It’s almost too obvious to describe Carrie Sheffield by the same name she coined her own media company, BOLD. After all, how can a Harvard grad who stacks Goldman Sachs, Forbes and MSNBC on her resume, who is classically trained in three musical instruments, simply rest under such an overused adjective?
And yet, the 5’2”, fearless conservative who has a knack for reinventing the wheel embodies the word the core. When I met Carrie, she was on the set of her livestream Facebook talk show, Bold TV, in a tiny studio located in midtown New York.
Wearing a black leather-like top, with hands neatly clasped before her, she sat between two charismatic, household names debating the elections. One of which, her co-host and former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken, was speculating the election with political activist (and high-rent aficionado) Jimmy McMillan. The men were animated and passionate, with voices that boomed across the set. And it was her wit and sincerity that guided their banter with great, calming ease — while simultaneously sneaking texts to the interns in the green room to get more active with the social live feed, Facebook audience.
It was incredible to watch.
After all, these blockbuster names are on her livestream show. An idea born out of dozens and dozens of lifetimes, as she describes them, all filled with trials and errors. According to Carrie, her life has been a journey of cramming all of her passions into one, cohesive career path that eventually led her into the startup game. In November of 2015, she founded a new online publication for conservative, millennial audiences everywhere, in a hopes to put her talents to greater use.
It was an effort that got the attention of Al Roker himself, leading to a partnership with his latest venture of piloting different talks shows and connecting them to emerging digital platforms, like Facebook Live.
“We are trying to bring all voices to the table for a thoughtful conversation, from politics to culture, tech/business, charities etc.,” says Carrie about BOLD. “In this election season of anger and vitriol we’re trying to bring a thoughtful and humanizing approach to these topics. We’ve already hosted guests from Black Enterprise, POLITICO, Bustle, Today.com, Silicon Harlem, Contently, New York City Wired & lots of DC policy shops.”
Which Is Awesome, But Not Her Original Plan, Though
It’s not everyday you meet a future media mogul whose initial startup plan made her a Mormon housewife and mother of eleven.“I was expected to be a musician,” Carrie says of her first ambitions from childhood. “We actually had a family band, and the expectation my parents had for me was that I would be a musician. And I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
And so she threw herself into journalism studies at Brigham Young University, with the mindset to just find true love on campus and begin her ambitious career as a mother of eleven. “I wanted to have eleven kids because my cousin had ten, and I just wanted to beat them at her,” she jokes. However, soon Carrie found even that dream to be a challenge after dots began to disconnect themselves between her personal convictions and the doctrine of her Mormon faith. A disconnect that even got her published in the Washington Post with a piece about breaking up with Mormonism for good.
Read my full interview with Carrie Sheffield inside HER Magazine. Access December’s issue by downloading our magazine in iTunes or Google Play
