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 untold stories of what it looks like to be a woman in leadership, life, and work. The Startup Pregnant Podcast shares long-form stories of parenting, business, entrepreneurship, and growth.
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 startup CEOs, with several Y-Combinator backed companies, and with people at Samsung, Apple, Google, and Amazon, as well as with one of the founding Presidential Innovation Fellows of the U.S. White House. Across her leadership consulting and communications support, she teaches best-practices in team leadership, growth, company vision, and creating master communications plans to grow awareness and presence at small-stage startups.
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.
As an NCAA post-graduate scholar, Sarah is a 20-time All-American swimmer who received a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Design. After completing her collegiate swimming career, Sarah became an open water ocean swimmer, completing the Escape from Alcatraz nine times (once naked), along with longer 6-mile and 9-mile distance ocean and bay swims. Today, Sarah is a practicing yoga teacher (RYT-200) whose work holistically focuses on excellence in mind, body, and spirit.
She’s written more than 700 essays around the web. 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 her time spent working in the tech startup world while she was pregnant with her first kid, and yes, she did help to create the company maternity leave plan (among many other initiatives).
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 started her first consultancy focused on the art of storytelling, clear communications, and marketing.
Swimming naked for charity (and other projects):
- Sarah and her partner Alex are the instigators behind More Women’s Voices, a website that promotes women speakers and entrepreneurs.
- 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.
- 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.
Listening more deeply: What’s missing? 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?
Our bodies, minds, and spirits are intricately connected. The future of business and work must be based on a next-level paradigm of what it means to be a human being. The current research—and the notes on the blog—focus 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.
We can and will design physical and virtual environments that enable people to be and live at their best. If we can imagine it, we can make it.
To stay in touch:
Subscribe to get the weekly newsletter: