By Martha Lagace, Staff Writer, HBS Working Knowledge
"Make the right choice for each of you and never follow the pack."
Candice Carpenter, CEO of iVillage, Inc., dispensed with all formality as she delivered that and other advice during her keynote talk at the Women Enriching Business conference.
Dragging a chair to the middle of the stage, Carpenter, who earned her Harvard MBA in 1983, spoke off the cuff about her life and career to date.
Her New York-based company, which she founded in 1995 with Nancy Evans, is one of the most popular general-interest women's "community" sites, claiming more than 2.1 million members. It went public in March 1999, and close to a year later had a market capitalization of more than $600 million.
Before starting iVillage, Carpenter had worked with Barry Diller at Q2, at Time-Life and American Express - and as a rock-climbing instructor at Outward Bound.
What follows is a selection of her comments to the audience of businesswomen and MBA students.
On why she was able to succeed on the Internet
Ninety percent of succeeding is FIT. The real thing that makes someone successful is to find a place and go kick some serious butt.[In my previous jobs] I was just on the borderline of being more trouble than I was worth. But that may have been exactly what I needed for the Internet. It's important to have the ability to make a decision without having all the information, and making it quickly.... I was really willing to make decisions, and that was from my climbing experience.
Courage does not mean not being afraid, it means being used to being afraid. I've been scared in everything I've ever done. I've been afraid a fair amount of the time and it really hasn't mattered.
You should do a start-up only if you can't stop yourself... You have to be able to lead other people through all those ups and downs when they have less stake in it than you do. You may get money quickly, but if you don't deliver you'll never get it again.
You have to do it out of something deeper that will sustain you through all the bumps. Talk to a few people who fail and make sure that you're willing to fail.
On the role networking and mentoring have played in her life
I don't like mingling. I'm an introvert on the Meyers-Briggs.I never networked, and then one time I did it, I did with a great deal of intensity. ... I went to talk to people [Barry Diller, David Geffen and Diane Von Furstenberg]. People who were moguls or divas. People who had built something out of themselves, and I wanted to know, who are these people.
I don't like Diane Von Furstenberg and she doesn't like me either, so I can say that. She changed my life. I walked into her office and she had a leopard skin rug and she didn't really have a job and she was just Diane Von Furstenberg and that was that. I was permanently affected.
Mentoring has to really be redefined. It's a slow process in how it is practiced. That's a problem. Who under the age of 30 is malleable and patient?
In our company we call it radical mentoring — but it's not an awful boot camp. People get better the more you give them feedback. In the old days you got feedback once a year in this formal process and you got nervous about it. We are running this with everyone in the company and trying to teach people how to enter this space. We are trying to give people an internal gyroscope.
On what it's like being a mom and an executive
Women of my generation forgot to have children. Then they turned 40 and thought, 'Oh, it's a good time to remember.' The forties are the most important decade in your work life, and at the same time we're trying to raise our children. Someone is getting screwed in the process. What are we going to do about this problem?
My children ... I am so conscious about them. I missed an important shareholder meeting to attend my daughter's recital. These statements are important to make. Shelly Lazarus [CEO of Ogilvy & Mather] was very influential to me. At American Express 20 years ago she said, "My son has a game and if I don't go he'll remember it for the rest of his life, but you won't remember this meeting a year from now."
This is a powerful issue. Hopefully, women didn't get this far [only] to back ourselves into a corner.
Photography: Jon Chase