Who we are

Mike is a longtime leader of startups and entrepreneurial efforts within larger organizations. In recent years, he has led efforts to commercialize a variety of AI technologies, culminating in serving as CEO of Modality AI, a venture-backed startup that analyzes data from both speech and video to model the progression of neurological conditions.  

In addition to the leadership and communications coaching he has pursued for a major international consulting firm, Mike has decades of experience in the discipline of product development, product management and product marketing.  With a focus in educational technologies, Mike has led teams that have created everything from the first online preparation for attorneys taking bar exams to a game team as it transitioned from waterfall and Flash to agile and Unity.

Mike graduated With Honors and Magna Cum Laude from Brown University.  He went on to earn a Ph.D. from UCLA as an Alfred Longueil Fellow.  He has taught everything from American Literature to Javascript at UCLA, Georgia Tech, as well as other schools.

A co-founder, Daryl works at the nexus of leadership, culture, and strategy to advise top leaders and leadership teams of some of the most globally recognized and innovative game orgs. His client service over the past two decades has enabled him to advance the leadership of iconic game franchises as well as to collaborate with game teams to help launch exciting new IP. In addition to cultivating long-term advising relationships, Daryl invests in designing high-impact game org and team diagnostics that generate distinctive insights on behalf of informing successful and sustainable game development.

Daryl enjoys working with gaming leaders across a broad spectrum of common inflection points within the industry, including starting up new studios, kicking off new games, scaling game teams, imagining (and re-imagining) studio culture, navigating successful post-M&A integrations, designing impactful processes, optimizing leadership transitions, building leadership capacity, and planning for succession, among other many defining situations.  

Daryl is a founding partner of Kenning Associates LLP, a leadership development consultancy, where he has served the leadership of Fortune 500 companies and major professional services firms. A former faculty member at Georgia Tech, Daryl is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Occidental College and has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He completed his graduate training at Cambridge University during a two-year Graduate Research Fellowship. 

Shannon is a game developer, industry leader, board member, mentor and coach. She recently retired after nearly 30 years at Microsoft, primarily making games, building teams, and launching platforms. Most recently Shannon was studio head for World’s Edge, Microsoft’s studio focused on all things Age of Empires.

Shannon studied computer science and mathematics at Duke University. She joined Microsoft in 1993 and quickly migrated to the Entertainment Product Unit. Her earliest work focused on the creation of online card-playing games, utilizing the emerging consumer potential of the internet and social game design. Shannon has been responsible for multiplayer games across all of Microsoft’s gaming platforms (console – including Kinect, PC, Hololens, and mobile platforms), including the Madness series (Motocross Madness, Monster Truck Madness, and Midtown Madness), Project Gotham Racing, the Fable series, the Viva Pinata series, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, and many others. In total, Shannon has contributed to more than 50 games.

Shannon has created and led many global teams, including games publishing teams, interactive television teams, and internal game development studios (most notably, Good Science, the team responsible for greenlighting and shipping the Kinect with full-motion games and core in 2010). Prior to World’s Edge, Shannon built and ran the Microsoft Studios 1st Party Global Publishing team focused on such AAA franchises as Crackdown, State of Decay, and the Microsoft Casual Suite. In her free time, Shannon enjoys playing video games, running, and travelling with her husband and two sons.