About

I'm Mike. I live in Omaha with my wife Melanie, our son Patrick, 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). I built digital payments at Hy-Vee supporting $11B+ in annual revenue. I grew paid users 132% at AIMG's generative AI platform. I helped Carry ship growth-critical pages during their scaling phase. And I've completed four programs at Chaincode Labs, which is basically bitcoin grad school.

These days I run Boland Company, where I do product consulting for startups and build AI assistants and workflows for businesses that want to stop doing repetitive work manually.

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.

Want to work together? Say hi at hello@boland.co.