Sarah K Peck is an author, startup advisor, and yoga teacher based in New York City. She’s the founder and executive director of Startup Pregnant, a media company documenting the stories of women’s leadership across family and work. She is the instigator behind More Women’s Voices, a website that promotes women speakers and entrepreneurs, a registered 200-hour yoga teacher (RYT-200), and a 20-time All-American swimmer.
She’s written more than 700 essays around the web, and many have become viral hits. The Art of Asking became widely read and is used across tech companies to train teams in clear communications. She writes a popular newsletter about about leadership, personal development, and behavior change.
She’s currently writing a memoir of working in the tech startup world while pregnant with her first kid.
Featured projects and work:
Her writing and business projects have been featured in 75+ different publications, including The New York Times, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, 99U, Psychology Today, Life Hacker, Thought Catalog, and more. She travels internationally to speak and has spoken at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Design School, the University of Virginia, the World Domination Summit, Alive in Berlin, Craft & Commerce, Year of the X, the Pakistani Emerging Leaders Council, and more.
Sarah publishes weekly essays and teaches workshops on her website at sarahkpeck.com. Her writing draws from her experience as an elite athlete, a tech startup VP, her editorial days, and her previous background as a landscape architect.
Startup Life
She is the creator of the website and community Startup Pregnant.
Previously, Sarah worked as the VP of Communications at the Y-combinator backed company One Month, an online school for accelerated education that teaches people business and coding skills in as little as 30 minutes a day.
She has worked with several Y-Combinator backed companies on a consulting basis, diving in to help create strategic PR plans, launch plans, press-ready articles, email copy, and master communications plans to grow awareness and presence at small-stage startups.
Landscape architecture, city systems, and human design
Sarah began her career in architecture and design with a focus on how the built environment affects human potential and happiness. She holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from Penn Design School. After school, she won a fellowship to study Landscape Urbanism and combined her love of storytelling and her passion for architecture and launched the nationally award-winning Landscape Urbanism blog to millions of views.
Now renamed Scenario Journal in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania and run by a team of two editors and 40+ freelance writers, the website documents new ways of thinking about building cities, human environments, and urban ecologies.
After building her first digital publication to a successful launch, Sarah left the corporate world to focus on building her own writing practice and online platform.
Teaching, courses, and yoga
Sarah built a collection of micro-courses and workshops teaching introductory skills in writing, content creation, storytelling, as well as courses for beginners interested in starting yoga or deepening their gratitude practices. As a certified yoga instructor and longtime athlete, she created a virtual beginner yoga course through web-based drawings (“yoga grams”), a project that caught the attention of LifeHacker and enrolled more than 2,000 people within the first few weeks of launch.
Her 14-day micro-course Grace And Gratitude generated extraordinary responses from around the globe, with reviews and testimonials pouring in from women and men that said the short course, “changed their life for the better,” “helped repair relationships and diffuse anger,” and even was influential in helping a woman conceive after four years of trying.
Finding unique intersections: what’s not being said?
Across all of her entrepreneurial projects and business endeavors, Sarah looks for the unique and under-represented intersections: how can we encourage physicality and exercise in the workforce? How can we embrace movement and embodiment as a way of being? What does spirituality have to do with business? Can we teach yoga using mailing lists?
A competitive college swimmer, Sarah holds 20 NCAA All-American awards and an NCAA post-graduate fellowship. After college, she began open-water swimming and has successfully “escaped”from Alcatraz nine different times.
She successfully campaigned to raise $29,000 for charity: water by promising to swim the Escape From Alcatraz in her “birthday suit” (wearing nothing but a swim cap and goggles) in order to bring clean water access around the globe. The project was covered by The Huffington Post, raised $33,000, and generated contributions from more than 450 people. Her essay on The Art of Asking, detailing how she raised the money by using more powerful language tools in the way you ask for things, was viewed 66k times.
When we move, things change.
My current research focuses on the intersection of connection, community, loneliness, and storytelling. How we communicate and connect to each other (through words, ideas, businesses, infrastructure, and design) helps us create value and meaning in our lives and communities.
I am interested in designing physical and virtual environments that enable people to be and live at their best. Join me as I unpack the psychology and stories of who we are and why we do what we do, and dream of what the future world can look like. If we can imagine it, we can make it.
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