Peter Murray

I've spent the last decade writing about things I had to learn from scratch — Amazon payment cycles, structured finance products, credit rating agency regulations, nonprofit fundraising software. The through line isn't the subject matter. It's the process: figure out what's actually going on, find the person who most needs to understand it, and write something that makes it click.

My career has moved through investigative journalism, early-stage startups, fintech, and financial data, which is an unusual combination. It means I've written compliance-cleared landing pages for credit rating agencies and helped an Amazon seller understand why their money disappeared, sometimes in the same week. I find that range useful. Most content problems aren't really content problems — they're a mismatch between what an organization knows and what its audience needs to hear.

I have high EQ and low ego, which in practice means I take notes well, give useful feedback, don't need to win the room, and actually enjoy collaborating. I've worked with some genuinely difficult people over the years and I've noticed it doesn't have to be that way. I'm highly motivated — partly because I care about the work, and partly because I'd like to get it done so everyone can go live their lives.

Outside of work I do stand-up comedy, which I picked up in DC in 2015 and took seriously in New York from 2018 until the pandemic shut the clubs down. At my peak I was doing 2 to 8 sets a night — open mics, then paid shows — with about 30 minutes of material I was genuinely proud of. I still perform occasionally. The discipline of finding what's funny about something true, then delivering it in a way that actually lands, has made me a better writer in ways that are hard to explain and probably sound like a cliché.

I'm also a singer-songwriter who writes, produces, records, and mixes my own music under the name PET PROJECT. I've finished around 20 songs and released a few, which tells you something about my relationship with perfectionism. Another band took the name and got more streams immediately because they play live, something I have never done. I'm choosing to see this as character-building. I love the outdoors, I've recently gotten into birding — New York City is a surprisingly good place for it during migration season — and I open up easily to strangers, which serves me well in both interviews and open mics. I live in Greenpoint with my partner. We dream about owning multiple dogs and cats, but our landlady is Polish, neurotic, and firm on her no-pets policy.