Carlota Perez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on 20 September 1939, the oldest of five children. Her father, Jose Henrique Perez Perez (1913-1978), was a very successful civil engineer as well as an international chess player who enjoyed playing up to twenty simultaneous games, including one in which he wasn't even allowed to look at the board. He devised a system for geographers to define the exact coastline in relation to tides, which was patented by the German company that built the equipment, and a method for scheduling his construction projects that predated PERT-CPM. Her mother, Carlota Perez Arenas (born 1919), is a painter and a determined, charming and courageous woman who, at ninety, drives a car and surfs the web.

The children were raised with very high expectations, and all, including the three girls, were expected to become engineers like their father. By the time Carlota entered kindergarten, at the age of three, she was already reading and writing. Her father's work took the family around the country, and Carlota ended up attending five different elementary schools.

The year Carlota turned eleven, the family got their first TV, she started high school and her parents divorced. Her mother, then 30, embarked for Buenos Aires with the five children – aged 6 to 11 – her sister, her aunt and her Oldsmobile. The Venezuelan petro-dollars were hard currency in Peron's Argentina and the children all went to private schools.