Peter Clark, the Human

I was born in the East of England and moved to San Francisco in 2010. I then moved to Seattle and now reside in the magical town of Louisville, Colorado.

I love Louisville and I'm delighted that my kids get to grow up in such a wonderful environment. My kids attend Peak to Peak technology school, I wish I did!

I am interested in 3d-printing, e-bikes, design, computer things, dogs, hiking, skiing, music, all sorts of things!

Some non-professional things I am currently learning and working on:

  • Being more emotionally present
  • Learning Bridge
  • Learning to ski moguls
  • Advanced (for a tall stiff guy!) yoga poses

I support the following football teams:

  1. Ipswich Town Football Club
  2. Tottenham Hotspur.

Peter Clark, the professional

I have been through Y Combinator twice:

  • 2011: Userfox — a B2B email marketing platform
  • 2021: Journey — a generative AI slide platform.

When not being a founder I've been a Product Manager/Leader at various companies:

  • AdRoll
  • Juul
  • Snapdocs
  • Pinterest.

I am very proud that I believe you can message anyone that has worked at any of these companies, and if they had happened to have worked with me, they'd say loosely the same things — Peter is authentic, willing to fight for the product/user to executives, and values fun collaboration with minimal nonsense.

I also maintain a Google Sheet of every person I have ever managed, approximately 30 people, including people I have let go, and just tell potential employers to just pick anyone at random for personal reference checks.

I am very interested in applied machine learning and applied artificial intelligence to solve product problems.

I love design — I am not sure if you've noticed, but my blog is quite esoteric. (as an example, posts can have tags, and each tag gets given a randomly generated hex colour, those hex colours then appear when you hover over my "From the computer of Peter Clark...")

My Skills

I'm really proud that I am very fluent in design tools like Figma. I can code, although I invest incredibly heavily in Claude (for example my starter repo) so am pretty out of practice now.

I have worked on all sorts of sales and business development pitches — I once flew to Japan to pitch Rakuten on a joint venture. I am very proud to have made dozens of friends (through collaboration and cheap beer) in sales and revenue generating teams, particularly at AdRoll.

Finally, I also had the fortune of spending a year or so at AdRoll reporting to Adam Berke, the CMO. In this time I learnt all the nuances of marketing — from demand gen, to product marketing, to growth marketing. I like to think I am a very solid product marketer, and feel comfortable saying this since I have not only been a Product Manager working on a marketing team, but also a Product Manager at a marketing tech company, and finally the 2 companies I founded were deeply connected to marketing.

Between product, design, engineering, marketing and sales, I like to think I am quite versatile at driving product outcomes — I also believe this gives me a great amount of empathy for people working in these roles.

My goal

I love building products, and despite my interest in ML/AI consider myself a "Y Combinator Founder" first and foremost: make something people want! I like to think my non-founder career is defined by being a "new bets" or "zero to one" style PM.

My current professional goal is to be the PM owner on a product/feature that gets a shout out on an earnings call.

I'd be remiss to not leave you with my projects portfolio