About Mike

I help companies and their people tell bigger and better stories. Over the course of my career, I’ve held executive roles in the Fortune 50, rolled up my sleeves with early stage startups, and cut my teeth in the world’s biggest PR agencies.

I’ve led global communications teams for high profile, culture shifting businesses at IBM and Alcatel-Lucent (where I co-founded a global movement called Corporate Rebels United). I served as the first Vice President of Brand and Communications at Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Most recently, I built and led the corporate communications function for Linode, where I assembled a team of cross-agency pros to create a new category — The Alternative Cloud — in a market dominated by AWS. In March 2022, Akamai acquired Linode for $900m, adding compute to its industry-leading delivery and security portfolio and reinforcing the value a pure play alternative to the major hyperscale providers brings to the market.

Now a strategist at Akamai focused on the company’s cloud and developer initiatives, I’ve turned my attention to communicating what it means to build a modern cloud platform where developers no longer build applications for a single place, but now must build, secure, and deliver them across the entire continuum of compute — from cloud to edge.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of helping some of the biggest names in technology tell their stories: Dennis Ritchie, Turing Award recipient and creator of the software underpinning of most of the technology we use today; John Patrick, the IBM visionary behind Big Blue’s Next Generation Internet initiatives and leader of the team behind the first ibm.com; Chris Aker, founder of Linode and one of cloud computing’s pioneers; Rob Malda and Jeff Bates, the founders of Slashdot; and Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, the iconic duo at the heart of Atlassian.

Over the course of my career, I’ve developed a strong track record as a trusted advisor to corporate senior executives and startup founders; demonstrated the ability to collaborate across functions and internal/external stakeholders; led high performance, globally dispersed teams, agencies and budgets; honed a reputation as a corporate change agent; and tapped into my natural curiosity to quickly understand and translate complex subject matter to help executives hone their messages and craft compelling, creative stories.

My great, great grandfather allegedly fathered The Jersey Devil and I once stood on the Saturday Night Live stage with Chris Farley.