Peter McKay

About

I've spent my career building and scaling enterprise software companies. Five times as CEO, twice through acquisitions, and across every platform shift. The common thread is that I keep ending up in the room when things are about to change, and I've gotten good at reading what that change requires. The lesson that took me the longest to learn is that transformation comes down to your people. It's never about the technology. I've watched brilliant strategies struggle because the CEO couldn't get the team to move. And I've watched simple plans succeed because the leader went first and the culture followed. You can't ask your organization to change if you haven't changed yourself. Which has been true at every company I've been a part of. I lead by instinct, surrounding myself with people who are smarter than I am in the areas where I'm not, and I try to build the kind of teams where trust runs deep enough that hard conversations happen early. Lencioni's work shaped how I think about this. Loyalty, accountability, and the willingness to be uncomfortable in service of the people around you. Those concepts are the reason some teams compound and others collapse under pressure. Right now I work with CEOs and their investors on AI transformation. The pattern I see repeating across every conversation is the challenge with the speed of change. While the urgency is there, the strategy struggles to keep up. I've been through that. I know what it feels like to bet the company on a platform shift when half your board thinks you're moving too fast and the other half thinks you're too slow. That lived experience is what I bring to the table. I grew up in Boston, studied accounting and finance at Northeastern, and somehow ended up spending my career in enterprise software. It still surprises me. On the personal side, I still bike and I'm still learning. The AI chapter is the most interesting one yet.