Today, as the Founder and Principal of a family office, Carman carries lessons shaped by entrepreneurship, investing, motherhood, and decades of pattern recognition across fast-moving markets. In this conversation, she reflects with unusual honesty on the decisions that shaped her career: the moment she realised academia wasn’t her path, the “superhuman” state she taps into when building, the logic behind her most successful investments, and the routines that keep her grounded when everything else accelerates.

What emerges is a portrait of someone who has reinvented herself multiple times, not by chasing titles, but by following curiosity, discipline, and a deep understanding of how people and systems grow. This interview offers a rare glimpse into that mindset.

You turned down a PhD scholarship in Financial Mathematics to build a startup. Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you had chosen the academic path?
Becoming a professor and teaching at a university was my original aspiration, which is why I applied for a PhD at Imperial College and received an offer and sponsorship at the time. Over that waiting period, as I wrote columns about the Internet and its potential, my passion shifted so completely toward building a startup that the PhD path became irrelevant to me, to the point that I literally hesitated to buy the plane ticket. As the startup life goes by, I totally forgot about this PhD offer and only rediscovered the offer letter years later in an old suitcase—proof that the startup journey had fully replaced any longing for an academic life.

You once said building a startup made you feel like a superhuman. Can you share a moment when you truly felt that way?
That feeling comes when working on something that ignites deep passion, because then focus, curiosity, and energy all switch to maximum at the same time. In those moments, learning accelerates, pattern recognition sharpens, and awareness of everything happening around the business becomes so intense that it genuinely feels like operating in a higher gear than normal life.

Your due diligence process with founders is known to be very thorough. Has a founder ever surprised you with an answer that changed how you saw their business?
At the seed stage, there is often very little in terms of financials, so the real due diligence is on the founder’s knowledge, learning speed, discipline, routines, and network—essentially, how fast they can compound insight. The founders who impress me most are those who surprise me with a strategy or insight I had overlooked, because those moments reveal both original thinking and the capacity to continually outlearn their market.

Your failure rate as an investor is unusually low. Do you think your background in mathematics plays a big part in how you assess risk?
Studying pure mathematics trained me to work with abstract symbols, uncover fundamental structures, and use first-principles logic to understand how systems behave, rather than just crunching numbers. That discipline makes me very sensitive to the underlying patterns, assumptions, and hidden connections in a business, which helps me spot both fragile foundations and truly robust opportunities.

You got into Spotify. What gave you the confidence to say yes to that deal?
The music industry was stuck in a digital ownership model where users had to buy and download each track. Spotify flipped the model from selling ownership to selling access via streaming, which not only expanded how easily people could listen to music but also created a powerful subscription engine and a data asset around listening behaviour that made the strategy especially compelling.

If your portfolio companies could remember just one lesson from you after they’ve exited, what would you want it to be?
Build a personal routine you can reliably return to for recovery and clarity, especially during stressful phases of the journey. For me, yoga and swimming are the anchors that help reset energy, perspective, and decision-making when the founder or investor role becomes overwhelming.

You’ve been a founder, columnist, investor, and mother. Which role taught you the most about power, and which one taught you the most about humility?
Motherhood made power feel very real because being responsible for young children comes with both authority and an intense sense of duty. Investing, on the other hand, taught humility: the job is to be a facilitator, intentionally giving ownership of ideas and strategies back to founders so they can truly lead, rather than turning them into executors of an investor’s agenda.

English was a subject you once found boring, yet your first business was based on English learning. What did that journey teach you about unexpected strengths?
As a student, traditional English learning methods felt painfully dry, which killed my motivation, but later I discovered that integrating memory techniques and creative exercises could make the process engaging and even playful. That experience reinforced a pattern seen many times since: every real pain point can be reframed, and what starts as a weakness or frustration can become the seed for a differentiated product and a natural market.

If you were giving one talk for your daughters to listen to 20 years from now, what would you call it and why?
The talk would carry the same core message as my advice to founders: “Build Your Own Refuelling Ritual.” Life will always bring pressure and uncertainty, so knowing exactly which daily practices help you recentre—rather than spiralling into your stress—becomes one of the most important life skills.

If a young founder asked you, “How do I become a superhuman like you?” what would be the first thing you’d say?

Keep experimenting until you find the work that makes you lose track of time. Once you find that kind of passion, your learning speed, resilience, and creativity will naturally push you into your own super version of yourself.