About this site

This is the personal blog of Will Clark, a founder, product manager, engineer, designer and artist from Portland, OR.

I'm the founder of Kickplan which helps growth stage SaaS companies better monetize their products with turnkey infrastructure.

I started building websites on my first personal computer in the 1990s. Since then, I've been interested in every aspect of software, from how to build software to how to work with people who want to build software and, most recently, how to build companies that build software.

I started out doing "web design" before CSS existed and when it was novel that a website could be a business. I taught myself to program because I didn't know any programmers to implement my designs and became an engineer because I realized that my lack of knowledge made my design worse. After becoming an engineer I realized that my lack of understanding of the business itself was making my engineering worse, so I became interested in being a product manager and eventually became Head of Product of Goldstar, the largest live entertainment primary ticketing marketplace doing more than $100m AGR.

Finally, I became a founder because I realized that I really care about all aspects of businesses that make software, and I wanted to contribute as much as I could. In 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, I co-founded Stellar Tickets to try to help live entertainment survive the pandemic.

I'm a systems thinker who finds it interesting to actually understand all the inputs and outputs of a system. I think that the containerization of knowledge and skills driven by industrial revolution thinking has held back software for the past 30 years.