A native to Marietta, Carie moved into Atlanta in 1994 to study Industrial Design at Georgia Tech and subsequently landed in innovation at Coca-Cola. While there, she built innovation and entrepreneurship programming - training over 1,000 employees, creating an EIR program to partner with entrepreneurs for transformational growth opportunities, spearheading the $500,000 global partnership with UP Global to engage with startup ecosystems, and also sponsoring Hypepotamus’ launch campaign for $25,000.

She left her tenure as the Global Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Coca-Cola to start Your Ideas Are Terrible, a company that works with global consumer goods companies like Cox, First National Bank, Black & Veatch, and Bayer to implement tools and systems that deliver a steady flow of innovative ideas and doubles the speed at which ideas move through the enterprise pipeline.

Within her role at Your Ideas Are Terrible, Carie serves as the Managing Director of the BridgeCommunity - an Atlanta-centric, startup and corporate commercialization program that accelerates the application of startup technologies to large, local enterprise’s core business challenges. Under her wing, the program produced nine pilots and proof-of-concepts last year and has doubled the number of participating startups in 2017.

Carie is a graduate of Flashpoint and Singularity University’s Executive Program, and has also taken a course on board service best practices. In addition, she has served as the Atlanta Chapter Chair of the Industrial Designers Society of America, as a Curator for the Museum of Design Atlanta, organized Startup Weekend Atlanta, and volunteers at other community events as a panelist, coach and judge.