Michael Conniff

Bio

Michael Conniff graduated from Harvard with honors in History and won a summer fellowship at the Harvard Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was the first Harvard writing instructor to use word processing as a teaching tool and is considered a pioneer in the online world. He is now an Expert-in-Residence at Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs. Mr. Conniff is co-founder of the Isaacson School for New Media in Aspen—selected Faculty of the Year by students—and founded the Digital Story Lab at Colorado Mountain College. He was also the first person hired full-time in the new media at NBC. He teaches his Storytelling for Startup workshops all over the world. His novel, BOOK OF O’KELLS: MOTHER NATURE, reached the Amazon Top Ten list for Historical Fiction. The author of more than a dozen published short stories, he was selected as a Sokolov Scholar in Fiction at the Breadloaf Writers Conference. THE GOOD EGG—from the BOOK OF O’KELLS—was the first and only novel ever conceived and consummated on Facebook. In addition, he has written several original TV pilots and screenplays—and the how-to book WRITE GOOD! He has also founded many companies, including INTERACTIVE SPORTS, Post Time Media, Media New Service, High Comm Group—and three nonprofits. In addition, he is the host of The Accelerator podcast; co-chair of the Media Committee at Holt Xchange in Montreal, Canada; a Partner at the KLIC l KALCHURI LNCT GROUP INCUBATION CENTERS in Bhopal, India; a Senior Adviser to Unify Platform (UNIPLAT) in Zug, Switzerland; Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Starta VC in New York; a Mentor at NewChip Accelerator in Austin, Texas; a member of the Customer Experience Advisory Board at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business; and the Editor-at-Large at SKI TV. For fun, Mr. Conniff plays drums. Mr. Conniff cut his teeth in the industry as a copyboy and then, as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, Baltimore News American, and Boston Herald. He has started five independent news services and co-founded Interactive Sports to pioneer analytics, fan marketing, and the interactive information network at MCI Center in Washington, D.C., one of the first such systems of its kind. He is the former host of Con Games in Aspen, the #1-rated radio talk show in the Aspen market. He was the editor-in-chief of the blog Aspen Post and editor-at-large at Aspen Peak magazine. He also helped to establish an emergency fund for veterans on Colorado's Western Slope.