Build It. Sell It. Repeat. - A conversation with Clark Peterson
Clark Peterson has been in the right place at the right time five times — and it was never an accident. From selling cell phones before most people had ever seen one, to building the nation's first nationwide cellular network, to pioneering cloud communications before anyone trusted the cloud, Clark has spent 35 years identifying windows of opportunity and moving fast before they close.
In this conversation, Clark walks through the full arc: getting hired at Cellular One because he already owned a cell phone, sending a blank fax to Craig McCaw that launched three more companies, watching employees shop for houseboats as their stock hit a million dollars right before the dot-com bubble wiped it out, and convincing businesses to trust their phone systems to something called "the cloud." What comes through most is his instinct for timing — knowing when to build, when to go public, and when to sell.
Key Moments
[00:40] — How Clark paid his way through college with a mobile window tinting business, used one of the first cell phones to land a Yellow Pages ad, and got hired at Cellular One because he was the only candidate who'd actually used one.
[03:10] — Why he turned down Pfizer after making more in his first two months at Cellular One than he would have made in an entire year at the pharmaceutical job he'd already accepted.
[03:51] — The blank fax: Clark and colleagues sent Craig McCaw a completely blank page with only the words "what's next" — and the companies that followed: Nextlink, Nextel, and ClearWire.
[05:02] — Why banks refused to fund Cellular One, projecting only 7% of the population would ever afford a cell phone, and how Michael Milken's junk bonds filled the gap.
[07:44] — The houseboat lesson: why managing people when everyone's stock crosses a million dollars is harder than managing them in tough times — and what the dot-com bubble taught Clark about taking money off the table.
[11:18] — How Carl Icahn skipped the boardroom, sat with a customer care rep for 30 minutes, and learned more about what was broken in the business than the entire C-suite in New York knew.
[12:29] — Building ClearWire from scratch as Craig McCaw's first employee, proving the model in one market before raising money to scale, and going public three years later in a successful 2007 IPO.
[21:25] — Selling Telesphere's $45M revenue business for $117M, then building Vonage's business division from zero to $800M — which Ericsson eventually acquired for $6.2 billion.
[25:21] — Why being acquired by a company that already does what you do usually fails, and why the opposite is actually an opportunity to build something new with someone else's money.
[36:26] — Ontologics: Clark's current venture using proprietary AI to analyze every patent filed worldwide, score portfolios, flag infringement, and predict where emerging technologies are heading.
[42:10] — "It's so much harder to find an opportunity from the bench than if you're playing in the game."
[57:19] — His dad's advice that's driven everything: "The harder you work, the luckier you get."
About Clark Peterson
Clark Peterson is a serial entrepreneur and telecom veteran who has built and exited companies across cellular, fiber, wireless data, and cloud communications. He co-founded the Cloud Communications Alliance, whose members today include Zoom and Cisco, and is currently building Ontologics, an AI-powered patent intelligence platform.
