About

Book announcement coming soon…

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No-filter stories & failure retros from my first company
(co-founded age 22, Shark Tank, failed+pivoted, scaled $0 – $20m ARR & exited)

Founder spotlights of the tenacious underdogs I meet each week.

Tactics & habits I’m utilizing while building my next company.

Hi, I’m Mike.

Currently working on: Impruve

Previous venture: Packback, on a mission to awaken & fuel lifelong curiosity. To date, over 2.5 million college & high school students have used Packback for writing practice. Summary of this decade+ long experience that started as a 21 year old know-nothing college senior includes…

Learning to become a much-less-bad entrepreneur/CEO through a decade+ of trial & error, while receiving intensive executive coaching and wide-ranging (generous!) mentorship from some of the best pros in the game.
Refining & packaging that knowledge set by undergoing a year+ process of handing off the reigns to a new internal CEO successor (a wonderful teacher-at-heart by the name of Kelsey Behringer).
Failing & pivoting out of the original business model – while being publicly celebrated for its apparent success – at age 25 after nearly 4 years of trying (that’s a long & weird story about what happens when the college kids call up the textbook publishers).
Shook Mark Cuban’s hand on TV and then checked into my other job folding towels in the Bulls locker room the next day.
Being young, dumb, and raising capital from far more angel investors than I have fingers & toes to count (while compiling an even longer list of VC rejections).
Finally getting to the VC investment …by way of a major (& necessary) “down round.”
Managing multiple iterations of a company Board of Directors as CEO.
Scaling to 100+ employees.
Distilling all fancy talk about building startups down to one simple yet enormously challenging math equation: LTV / CaC

Most special of all = being part of a team far more talented than me, hellbent on awakening curiosity. Accolades earned by that team include:

Fast Company’s “10 Most Innovative Companies in Education”
Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America
Forbes’ “30 under 30” in education
Chicago Crain’s “Twenty in their Twenties”
Shark Tank deal w/ Mark Cuban
Chicago Innovations Awards
National Press – variety over the years

And what else?

Spent 7 seasons in the locker rooms of the Chicago Bulls & other NBA teams.
Learned elite performance coaching from Michael Jordan’s famed trainer & NYT Bestselling Author, Tim Grover (including being on staff at multiple NBA Draft Combines, Nike Skills Camps, etc.)
Started & ran an open mic event with a few friends housed out of our startup office, had a good 4 year run drawing attendances north of 100 and pulling creative moments out of the intersection of Chicago’s arts, tech, & sports communities. It was pretty sweet.