Annotations cc: Billy Clark
Billy Clark works across talent acquisition and advisory through his firm BILLYCLARK, with offices in New York, Paris and Los Angeles. The firm advises founder-led businesses in architecture, art, design, fashion and hospitality, and organises its work around three pillars: people, process and production. His own trajectory has been shaped by affinity for collaboration, openness to possibility and tolerance for risk. He is discerning in practice, with sincere trust in what emerges, while holding a clear sense that not every opportunity is the right one. In this conversation, we consider the less tangible attributes that determine where a person or a practice belongs.
Anoe: Working across disciplines seems less a choice than a condition of contemporary practice. As the boundaries between fields continue to shift, we are asked to move between different forms of knowledge and practice with a greater degree of adaptability.
Billy: And it is a good thing, but it can also become complicated if people aren't mindful of what they're doing. You can't be everything to everybody – it’s important to find something you enjoy, something you're good at, and something from which you can make a living.
Trying to find a career that can be productive financially and personally is the goal - whether that's achieved through full-time employment, consulting, or independent projects - we're seeing more people pursue a combination of these varied arrangements now than ever before. 
A: And at the same time, it can be complex to navigate a different field, not only in terms of the output, but its infrastructure, the way it operates. There's a tension between the practices one holds: one may carry visibility, while another is what actually sustains it financially. So it's also a question of how we present ourselves, what we choose as our identity, where we locate purpose and meaning — and that doesn't always correspond to the economic reality of the practice.
B: One hundred percent. When someone chooses a creative path, whether it's architecture, design, fashion, photography or something else, there is usually a strong emphasis on personal fulfilment involved in making that decision. Hopefully you can also make a living from the creative career path, ideally a successful one.
I think the reality for many people is understanding how to make a career ‘work.’ There's an old expression: “Make your vocation your vacation.” Not everyone can realistically do that, but deriving some degree of enjoyment, excitement or pleasure from work is very important.
A: You have also published a book on career transitions and different professional paths, The Little Book to Land Your Dream Job, co-authored with Clayton Apgar. You seem able to see a trajectory the individual cannot.
B: To give a little background on the book, when my partner and I were putting it together, we found ourselves reflecting on the fact that we had already been consulting creative professionals on career transitions for many years - almost twenty for me by that point - a repetitious methodology to that process had developed over time.
As unique and individual as every career arc is, there is a ‘blueprint’ through which people can evaluate where they are and where they want to go. That prompted us to put our thoughts together and write the book: to help people develop their personal roadmap to better navigate the different stages of a career.
The process goes far beyond skills. Skills can be learned, but there are also intangible qualities within a person that aren't acquired. They are attributes that you innately possess, and the question is whether those attributes actually align with the career path you're pursuing.
You want it to feel like a natural progression rather than constantly fighting to make yourself do something that doesn't really correspond to what you're capable of or what inspires you.
It's about understanding what actually motivates you, from what you derive pleasure and what feels in sync with your abilities. That initial ‘inventory assessment’ is a crucial part of the process.
A: Your work opens many different perspectives — not only the firm and the layers through which it operates, but independent projects such as the book and the podcast, The Hire Life, which investigate similar themes from different angles. What was it about your own trajectory, your non-linear path, that led here?
B: I knew I wanted to live in New York. I started at an investor relations firm, which was extremely rigorous, corporate and structured. This experience taught me what it meant to go to work, to be professional, to be somewhere on time. There was absolutely no margin for error when it came to documentation and the materials we were compiling for clients.
Throughout my career, I've always enjoyed that collaborative aspect of working with people. When I started working in recruitment, I realised that I really enjoyed the interpersonal aspect of it. I enjoyed connecting with people, getting people excited about a journey and helping them through that process.
Recruitment simply happened to be the vehicle. Helping a client identify the right person is almost like casting a film, while helping a candidate identify the right role or professional direction for themselves can be equally rewarding.
Over time, I realised that I'm naturally quite curious and adventurous, and that those qualities are important to me. I'm also relatively risk tolerant.
A big part of the nonlinear nature of my career has simply been a willingness to try things without knowing where they're going to lead. Not everything is a wild success.
I think that willingness to try things is an important personal attribute. Not everyone has the flexibility to do that, but because I have my own practice, I have been able to move and expand in ways that gave me that opportunity.
A: Some of your partners have also arrived sideways, with backgrounds in architecture, art history, acting, and other fields. Coming back to recruitment, are you seeing more openness from clients towards hiring people who have moved between disciplines and bring different perspectives with them? Has the industry shifted, or are employers still generally looking for a rather linear trajectory and a defined expertise?
B: That's an excellent question. I think the expression is: there's a lid for every pot. We're not for everybody, and I think it's important to understand that as a business owner and service provider.
Our methodology is shaped by our diverse backgrounds and our nonlinear paths. The clients we resonate with most are those who are excited by that and who value a slightly different approach.
At every level, and perhaps more than ever before, we're seeing an increasing emphasis on ‘fit,’ from both the candidate and the employer.
We call that casting. It's similar to making a movie. Someone might tick every box and have all the right experience, but they may simply not make sense for the company. It might not be a personality match. There can be an intangible sense that someone isn't going to coalesce with the team.
What we're particularly good at is helping clients identify not only the skills they need for a particular role, but also the fit. That's the casting component.
A: Beyond recruitment, what are the other areas where founders tend to need support? You mentioned risk earlier, which I noted. That seems particularly relevant to founder-led practices.
B: I think it helps to give some context on how that advisory side of the business developed. It was really a natural extension of the recruitment work.
For years, clients came to us because they needed people and talent. They needed someone to fulfil a particular function within their organisation. But over the last ten years or so, people increasingly came to us not with a people question, but with a problem.
They needed to solve something, and it wasn't necessarily a single person within the organisation who was going to solve it. That naturally led to the advisory side of our business, which is run by my partner, Everett Hollander, who was the COO of BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group for many years.
The work can be strategic, operational, financial, organisational, or related to marketing and business development. Essentially, we help founder-led creative businesses across architecture, design, fashion, hospitality, and other fields orient themselves around a problem and find a way forward.
Often, that eventually feeds back into recruitment. At that point, the work can become a recruitment exercise, but the initial step is diagnostic.
We return to that idea of taking an inventory. We get involved quite deeply and help determine the most appropriate course of action.
A: And then there is the last pillar: people, process, and production. Let's speak about your exhibition in New York, 26TH AND 10TH.
B: I think that third pillar, production, has been developing over the last year and a half or two years. We love alliteration, so there are a lot of Ps.
Given the world as it is today, with so much happening digitally and everything involving a screen, we wanted to take the relationships that are really at the core of our business and bring them into the real world, into a more interactive, engaged, and interpersonal experience.
We have a space in our building in New York that we'd been wanting to program. I'm not a curator myself, and I'm not going to pretend to be an art director, since that isn't my métier, but I understand how to put the right people in place. We brought together many of the relationships we'd built over the last twenty years and put them into one project, from the curation by Valerio Polimeno to the production design with Currie Ritchie, as well as the galleries, consignors and collaborators who were excited to put pieces into the show. It was a great success, and we were very pleased with the outcome. We're continuing to build a program through 2027, timed to major design and art fairs.
A: I was wondering what that setting enabled that other situations might not. As you say, relationships are at the core of what you do, which involves the relationships you already have and the ability to make something together. But through the choice of the apartment, and the curation, you also create the conditions for new relationships to emerge. In retrospect, what did you observe?
B: For me, personally, for my business partners, and for everyone on our team, our vision of both the professional and personal world is expansive.
We were interested in generating new experiences with collaborators, attendees, vendors, and everyone involved, and creating an environment that encourages conversation and brings together people from completely different backgrounds. I think that open-ended quality was really beneficial.
It was also intentionally non-traditional, and we're excited to continue developing that sensibility. Over the years, working with high-profile creative people who create highly exclusive experiences has been incredible, and it's been a privilege to be part of that world. But there is something valuable in helping to open those experiences up so that more people can participate. So for us, it's about allowing the relationships that develop through these projects to be new, open-ended, and slightly unexpected.
A: And returning to the present, you're currently between New York, Los Angeles and Paris, where you are at the moment. Is that a personal or a strategic decision?
B: It's really all of the above. It’s about being strategically positioned, both personally and professionally, to engage with clients, candidates, and projects in the places where it makes sense.
Paris feels like the next frontier, even though it has obviously always been here. There is something particularly special about the city right now. It feels very inclusive and welcoming. Working here has been unbelievable. People have been incredibly open, and curious. For us, being in a new market and engaging with new clients and projects has made Paris a wonderful place to establish a presence.
Coming to Paris wasn't part of some elaborate business plan where everything had to happen by a particular date. It was much more: “Let's try this. Let's see if we can make it happen.”
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26TH AND 10TH
BILLYCLARK and _POLIMENO
New York, May 11-23, 2026
Photography: Mickaël Llorca
BILLYCLARK
New York Office
Interior Design: Charlie Ferrer
Photography: Oskar Proctor
