Candice Carpenter Olson
Founder of Here House
Candice began her career leading college students, teen convicts, and executives through the mountains, and spending her $250 a month paycheck on donuts and cowboy bars. At 30, she found herself at Harvard Business School, and then branding and marketing at American Express.
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Candice took over a tiny start-up division within Time Warner and made it a larger division, producing her first grownup paycheck. Realizing corporate life was too confining, she interviewed 5 media entrepreneurs around the country, seeking inspiration. At the end of one of these lunches, Barry Diller asked her to build his next cable network. She later went on to create iVillage with a team and group of venture and strategic partners. This media brand revolutionized the use of the internet for women by providing well-organized peer discussions in finance, health and parenting, and the company went public in 1999 for over $1B. Much later, Candice learned that she and her business partner had been the first women to build a company from scratch and take it public.
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She stepped down, got married, and spent the next ten years parenting and exploring a different dimension of life at Divinity School at Columbia. She published Chapters, with Simon and Schuster, on the successful navigation of life chapters. She was on the founding board that created a 3,000-student charter school network with high academic standards.
She then started a company with her husband designed to better prepare college graduates—from Ivy League to community colleges—for the workplace, covering topics like finance, working in teams, and challenging conversations. In addition to Ivy League and community college students in the U.S., Fullbridge successfully trained 20,000 women in Saudi Arabia and was central to the Ministry of Education’s strategy to advance women’s opportunities.
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They sold the company in 2016 and moved to Aspen full time, where Candice has worked with her daughter to build Local Coffee and Eatery and Here House, which was recently selected to be part of Sonato, a curated global network of unique co-working and social clubs. Candice and Michaela have just launched a design company, Ora, which focuses on homes, hotels, stores, restaurants and other spaces where the intent is to gather people in connection, beauty and warmth. She has also FINALLY made time to grow her first flower, bake her first loaf of bread, complete a yoga teacher training and begin a program in spiritual psychology.
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Throughout a career that spanned a $250 a month paycheck and an IPO, Candice has had many relationships with money, some of them flawed and clueless, some inspired. She is currently completing a book called Chasing God and Money, which hopes to share hard-won wisdom on the dance between the material and spiritual, and on money’s important role in our growth—having it, not having it, spending it, investing it, losing it, and owning its care and feeding.