Karen Peterson is a four-time Chief Marketing Officer and Fractional CMO at Amplēo who helps founders and executive teams turn marketing into a disciplined growth engine. Known for pairing strategic clarity with resourceful operations, she partners with growth-stage businesses to drive measurable results through lifetime value improvement, performance optimization, and go-to-market effectiveness—without relying on inefficient spend.
Karen brings more than 20 years of executive marketing leadership, having served as CMO at Ancestry, BrainStorm, Lendio, and Chatbooks. During her 13 years at Ancestry, she helped guide the business through multiple phases of scale, including launching the Canadian market from Toronto and contributing to the company’s evolution into a category-defining, billion-dollar consumer brand. Her experience spans consumer and B2B environments, including subscription, SaaS, health, and fintech, giving her a broad perspective on monetization, performance models, and organizational focus.
What motivates Karen most is building executive confidence in marketing’s ability to grow the business in meaningful, sustainable ways. She is deeply committed to helping leadership teams replace guesswork with strong foundations, including clear strategy, sound data, and efficient systems that scale as the business grows. Her leadership has been recognized as a Silicon Slopes CMO of the Year Finalist and Utah Business Woman of the Year.
Outside of work, Karen is a passionate advocate for adaptive sports, a proud wife and mom of four, and an avid outdoors enthusiast who enjoys snow biking, motorcycles, camping, and mentoring the next generation of marketers as a guest lecturer and BYU Marketing Advisory Board member.
Education/Certificates
- MBA, Business Administration — Brigham Young University, Marriott School of Management
- BS, English and Criminal Justice — Radford University