32 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} stories on his family’s electric typewriter and as a sixth grader, created his own role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons-esque game. “That really gave me the entrepreneurial bug from a very early age,” he recalls. Raised in Wisconsin, Mike earned a business degree and worked for a few years on Capitol Hill before coming west to ride the tech wave in the 1990s. Ever curious, he explored its many facets, gathering a host of “you can’t make up this stuff” tales. Mike credits his wife Leslie for kickstarting his novel-writing efforts and the pandemic for offering an opportunity to write daily, not just on weekends. Out of the tasks required of every author—writing, editing and promoting—Mike enjoys two of the three. The extrovert says, “It’s almost surprising to me that I can be deeply satisfied by a day where I did nothing but sit in front of indictment and more, giving the reader a broader perspective than that of the characters, who struggle with gaps in their knowledge. “The book is really about truth and information: how we get it and what we believe,” he says. “And the three narrators are all unreliable.” Mike says he experienced many of the same things as Sam, the protagonist in his first novel Bit Flip, when facing the moral and ethical dilemmas rife in tech startups. After 20-plus years in Silicon Valley, Mike renders characters who seem so real that he often fields the question, “Is that character based on so-andso?” He says no. They’re mashups and archetypes of various Silicon Valley players, painted broadly. In his youth, Mike pounded out
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==