An avid triathlete, Nathan Tanner has biked hundreds of trails throughout Utah. Professionally, he’s also ridden the peaks of entrepreneurship and the valleys of rough economies.
Tanner was excited to land his first postgraduation job at Lehman Brothers in the Bay Area as an investment banking analyst. “One month into it, the company imploded in the largest bankruptcy in US history,” says Tanner, who earned his BS in management from BYU Marriott in 2008. “A few months later the markets worsened, and soon I was out of work.”
Tanner spent the next five years working in finance at Piper Jaffray and Merrill Lynch, but he felt disengaged. “I didn’t like the route I was on,” he recalls, “and I wanted to find my passion.”
As Tanner searched for a new field, he spoke with dozens of professionals. One contact working at LinkedIn suggested human resources, and it dawned on Tanner that his most energizing work experiences had ties to HR. “The more I talked with people in HR, the more I realized it would be a field where I could leverage my strengths,” he says. In 2013, Tanner returned to BYU to earn his MBA, using his second round as a student to reset professionally.
Upon completing his MBA in 2015, Tanner accepted an HR position at LinkedIn, where he stayed for almost three years until an opportunity arose at a relatively unknown startup called DoorDash. At the time, the company had 250 employees, and Tanner wasn’t sure if it could deliver what it hoped to. “But I couldn’t think of a better environment to learn in,” he says. “I was fortunate that DoorDash turned out the way it did. In my mind it would have been a success even if the company failed because of the unique experience and learning I gained.” By the time he left DoorDash, the company had a valuation of nearly $60 billion and more than 5,000 employees.
After five years of growing DoorDash, Tanner set out to have another entrepreneurial experience. He landed at Neighbor, a self-storage company, where he served as vice president of people until he left to be a full-time executive coach in 2022. “While I was at DoorDash and Neighbor, a lot of my time was spent coaching senior leaders, and I loved working one-on-one with them,” he says.
Tanner resides in St. George, Utah, with his wife, Whitney, and their four children. He has authored two books, Not Your Parents’ Workplace, which he penned while earning his MBA, and The Unconquerable Leader. “I get a lot of satisfaction from writing and can’t think of a better way to solidify and clarify my understanding of important topics,” he says.
Composing books takes consistency, and Tanner’s time at DoorDash underscored why habits are paramount. “We focused on what we could control, continued to make improvements, and hired more people, but there was no silver bullet. We were very, very consistent over time,” Tanner says.
“I constantly remind myself that recognition from the outside world comes long after the work has been done,” he says. “There’s a gap between effort and reward, and that’s why consistency is so important.”
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Written by Emily Edmonds
Tanner's story is published in the Winter 2025 issue of Marriott Alumni Magazine, page 30.
