very interesting. And, you know, having to come at it, you know, it doesn't matter how much I've done in my legal career, this is a whole different ball game. So, it's been very, very interesting, humbling. And I just, I really enjoy writing, so I'm going to keep doing it. I've now been writing some short stories and getting those published little by little as well.

Tyler Finn

That's fantastic. I hope to see it on a shelf near me at Barnes and Noble sometime. And I understand the publishing industry takes a while from some friends who've written books, but maybe by like, you know, early 2026 it'll be on a shelf somewhere. That would be fantastic. As we start to wrap up, Shanti, I've got some traditional closing questions that I like to ask my guest and my guests, I want to ask a few of you. My first one for you is what your favorite part of your day to day at JFrog is.

Shanti Ariker 

Well, I guess every day is really different. But I really, you know, if you would have asked me a few years ago, would you really enjoy going into the office, I would have said no, but, you know, I really do enjoy we come in three days a week at JFrog, and I really love sitting down with my team at lunch, talking to people every day, sitting, you know, meeting people in the hallway, and all the celebrations that we have at JFrog. It's just a lot of fun.

Tyler Finn 

The the flip side, I think this is funny though. You know, do you have a professional pet peeve? Maybe this could be the subject of one of your newsletters.

Shanti Ariker 

I really get annoyed when people like think it's funny to say that the legal department is the Department of No,

Tyler Finn 

Oh, I hear that a lot.

Shanti Ariker

I've worked so hard to be a solution minded person and to to hammer that home to my team, but people still often will say it's stuck in legal when it's not necessarily stuck in legal or weird, it's second legal, because legal has been given information from the security team that we can't agree to, or something like that. So we tend to get bear the brunt of a lot of these. These stall stale. You know why things stall?

Tyler Finn 

Yes. I don't think you're alone in being frustrated by that perception, which I think oftentimes is is wrong, as you mentioned. I mean, legal is one of the most cross functional teams, and often sees solutions that others don't. My last question for you, Shanti, my traditional closing question for my guests, it's if you could look back on your career and think about maybe when you were a young lawyer just getting started, something that you know now, that you wish that you'd known back then,

Shanti Ariker

you know, I was really nervous that I would fail, and also that I had to pick one type of law, and if I didn't pick the right one, it would be a disaster. And I originally was very sure that I wanted to do environmental law. Spent a summer associate position at a US PIRG and doing Clean Water Act review. So boring. And so I realized then and there that I couldn't just do administrative type law and I needed to do something else. But, you know, I've dabbled in a little bit of everything. And I think if I would have known at the beginning, I tell law students is, you know, you may have an idea about your career that it's going to go in this one direction that you may some people might know I want to be a litigator. That's all I want to do. But I tried litigation. I didn't love it. Having the background has been helpful as a GC, you know, I've tried a little bit of everything, and I think that that makes you a valuable general counsel, and also it makes you more empathetic for all the people on your team. So if there's one thing I would want people to take away is that, you know, just because you're doing something today doesn't mean you have to be doing it tomorrow. You might need to create a path for how do you get to the other thing that you're really looking to do, but you know, and that's through networking, talking to people, educating yourself, getting certifications or what have you, but, but you can do so much with a legal degree, whether it's in the legal team or outside the legal team.

Tyler Finn 

I think that's a lesson that will resonate with folks across our audience, right, whether they're students, associates or folks who are more senior and have been working in the law for even a couple of decades. In some cases, this has been an absolute pleasure. Shanti, thanks so much for joining me.

Shanti Ariker 

Thanks so much for having me. It was fun.

Tyler Finn

And to all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of The Abstract. We hope to see you next time.