Advisory for founders & executive teams
Drive revenue. Enter new markets. Adopt AI.
An advisory practice helping founders and executive teams drive revenue, enter new markets, and adopt AI — from seed-stage startups to established companies rebuilding how they sell.
Start a conversationPreviously at Google · YouTube · Adobe · Viacom · CNN
How I work with clients
Four areas of focus
I work with founders and executive teams at the moments that decide the next stage of growth — refining strategy, building a revenue engine, entering a new market, or putting AI to work where it actually matters. Every engagement is tailored, but the work falls into four areas.
Go-to-Market & Monetization
Build go-to-market and monetization strategies for startups and established companies — turning how you sell and how you price into a repeatable engine for revenue.
Selling into the Agency Ecosystem
For companies selling into the advertising and marketing world, I advise on navigating holding companies, independents, and in-house teams — and reaching the decision-makers who actually buy.
AI Adoption
Guide AI adoption across commercial functions: where it creates real leverage, how to evaluate vendors, and how to govern it — with particular depth in regulated, privacy-sensitive environments.
US Market Entry
Lead US market entry for international companies — from strategy through execution — and build the revenue leadership teams to make it stick.
About
Clare O'Brien
Agency partnerships & advertising revenue leader · AI & emerging technology
For more than 20 years, I've helped skeptical, often heavily regulated markets adopt something for the first time.
At Google, I built the company's first agency-development function and its first dedicated holding-company team — growing Publicis into Google's top-spending U.S. holding company, with investment up 120%.
I opened YouTube to pharmaceutical advertising by partnering with Pfizer on the first social-media guidelines a pharma company would approve. At Adobe, I led their global partnership strategy with Publicis agencies around SaaS solutions. I later built the go-to-market strategy for a first-of-its-kind autonomous AI screening product in healthcare.
Through bklyndigital, I now work with founders and executive teams on those same challenges — revenue, market entry, partnerships, and where AI creates real commercial leverage — pairing deep client and agency development experience with a working command of how to commercialize new technology.
Based in Brooklyn, working with clients wherever they are.
Get in touch
Let's talk about what's next.
Tell me a little about where your business is headed, and I'll be in touch.
clare@clareobrien.co