Don't Be Afraid to Pivot with Cece Arnold
This episode of the Success Fundamentals Podcast features Cece Arnold,
CEO at Trendalytics. Much like the tech world itself, the requirements for becoming a success in this niche have changed rapidly in recent years. Nowadays, the only thing a founder needs to be a success is a solid idea.
Gone are the days when you had to know how to build the product you want as well. Cece shares her own professional journey before finding herself the CEO of a tech company. She explains where her drive comes from and her genuine curiosity on how things work.
Cece shares where the strengths of a tech CEO can be put to really good use, as well as the practical role she plays as her company's cheerleader and primary saleswoman. She also shares what a generalist can do for such a specialized industry like tech and how her own strengths have helped propel her career and company forward.
HIGHLIGHTS
03:09 Changing gears: From chef to retail to tech
07:09 A single good idea can create a unicorn almost immediately
10:03 Tech thrusts you in one-off situations that you have to figure out on the fly
12:32 Founders either want to be acquired or do it their own way
17:06 An unquenchable desire to be busy drives Cece's ambition
22:26 Generalists can focus on business in tech without technical knowhow
25:37 Reconciling the fundamental differences between sales and devs
28:56 AI is misunderstood and a buzzword in business circles
33:10 Cece's fundamental learnings about business for aspirants
42:38 Money allows you freedom of choice, power exercises that freedom
46:24 Trendalytics makes sense of social media numbers for data-backed decisions
QUOTES
07:48 "It's amazing because you can go from zero to unicorn basically immediately. And some of the more typical barriers to entry like having to have somebody who knows how to code or just spending a lot on marketing just doesn't exist as much anymore."
17:30 "I like to learn a lot and once I feel like I've learned everything that I can learn, then I want to go learn more and want to do different things. And I think it is purely because I can't sit still and I don't like to be bored."
19:50 "Running a company when you're making it up as you go along, you're going to fail at everything, and every decision will have a better answer if you had had perfect information. And I think you have to be able to admit it."
33:43 "Maybe for a dev, you can just be a really good dev and you never have to talk to anybody and maybe that's okay. But for business people in general, actually the older that you get, the more you realize that your strength is actually in your network."
35:31 "The other thing about being a success is that you can never think that anything is beneath you. And actually, I think that is also a key to success for being a CEO is never thinking that anything is beneath you."
You can connect with Cece through the links below.
- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cece-lee-arnold-b7b497b/
- Website - https://www.trendalytics.co/
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