Mike McHargue

Booking me for a stage, a panel, or a program? This is the bio to copy and paste. It’s written in the third person so you don’t have to — and you’re welcome to trim it. If you need something I haven’t covered here, just ask: hello@robot.rodeo.

Mike McHargue is a strategist, advisor, speaker, and founder of Robot Rodeo, where he helps ambitious people and organizations figure out what to do when the future gets weird.

His career has never fit neatly into one lane. Before becoming a bestselling author and building a podcast audience of millions, Mike spent sixteen years in the agency world, ultimately serving simultaneously as Vice President of New Media and CTO at a TBWA agency.

Since then, Google has brought him in repeatedly to speak, think strategically, and help shape products. Marvel Studios called on him to help imagine how the Marvel Cinematic Universe could become a multiverse. Netflix has brought him in to help rescue stories collapsing under their own narrative complexity and to think through the implications of user-generated content.

Today, Mike serves as Chief Evangelist at Applied Wonder, an experiential technology company building new ways for people to connect, create, and collaborate. He also helps lead Protixa, a biotechnology company developing novel peptide delivery technologies, and Cell Wellness, a consumer health and beauty company translating emerging science into products people actually want to use.

Across all of it, Mike’s work has followed the same thread: taking complicated systems, finding the human story inside them, and helping people see possibilities they couldn’t see before.

He’s usually brought in when the problem is hard to name, the disciplines don’t naturally fit together, and the obvious answer is probably the wrong one.