Leaders Unscripted

Conversations with leaders about the challenges they’ve faced and what they’ve learned.

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9: Being an Accidental CEO with Founder & CEO at Contenda, Lilly Chen

Episode cover image

People may often fight for a CEO role, but having had it bestowed on her among the founding members of Contenda, Lilly Chen is truly excelling as a compassionate leader.

Her first experience in leadership shows us that the questions you ask yourself lead you to become a better leader for others.

We caught up with Lilly on Leaders Unscripted this week, summing up her Facebook years, chronic illness recovery, and passion for lifting others.

This Episode Covers:

  • Dealing with chronic illness young, and finding her path in a monastery
  • Working at Facebook, and balancing job fulfilment with financial gain
  • Becoming a first time leader in an exciting startup
  • Whether the CEO role is a blessing or a curse
  • A company culture of moving work around your life, rather than the inverse
  • Asking yourself what kind of leader you want to be

Episode Highlights:

“I never look down on anybody who works at a company like Facebook or Coinbase. Wherever you work, it's a job and if you need that money, you get that bag. So I was at Facebook, but the job itself wasn't extremely fulfilling.” - 6:30 - Lilly Chen
“Truthfully, I think the other founding members are better engineers than me. I learned how to code after the fact, they have CS degrees so they've actually been coding much longer than me. But I have more industry experience because I'm older, and I just jumped right in. They just decided it made the most sense for you to be CEO, and that’s it!” - 13:20 - Lilly Chen
“There’s this idea that people fight over the CEO role. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want it - it’s high pressure, you’re doing everything under high scrutiny, weight rests on you even when you have founders.” - 14:30 - Suzan Bond
“It's really frustrating when you're the remote person to not be able to hear or see. So make the day-to-day easier. There's a lot of really small things, like when you have an in-person conversation, make sure that you close the loop on the async platform that you use, like Slack.” - 18:40 - Lilly Chen
“Whoever I came in contact with, I wanted to lift them as high as I could. When I realised that was my goal, it became so much easier to make decisions around company culture.” - 27:10 - Lilly Chen
“You always want to think ‘I know who I am and what I want from life’. But early on I was solving immediate problems, like ‘my family needs money, I need to find money’. It was very problem-solution. I had a moment over the summer to be like, ‘I always try to solve other people's problems, but what am I looking for?’” - 32:15 - Lilly Chen
“My advice to anybody out there would be to think a lot about what kind of person you want to be in a worst case situation, if everything goes to crap. What do you want to get out of this? What kind of person do you want to be at the end of this?” - 36:35 - Lilly Chen

Links & References:

Constellary: https://www.constellaryhq.com/

Suzan Bond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanbond/

Lilly Chen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lillychen48/

Contenda: https://contenda.co/