More than 30 years ago, on Carly Sneed’s third date with her co-worker, Frank Fiorina, he told his not-yet-30-year-old dinner companion that one day she would run AT&T, the company where he was at that point a rung ahead of her on the corporate ladder. “It was a good line; she loved it,” he says. He doesn’t recall much else about the evening. “I just remember making out in the car.”
But Frank’s view of Carly’s extra-large future wasn’t only a line; he meant it, and for Carly, it was a validation of her burgeoning ambition. “It was a startling thing,” Carly Fiorina says, when she sits down with me a few days later to talk about her intention, barring catastrophe, to run for president in 2016. “But you know, when you’re a woman growing up in a man’s world, when someone takes you seriously, it’s such a relief.”
