About

I'm Mike. I live in Omaha with my wife, our son, and a goldendoodle named Guinness (after the beer, not the book).

I've been building products for about a decade now, across more industries than I expected. Fintech, bitcoin, generative AI, agriculture, enterprise software, and grocery payments. I also co-founded SmartLocker, an agtech startup automating workflows for ranchers, meat lockers, and butchers. We scaled it to 40+ commercial partners and 15,000+ users before it was acquired in 2024.

My background is a mix of design, product, and engineering. I studied research psychology and HCI at Brighton, which means I think about how people actually use things, not just how to build them. I've led teams of 20 and shipped products solo. I've secured grants, built payment systems handling billions in volume, grown platforms to hundreds of thousands of users, and co-founded a company from scratch.

Some highlights: I was a founding engineer and interim CTO at Bitcoin Layers (acquired Q1 2026), where I also contributed to open-source bitcoin research and tooling. I built digital payments at Hy-Vee supporting $11B+ in annual revenue. I helped Carry ship growth-critical pages during their scaling phase. I was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Swiss EP. And I've completed four programs at Chaincode Labs, which is basically bitcoin grad school.

These days I run Boland Company. I do AI consulting and automation for businesses that want to stop doing repetitive work manually, and product strategy for startups figuring out what to build and why.

Outside of work, I read a lot, I like hobbies that involve fermentation, and you can probably find me at a local bitdevs or a brewery.