An
Accidentally
Brilliant
Career:
An
Exclusive
Interview
With
Charlie
Caruso
Kate Matheson
I was introduced to Charlie Caruso by a
mutual friend, after coincidentally mentioning
that I had read her recently published book,
Understanding Y (which again, coincidentally,
we reviewed in GLOSS last year).
This led to an extremely long phone
conversation which was basically just babbling
at each other in complete geek speak, then
on to a face to face meeting which was further
geek speak. I’ll spare you the details, but
suffice to say, if we were looking for someone
to sum up the theme of this month’s issue which is, of course, Disruption - then look no
further.
From deliberately grey hair (admittedly it’s
a pretty chic version rather than ‘I forgot to
get my roots done’) to administrating a multinational company at 18, Charlie Caruso might
as well have her name under ‘d’ for disrupter
in Wikipedia along with ‘brain the size of a
galaxy’.
She talks at a million miles an hour and
every sentence has an idea in it that Apple
would probably steal if they had the
opportunity. Take the book - Understanding
Y - for example. She wanted to talk about the
Millennial generation - so she not only wrote
about the subject herself, she managed to
bring in luminaries such as Bernard Salt, Ryan
Heath and David Burstein to the party... oh,
and scored an international publishing deal.
Then there’s PuggleFM.
‘I started PuggleFM purely out of being
pissed off with the state of radio – it was
eight o’clock in the morning and I was
dropping the girls to kindy. Rihanna’s S&M
was on one channel, and a sports star
whinging about his wife not her losing baby
weight on another – why was there no music
that kids could hear, and content that I
wanted to hear? How about how to help your
relationship when kids are behaving badly? At
the same time, I didn’t lose my brain capacity
or my ability to talk about politics because I
had kids. There had to be someth