Michael Preuss leads go-to-market (marketing and sales) at VRIFY, a verticalized-AI company for the mining and mineral-exploration industry whose DORA platform puts AI-assisted mineral discovery in the hands of geoscientists. A builder-operator by nature, he came up through roughly a decade of front-end engineering, ran his own digital/e-commerce design agency, built a product-design team for Lululemon's e-commerce business, and built a growth-marketing team at GitLab before joining VRIFY in August 2024 to stand up its marketing org and an ABM sales motion. His thesis: the zero-interest-rate 'peacetime' era of servant leadership is over, and in an AI-first, wartime environment leaders must practice 'active leadership' — leading from the front, doing the work, and being 'micro-interested' rather than micromanaging.
“While I do think AI has killed servant-based leadership, I think it was already on the ropes. Once the zero-percent interest rate era ended, money started becoming a little harder to come by.”
“AI doesn't have career aspirations. So if you're the servant to the AI, and we have these agentic systems that are just built to do and accomplish and don't have emotions — who are we serving?”
“I ask everyone on my team to write a Post-it note and put it on their main screen that says, 'How can AI help me do what I'm just about to do?'”
“No one likes a micromanager — it appropriately has a negative connotation. This 'micro-interested' concept was the first time I'd come across someone putting language to what's in between that gap.”
“Trust, to me, the equation is consistency over time equals trust.”
“At a certain point you have no right to complain about your team, because your job is to make your team.”
“AI doesn't have taste. AI takes prompts, AI shows you a thing, and then you have to determine if that's good or not.”
“I'm not going to sit as a barista at my local coffee shop waiting for the straight line to where I'm going to go.”