Michael Becker.

I double-majored in communications and journalism at Butler. My internships at Publicis Groupe and Learfield Licensing Partners brought me into licensing, dealmaking, and the commercial dynamics of negotiation.

At Publicis Indianapolis, I would sit with Kirk Stahl, a senior leader in the office, and listen as deals were being made. I was around 20 or 21, hearing commercial negotiations up close and beginning to understand how much happens through a conversation, a relationship, and knowing what each side values.

Teradata Marketing Applications, formerly Aprimo, was a smaller arm of the larger Teradata Corporation. This was my first time inside a large, matrixed organization, with teams around the country and many moving pieces. I managed content, digital growth, and media programs with responsibility for a $1M marketing budget.

I worked with CMO Lisa Arthur, helping with her speaking engagements and work around her book. My time there came ahead of the unit’s $90M divestiture to Marlin Equity. Teradata ultimately sold the business to refocus on data and analytics after the marketing operation fell short of its financial forecasts.

I joined Sharpen as its first content hire after Series A, working directly with the founders at its Indianapolis headquarters. I built the enterprise earned-media function with a scrappy local team. This was my first experience inside the engine of a young software company: the pace, the chaos, and the pressure to make the investment count.

About a year after I joined, the company went through layoffs. I was among the people let go. I saw how hiring, spending, and pressure could catch up with a startup, and how quickly a role could end even when you had put everything into it.

I was recruited to help build the North American commercial function at Emarsys through content and editorial. My main mandate was Marketer + Machine, the company’s branded media and demand engine. It grew across podcasts, SEO, webinars, partnerships, and company narrative.

I worked closely with CEO Ohad Hecht and executive leadership through SAP’s reported $500M acquisition and integration.

Between 2018 and 2020, I went through a profound spiritual awakening. It changed how I experienced myself, consciousness, and reality itself. I began paying close attention to the relationship between my thoughts, convictions, actions, and what unfolded around me. I felt a much stronger sense of agency and started questioning the identity and expectations I had inherited.

That experience opened my thinking far beyond the career and life I knew in Indiana. I went looking for knowledge in business, entrepreneurship, money, travel, and lifestyle design. Later, Think and Grow Rich, The 4-Hour Workweek, and Andrew Henderson’s Nomad Capitalist gave me practical ways to act on that shift: greater ownership, vocational freedom, and work that supported the life I wanted to live.

New Earth Knowledge was how I put that energy into the world. I had to write, create, and build something of my own. It became a media brand around consciousness, philosophy, and personal growth, with original writing, visuals, and multimedia programming. It generated more than a million impressions and attracted over 60,000 lifetime followers.

This was my first serious attempt at entrepreneurship. I experimented with individual and group coaching, courses, and information products. The monetization fell short of what I had hoped for, but the creation itself was beautiful to me. In 2023, I sold the brand through Flippa.

I began working directly with founders and executive teams across SaaS, AI, fintech, and developer tools. The work covered commercialization, positioning, demand generation, and the customer lifecycle, from early products through scaled software companies.

Three of my longest-running client relationships have been Polymail (2025 to present), Cirrus Capital Partners (2024–2025), and SaaS Academy (2024–2025). Each gave me room to work closely with the people making decisions and bring my skills to the problems that mattered most to the business.

At Antler in Dubai, I worked with several teams and focused most closely on a venture developing brainwave-detecting earbuds designed to adapt content on connected devices. I helped that team raise $180K from Antler. I was the only U.S. national in the cohort, working alongside founders from across the world.

It was my first experience doing business in a global hub. My own attempt to form a founding team fell short. I built relationships across the MENA region and still keep in touch with people I met there.

I spent six months on site at HackerRank in Santa Clara, working with the CEO during a critical repositioning for the AI era. It was a deep residency inside a long-established, YC-backed company and my first sustained experience of Silicon Valley’s energy. The company was rethinking its role in hiring and developer workflows as AI changed how software gets built.

I led AMER GTM content and messaging across lifecycle, account-based marketing, outbound, web, and editorial programs tied to enterprise pipeline. The work was about making the company’s evolving technical capabilities clear and relevant to enterprise buyers.

I shifted my practice toward strategic sales of early-stage SaaS, AI products, and software IP. I assess the asset, help the founder articulate its value, find the buyers with a credible reason to acquire it, and support the process through discussions and diligence.

Alongside that work, I’m building Ubiquitous, a book and interview series about the choices behind breakout software growth.