Lucy Castaneda

I attribute my success to adversity and a fear of returning to where I came from. I grew up in one of the poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods in Austin, Texas, where you wouldn't even want to go because it was so dangerous. School became my escape from that volatile home environment, along with activities like wrestling, Keep Austin Beautiful gardening and volunteer work, and science club. While many kids saw these as extra chores, I saw them as fun things that allowed me to escape. As an adult now, what has contributed to my success is never wanting to have that life for myself, and also never wanting that life for my 4-year-old son. I want to make sure he has the opportunity to pursue whatever version of excellence he can be and have access to whatever he needs to achieve that. If I could summarize it, what has contributed to my success is a fear of ever being in that position again. Of course, I couldn't control it when I was a kid, but now I can control it as an adult, and I'm doing everything every day to be the best version of myself at work and also at home.

Every female CEO I've met always said you have to find the things you're good at, the things you want, and where you want to be. That advice really shifted my perspective during my last year of college when I took a class called Women Entrepreneurship. I had been on a path toward medicine and pursuing that education, but I realized I just didn't feel passionate about it after learning everything doctors have to go through. That advice from those female CEOs helped me decide to start getting my foot in the door in a different direction, and that's what shaped where I'm at right now.

I would say learn as much as you can and find a mentor. Mentors are so important, and I would recommend finding a female mentor specifically. All of my mentors in my life have always been male, and naturally I absorbed some of these personalities that they had, which meant I never really got to understand who I was as a female in this space. I wish I would have found a female mentor to lead me and guide me, and help me be okay with using who I am as a woman, because we're very different fundamentally, men and women. Now I feel like another bro in every conversation because that is basically what I've absorbed my entire career. I would recommend any girl or woman trying to enter my field to find a mentor that can help bring your confidence up. That can be a woman or a man, it doesn't matter, but find someone that understands you and the challenges you're going to have, so most likely it will be a female leader. Just ask questions and don't be afraid to be the only one in the room, because early in your career you may be the only one in that room that looks like you, and that is okay. Just keep working on that confidence, and confidence also needs knowledge, so always be learning. Those are the two things I think anyone wanting to enter the industry needs to focus on: confidence and always be learning. Those are really important.

The biggest challenge is trying to hypothesize what AI will do in the digital space for multiple industries and how we can prepare for that. We're preparing based on the data we see and what we think we should be doing, like the technical SEO work and having one brand presence across different channels. We think we're heading in the right direction as leaders in this space, and we're guiding our clients in the right direction with success, but at the end of the day it's still us hypothesizing because we can't tell the future. We're just going as we see things unfold, based on our years in the industry. The opportunity is that same challenge. Things are changing so rapidly, so who is the first one to prepare at the fullest extent? Who is the first one to have one unified brand presence across every single channel? There's so much opportunity right now in digital because people don't want to go into stores anymore, they want to do everything online. With large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini, there's a lot of opportunity because if you are a leader as a company, you are most likely going to win clients in those models. You're most likely going to be referenced by Google a lot and show up in social media really heavily when someone is searching certain topics, because you are the leader in the space. So there are a lot of challenges because of the unknown and we are hypothesizing right now, but at the same time that is the biggest opportunity. If we are right that one unified brand and brand visibility across all channels in the digital space is the solution to all these chaotic things AI is causing, then that is going to bring a lot of opportunity and revenue to many of our clients.

If I could summarize that into a word, it would be growth. Growth in my personal life and in my career is extremely valuable to me because I need to see potential growth. If I cannot see myself growing, I know that I will plateau and never become better. I think we fundamentally can become better, even by 1% every other day or every day, though obviously we have ups and downs. In my personal life, I found that I was stalling in my knowledge and expertise in what I like to do, so I took on gardening. I failed the first year and everything died, but now everything's thriving and I realized I enjoy it. Professionally and personally, I was stalling in what I did know. I would get into these high executive calls with people that were CMOs and people that have been in the industry longer than I've been alive, and I felt that I wasn't able to guide them in the right direction. That's why I decided to pursue my master's degree, meet with individuals who have been in the industry so I can learn from them, and bother everybody in my company so they can teach me. I need that opportunity to grow intellectually, professionally, and within my everyday life. Also, because of what I studied in college, one of the biggest reasons on top of genetics why humans sometimes get dementia and Alzheimer's is the lack of stimulus to the brain, whether they stop reading or the environment is too harsh. There are so many factors, so I wanted to control that variable of always be learning, always be growing, and always giving my brain a little bit of a workout on a daily basis.