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“Being independent doesn’t mean being alone.”
It’s one of the last things Josefina Eizayaga says, and it’s the perfect summation of her journey thus far. The current chief legal officer at OCP Tech has built a career that spans from Argentina to the United States, rooted in supporting start-up companies grow exponentially, then moving on.
Eizayaga is the attorney who understands how to help grow a fledgling company into something much greater than the sum of its parts. She’s done it in multiple industries, in multiple countries, and all she asks in return is that the work be incredibly challenging.
That seems to be the one question Eizayaga has when interviewing at a new organization. Will this role require me to grow in new and exciting ways? If the answer is yes, you can’t count on her.
That desire, however, is a double-edged sword.
From the beginning of her career, it’s tough to keep her in an environment where she has grown herself. When things begin to level out and start to handle themselves, Eizayaga hears the call of the road. One gets the feeling she might be trouble on a vacation where the goal is relaxing. At least professionally, “easy-going” is the last place she wants to be.
The CLO, in all hopes, just hopes her late grandmother would be proud of her. Eizayaga is full of stories of her mother’s mother, a self-assured woman who didn’t seem to have any money to lend her granddaughter when she and her husband were considering buying a home, but when plans changed and she was considering moving to the US to pursue her LLM, suddenly there was plenty of money to be had.
“My grandmother always emphasized how important it was for me to be able to get an education and take care of myself. That a partner in life needed to be that, a partner who would support me,” Eizayaga explains. “Me eventually settling down was fine, but if so, I needed to have an education that I could rely on for myself. I should be able to support myself, regardless of the situation.”
Eizayaga is the granddaughter of a woman whose family moved her to Argentina, whose stay there was extended due to World War II, and by the time they were able to move back home, Eizayaga’s grandmother had met a man and elected to stay. In short, “headstrong” is in Eizayaga’s DNA.
Argentina provided Eizayaga the possibility of pursuing whatever career she wanted to. She’s grateful for the opportunity universal education provided, and she chose law, even though her father had a strict aversion to lawyers. She practiced criminal law in her early years and later found commercial and transactional law.
She built out experience in oil and gas, she studied in the US for a year, moved back to Argentina, and eventually came back to the US working in the ag sector. She earned her LLM and was also a research fellow at the National Agricultural Law Center. She came to OCP Tech, a tech solutions startup, in 2022 as CLO and has helped the organization grow by leaps and bounds.
“When I first started here, there were almost no employees,” Eizayaga explains. “We’re now going to be in seventeen different countries by the end of the year with nearly three hundred employees. That kind of growth has happened in the last three years. That’s the kind of organization that excites me to be a part of, and that’s where I’m able to be the most effective. It’s fast-moving and energetic. It’s the kind of environment I crave.”
Eizayaga says she’s been able to help OCP TECH diversify and expand. She loves the interactions she has across the organization, seeing how culture incubated at the start-up level can blossom into something transformational and real.
“My grandmother always emphasized how important it was for me to be able to get an education and take care of myself. That a partner in life needed to be that, a partner who would support me.”
Josefina Eizayaga
Being an in-house contributor for a start-up didn’t immediately come easy, though. The CLO says she prefers to work in a fairly horizontal organization, one where people feel comfortable going above and beyond their roles to help the organization succeed. She thinks this perspective is probably a result of learning to sail at the age of nine in Argentina.
“Sailing is how I think I view a lot of the ways that people work,” Eizayaga says. “You start out sailing along in a dinghy, a small boat. As you mature, the boats and the crew get bigger. But one thing never changes, you need to be able to do any role on that boat. You learn how to collaborate with different people, but everyone has to do their part or the boat will not move.”
As for where Eizayaga’s ship is headed? She’s still focused on OCP TECH’s growth and enhanced global presence. The challenges just seem to find her when she needs them most. But right now, the waters are still just the way the CLO likes them: choppy and unpredictable.
