Leaving a senior role at Amazon for a 16-person startup does not look like the obvious career move. For Peter Zatloukal, that was part of the attraction.
Leaving a senior role at Amazon for a 16-person startup does not look like the obvious career move. For Peter Zatloukal, that was part of the attraction. By then, he had already built a substantial career in technology, but when the opportunity arose to join a small artificial intelligence company, he wasn’t primarily comparing company size, security or status. He was looking at the people around the table and thinking about what he could learn from them. His initial reaction was simple: “Hell yes.”
That decision captures one of the strongest themes in Peter’s conversation with Anthony Bay on Zero to Prove. Across a career that has included Microsoft, Amazon, startups and Apple, some of his most important decisions have involved moving towards uncertainty rather than away from it — not because risk itself is desirable, but because the less obvious path sometimes contains something the safer one doesn’t: the opportunity to learn. Rather than being threatened by people who knew more than he did, Peter has repeatedly been drawn towards them. He remembers presenting to Bill Gates as a young engineer. Of course it was intimidating, but there was another way to read being in a room with people operating at that level: “What an opportunity.” Instead of asking whether a move is a step up, the better questions become what he will learn, who he will learn from, and what he might become capable of because he took the opportunity.
Peter’s willingness to keep learning makes more sense when you go back to the beginning. He was seven when he became interested in programming, before his family owned a computer. His father brought home a book about BASIC, so Peter began learning with pencil and paper. The attraction hasn’t changed very much: he likes making things. He describes software as a form of art, a mix of logic and imagination in which you picture something that doesn’t exist and then try to create it. “I would pay to be allowed to do this,” he says, an unusual statement after a career in an industry known for extraordinary compensation. The financial rewards came later. The fascination came first.
Experience, Peter says, comes through mistakes. “There are certain things you can only learn by running into the walls yourself.” During his startup years, the company had around 40 employees, many of them friends, when it became unclear whether they could make payroll. Expected funding hadn’t arrived, and Peter had roughly $20,000 on an American Express card with no obvious way to pay it. His reaction was strikingly understated: “Huh. I wonder what happens next.” The funding eventually arrived and the company was acquired, which makes the story easier to hear, but living through the middle of it was different. Successful careers look inevitable in hindsight; the decisions inside them rarely felt that way.
The walls weren’t confined to entrepreneurship. After becoming an executive, Peter was given a lesson he still remembers: “The things that got you here are not the things that are expected of you.” Earlier in his career, advocating for his team had been a strength. At executive level, he was also responsible for the health of the wider business, and sometimes the right decision for the company would negatively affect his own organisation. There is no neat slogan that makes that tension disappear. Advancement isn’t simply doing the same job with greater authority; at certain points the job itself changes, and some of the behaviours that got you there have to evolve.
Today, Peter has stepped away from a full-time big-tech role, and he isn’t sure the language of retirement fits. “For a certain kind of person, there is no retiring at the beach,” he says. “The thing that got me into it when I was a boy keeps me in it now.” Instead, he sees an opportunity to pass on what others once taught him, from how teams work to what actually happens in boardrooms and compensation decisions. “I can almost always trace it back to a person,” he says of his own lessons. Staying in the game, in his version, is not another title or another rung on the ladder. It is continuing to build because you still love building, working alongside people who still have something to teach you, and passing on some of what other people once took the time to teach you.