Sandy Carter Built $12B Across the C-Suite. Her Advice: Be a Beginner on Purpose

Sandy Carter's advice for getting ahead sounds like the opposite of a plan. Stop climbing. Move sideways. Make yourself a beginner again, on purpose.

It is easier to take seriously coming from her. Carter has run marketing, product, operations, sales, and strategy inside IBM, Amazon, and a Web3 unicorn, holding five different chief titles along the way, and by her own account helped build a combined $12B (£9B) in businesses. She is now the Chief Business Officer at Unstoppable Domains, a digital identity company, and she has landed on one conviction about the age of artificial intelligence: it will reward range over rank.

A computer scientist by training, with a degree from Duke and an MBA from Harvard, Carter told IBTimes UK in an email interview that the revenue she generated was never the goal. It was, she said, only proof she had read a shift before the market did.

Build Categories, Not Just Products

Carter's career has tracked the big platform shifts, and she says her job was rarely to ship a product. It was to create a market that did not exist yet. As chief marketing officer of IBM's WebSphere, by her own account, she built a category that took 70% market share across 18 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.

At Amazon Web Services she founded the Enterprise Workload division, which she says generated $5B (£3.7B) in revenue at 55% year-on-year growth. Earlier, as a channel chief at IBM, she built a $7B (£5.2B) business spanning AI, cloud, and the internet of things.

'That is the moment you realise you are not building a product anymore,' she said. 'You are building a category.' What made those bets matter, she added, was timing, not scale. 'Strategic significance comes from being early to a structural change and having the conviction to build for it while it still looks uncertain,' she said.

Be a Beginner on Purpose

Most executives climb one function and go up. Carter kept switching lanes, treating each new title as a first day rather than a promotion. 'I never saw those moves as lateral,' she said. 'I saw each one as learning a new language and adding a new muscle.'

Carter says that repeated reset is the whole point. 'Every role forced me to be a beginner again, and being a beginner on purpose is one of the most underrated leadership disciplines there is,' she said. The reward, she argues, is the ability to see a company as one connected system rather than a stack of departments, a habit she says matters more now that AI is erasing the old lines between functions. 'AI does not respect org charts,' she said. 'It collapses them'.

What Actually Prepares You to Lead

That, in Carter's telling, is what readies someone to lead. 'I did not arrive at this seat by climbing one ladder,' she said. 'I arrived by living in every part of the system, and that is the preparation the job actually demands.' She has run a company before. Before IBM and Amazon, she was the founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley startup, and she says she is ready to do it again.

One habit from AWS still governs how she works. 'You write the press release before you write a line of code,' she said, a way of forcing the customer case to the front before a cent is spent.

Widening the Field Behind Her

Carter has spent years trying to pull other women into a field where they remain a small minority. She founded Unstoppable Women of Web3 and AI, an initiative launched in March 2022 that the company says has connected with more than 45,000 women. She previously chaired the board of the non-profit Girls in Tech, and has taught leadership, innovation, and marketing as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. CNN has named her one of the Ten Most Powerful Women in Tech, and she features on Adweek's AI Power 100. Her own playbook for the moment is set out in the bestselling book AI First, Human Always.

The biggest title may still be ahead of her. But the lesson Carter keeps returning to is meant for anyone watching AI redraw the org chart around them: the advantage will belong to those who understand the whole machine.

That message carries extra weight for women breaking into AI and Web3, where they are still outnumbered. Carter has spent years widening the door through her initiative, the board she chaired, and her teaching.

Her advice mirrors the principle that shaped her climb: Do not wait to feel like an expert before stepping in. Start over when needed, build the range others lack, and become impossible to overlook.