For Founders
Sharpen the narrative behind the company, the round, the category, and the next stage of growth.
- Founder narrative
- Startup storytelling
- Pitch clarity
- Strategic positioning
- Media narrative
First full-time new media hire at NBC
Michael Conniff helped build the first era of digital media. Today, he works where story, capital, technology, and culture meet, helping founders sharpen consequential ideas, investors recognize what matters, and audiences understand what comes next.
Michael’s career has moved through journalism, television, digital media, entrepreneurship, venture, fiction, education, and podcasting. These are not disconnected chapters. Each one reflects the same instinct: recognize a shift early, understand the people inside it, and communicate the idea clearly enough for others to act.
Sharpen the narrative behind the company, the round, the category, and the next stage of growth.
Explore the companies, ideas, and media shifts shaping the path from emerging opportunity to durable value.
Books, essays, conversations, and frameworks for people who believe better writing still changes the room.
Michael was working inside digital media before most people had language for it.
History, politics, writing, and the intellectual foundations beneath the work.
The first full-time new media hire inside one of the world’s major broadcast institutions.
Building companies, products, media experiments, and new ways of publishing.
Helping founders communicate why their idea deserves attention, belief, and capital.
Working at the intersection of founders, investors, growth, and emerging opportunity.
AI, media, publishing, culture, and the next wave of human storytelling.
Michael works with founders and leadership teams to uncover the narrative beneath the business, clarify the stakes, and communicate the company in a way investors, customers, talent, and media can understand.
Growth-stage opportunity, strategic relationships, and the stories behind companies preparing for their next chapter.
Visit Murray Lane Ventures →Conversations with founders, operators, investors, and people building what the rest of us will notice later.
Listen to The Accelerator →A direct, practical, and occasionally rule-breaking approach to writing with clarity, rhythm, and force.
Discover Write Good! →Fiction, history, cultural commentary, digital experiments, and work that refuses to stay in a single category. The Book of O’Kells reached Amazon’s Top Ten in Historical Fiction.
Explore the Library →A writer’s writer who knows rules are made to be broken.
Michael brings the perspective of a media pioneer, founder, investor, author, educator, and podcast host to conversations about what has changed, what has not, and what people are still getting wrong.
Sample editorial directions for the redesign. Placeholder content, not yet published.
Why the tools that flood the market with content make a genuine point of view more valuable, not less.
Read →Lessons from pitching new media to a legacy institution, years before most people had email.
Read →How the strongest narratives move investors from evaluating a feature to backing a future.
Read →A curated dispatch from Michael Conniff for founders, investors, writers, and curious people who prefer to notice a shift before it gets a conference panel.
Sharp ideas. No inbox furniture.
Michael Conniff is a digital media pioneer, founder, investor, author, and speaker. He was the first person hired full-time in new media at NBC, is Founder and Chairman of Murray Lane Ventures, and serves as an Expert-in-Residence with Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs. He is also a Harvard honors graduate in History and an Amazon Top Ten historical fiction author.
Michael works with founders and leadership teams on the narrative beneath the business: clarifying the stakes, sharpening the pitch and category story, and shaping a message that investors, customers, talent, and media can understand. He teaches Storytelling for Startup workshops and mentors founders through programs including Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs and the AWS Global Fintech Accelerator.
Murray Lane Ventures is the investment firm Michael Conniff founded and chairs, working at the intersection of founders, investors, growth, and emerging opportunity, including the stories behind companies preparing for their next chapter.
Yes. Michael speaks and appears on air about the future of media, storytelling in the age of AI, founder narrative, and how the first digital revolution informs the next. He is also the host of The Accelerator podcast. Use the contact options on this page to start a conversation.
Michael is the author of Write Good! and the Book of O’Kells series, including Mother Nature, which reached Amazon’s Top Ten in Historical Fiction. His essays and ongoing writing appear on his Substack and across the work collected on this site.