Mike brings over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience and go-to-market leadership to Lightspeed and its Enterprise Founders. Over the course of his career, he’s overseen incredible growth through his ability to find “X factors” inside of businesses; dials he could turn to drive scale.
Growing up, Mike had several learning disabilities. Fortunately, he received the perfect mentors to help him find success. His father and mother were both a profound influence on him. His father suffered from polio and was physically handicapped, but he, “never let his obstacles get in the way, he always found a way around them.” That mentality was ingrained in Mike at an early age. A combination of an accepting mother who taught the need to give and a father that wouldn’t let himself accept any obstacle as a barrier to make his intended impact on the world.
Some things were so difficult, at times he thought he just wasn’t smart. “Growing up with learning disabilities, I had to find a way to be successful even when I couldn’t perform the work. I developed ways to find the little hacks that gave me an edge. There’s always something little you can find that, if you do it over and over again, you’ve found the glitch to win the game. It came through in gaming and now in business. It came from developing a skillset to find another path without accepting the one given and taught to me.”
Most recently, as the President of Global Sales and Field Operations at CrowdStrike, Mike was instrumental in expanding the sales organization worldwide and generating business growth at scale, helping it become one of the most valuable enterprise security companies today. Prior to CrowdStrike, he served as President, Global Sales and Field Operations at Tanium and was the driving force in helping the company achieve global growth. Before that, he led sales for the Americas at McAfee.
As Venture Advisor at Lightspeed, Mike devotes his time to helping the firm’s Enterprise portfolio team understand how to scale. He’s crafted the playbooks, analytics and processes that lead to rapid growth and repeatable consistency in forecasts and achievement. He’s built winning, analytical cultures, in which go-to-market teams collaborate to understand how, when, and where to invest in order to capture market share. He’s a seasoned executive who understands the motions for selling across all sectors – he even wrote a book about it, titled “Everything You’ve Never Tried: Breaking the Rules to Compete and Succeed Like a Sales Leader.”
Mike is currently Chairman, Founder & CEO of XFactor.io, a SAAS based go-to-market platform that revolutionizes how companies operate. He also serves on the Board of Armis Security. Outside of work, Mike loves staying active through MMA, skiing, and spending time with his family.
