Laura Pearson steps to the line and bounces the fuzzy, yellow ball in a simple cadence. A few seconds later, her team is ahead 15–love. This Marriott School grad may be queen of the court, but she also doubles as a financial analyst at Google.
Before Pearson entered the tech world, she earned her BA in English at Stanford in 2004 and her MBA from the Marriott School four years later. After celebrating graduation in Europe, Pearson headed west to begin working as a financial analyst for Intel. Two years later she was promoted to senior financial analyst for its marketing group.
“It was great to work with such a fun team and such a well-recognized brand,” Pearson says. “The marketing group at Intel did a fantastic job of using every dollar to achieve great name recognition among customers.”
In January 2010, just a few months after receiving her promotion at Intel, Google approached Pearson with an offer she couldn’t refuse: to become a senior financial analyst for the engineering and operations teams. Pearson made the switch, and her primary responsibility is to efficiently allocate funds to her teams.
“We work hard at Google because we love our jobs and the atmosphere,” Pearson says. “It’s a much younger environment with a lot of energy. And in an office that has arcade games, climbing walls, pool tables, and twenty-three cafeterias, we also know how to take a break.”
Another way employees take a breather is on the tennis court. Pearson has played tennis against employees from some of the largest tech companies in the greater Silicon Valley area, while working for both Google and Intel. During the almost six-month-long season, companies play in five doubles matches every other week and at the end of the season the top four teams compete in a tournament. In fact, while working for Intel, Pearson and her teammates beat Google on the court. Now she hopes the advantage swings to Google’s favor this season when the two companies face off.
Pearson is invested in serving on and off the court. In 2008 she became co-chair of the Stanford Tutoring Program—a one-on-one mentoring program that pairs an elementary school child with a Stanford student or volunteer. “It was amazing to hear the parents share their gratitude for their child’s tutor—that it really made a difference, helping a student go from failing math to becoming top of the class,” she says.
Although Pearson no longer serves as the co-chair of the one hundred–student program, she continues to tutor a second-grade girl twice a week.
Pearson has lived in Palo Alto, California, for most of her life. When she isn’t playing on the Google tennis team, she can be found playing with the United States Tennis Association or traveling. Pearson also serves as president of the Young Professionals Organization, a subset of the Silicon Valley chapter of the BYU Management Society.
