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Somewhere around 1992, Mike discovered Usenet and Email at his college Macintosh Lab. Immediately taken with the Internet, he began to use it in his work as marketing director for The Florida Film Festival and Enzian Theatre. As Marketing Director, he learned how to use the power of narrative advertising to drive business for the burgeoning film festival, today cited as one of the top 10 in the country. The launch of the festival's website was so novel at the time, it earned coverage in the business section of the Orlando Sentinel.

In 1998, Mike left the Florida Film Festival and joined his film school friends to form Haxan Films and co-produce "The Blair Witch Project". Rather than just make a movie, they created an integrated, interactive narrative experience and developed a community around the film's mythology, resulting in a pop-culture phenomena and over $240 million dollars in world-wide box-office. The Blair Witch universe included the feature film, a one-hour television "documentary" which Mike produced and edited, a book, a comic book series, posters, and a soundtrack, all integrated within the Blair Witch narrative.

Mike realized he was much more excited by this kind of immersive and engaging entertainment than in the typical feature film production chores, and in eventually co-founded Campfire using his experience in online narrative and viral marketing to create immersive, community-building campaigns for top global and national brands.

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