Michael Schreibmann has a preference that makes perfect sense in consulting and sounds faintly suspicious everywhere else: begin at the end. Before the roadmap, before the prototype, before anyone has ordered a celebratory lunch, decide what the business ought to make possible. Then work backward. It is a useful way to save an ambitious idea from becoming an expensive hobby.
He is CEO and co-founder of Star, a technology consultancy whose work connects business strategy with design and engineering. The company began in Silicon Valley in 2008 as Cogniance. Its founding problem was wonderfully unglamorous: the distance between having an idea and getting a product into somebody’s hands. That distance can contain an astonishing number of meetings.
A company built around the gap
Schreibmann’s earlier working life included PwC, CSC and Sonopia. He and fellow founder Juha Christensen had worked together at a venture-funded Silicon Valley startup. They were frustrated by the difficulty of finding one consulting partner capable of accompanying a young business from an initial concept to a finished product. Cogniance was their answer.
The founding team also included Sergii Gorpynich, Star’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The combination matters to the story: Schreibmann’s company has always had to reconcile commercial ambition with what designers and engineers can actually deliver. A promising proposition has to survive contact with a budget, a deadline and a user with somewhere else to be.
The name changed in February 2019. At that point, Cogniance described a workforce of 750 people across strategy, design, engineering and marketing. Christensen reported average annual growth of 32 percent during the first decade. Those are figures from that moment, a photograph of the business rather than a claim about its size today.
Schreibmann’s contribution to the rebrand announcement was less interested in the new stationery than in the work behind a successful product. An idea needs people to design it, build it and use it. It also needs a commercial strategy. The company was organizing itself around those connected requirements. The shorter name arrived with a fairly demanding job description.
“There are no shortcuts to success.”Michael Schreibmann, 2019
The finish line comes first
Star gives its approach a name: Endgame Thinking. The basic sequence is straightforward. Describe a worthwhile future outcome. Examine the organization’s resources, capabilities and market. Work backward to the steps that could connect the two. Revisit those steps as circumstances change. The destination supplies direction; operational realities supply the occasional necessary interruption.
Schreibmann and Christensen helped develop and promote the approach. It asks clients to make their ambitions specific enough to guide actual choices. A company might know that it wants to grow, for instance, without having decided what lasting difference its product should make for customers. Endgame Thinking puts that second question near the beginning.
- 01 / Picture the outcomeWhat should customers gain?
- 02 / Work backwardWhich capabilities and milestones are needed?
- 03 / Act in the presentBuild, learn and adjust the route.
In March 2024, Star took the concept into an Innovation and Disruption Leaders documentary available on CBSnews.com. Its announcement described planning horizons of three, five or eight years. The point was to make a long-term objective useful to the people making short-term decisions. An attractive future is rather easier to describe than to finance, staff and build.
The same announcement placed the company’s cumulative work at more than 1,000 projects. It presented Endgame Thinking as an approach refined through client engagements, with immediate problems and longer ambitions considered together. Schreibmann’s role in that public explanation was characteristic: connect the promise of a future result to a disciplined way of getting there.
A founder’s friends are a forgiving market
His advice to startup founders makes the method more personal. In August 2024, he warned against becoming overly attached to a product because a supportive circle likes it. Friends and family are excellent company. As a testing environment for a business model, they can be dangerously agreeable.
He wanted founders to define the value their business would deliver, including the effect on their customers’ customers. That extra step is particularly relevant when the buyer and the eventual user are different people. A founder can satisfy a procurement process and still build something the person at the other end finds tiresome.
Schreibmann’s questions extend into operations: what must the company become capable of doing to solve the problem it has chosen? A different business model or a missing skill may matter more than another feature. His argument gives founders permission to change the machinery of the plan while keeping its purpose under examination.
It also introduces a useful restraint. Setting an endgame takes discussion and reflection. He treats that time as part of the work. For a young company, committing early to the wrong objective can consume resources it will struggle to replace. Enthusiasm supplies momentum; it deserves a destination chosen with some care.
Ten years ahead, feet on the floor
In April 2024, Schreibmann explored another version of the future question through Star’s 10Forward research. Rather than merely predicting where a company would stand in 2034, he asked what value its leaders wanted to create by then. The change in wording moves responsibility back toward the people making decisions today.
The project used four deliberately extreme future scenarios. His explanation emphasized understanding the wider environment, looking honestly at the organization’s current capabilities and bringing those two views together. Scenario planning becomes more useful when it tests a business’s adaptability rather than furnishing a collection of interesting predictions.
He also wrote as a father, conscious that present decisions shape the world that follows them. That connection lends his future-facing business language a more ordinary scale. Ten years is a strategic horizon on a slide. Within a family, it is a considerable stretch of growing up.
Later that year, Schreibmann, Gorpynich and Christensen jointly described Star’s movement from product development toward a wider technology consultancy. Their account put strategy advice, experiences, data, cloud systems, AI and enterprise platforms within one continuing client relationship. The business had expanded the range of work it intended to own.
The emphasis was on connected systems and implementation over time. Existing technology, business objectives and customer expectations all have to meet somewhere. For Schreibmann, the consulting opportunity sits in making those connections work. His co-founders’ joint account suggests an organization trying to apply its own long-view thinking to its changing services.
AI arrives with a management problem
Star had launched Start.AI in December 2023. The offering began with an assessment of an organization’s infrastructure and readiness, before identifying where AI could be useful. Its sequence fits the company’s broader habit: establish the conditions, decide what matters and then choose how to build.
That is a less theatrical opening than a demonstration in which everything works on the first attempt. It is also closer to the circumstances of an existing business. New capabilities must join tools, processes and obligations already in motion. An organization cannot begin each technology shift with an empty desk.
By June 2026, Schreibmann was distinguishing between improving an existing business with AI and using AI to create a different one. His writing separated optimization from transformation, while treating both as legitimate work. He also asked leaders to decide which human relationships and responsibilities they intended to preserve.
There is a revealing division of attention between the co-founders. Gorpynich describes the logic of AI-native systems; Schreibmann presses the broader question of what an AI-native business should be. People, judgment and accountability belong in that definition. A company is a social arrangement with customers, rather more complicated than a collection of efficient components.
In July, he sharpened the management argument. He described rebuilding an organization’s mix of skills and roles around new capabilities, including training and moving people into different work. He placed those decisions with the CEO. Buying technology does not settle who does what next, or how quickly a team can absorb the change.
His September essay turned toward customers. He argued for clear limits on AI authority, meaningful ways for users to intervene and access to a person when circumstances require it. The ability to stop or reverse an interaction belongs in the experience from the beginning. Convenience is more appealing when it comes with an exit.
Someone still has to show up
Away from the corporate argument, his examples are refreshingly domestic. In a reflection on 2025, he described using AI for family travel planning and preparing sessions for the soccer team he coaches. He also talked about autonomous driving becoming an ordinary presence around Silicon Valley. Technology reaches his account through daily routines as well as client work.
His October 2026 writing offered a different routine. Running grew out of evening neighborhood walks after his children had gone to bed. Listening to James Clear’s Atomic Habits helped shape the gradual progression; eventually he jogged to collect his son from school. He is a father of three, fitting the activity around a crowded day.
What interests him is the obligation involved. A distance cannot be delegated. The parallel with his business thinking is easy to see: choose the outcome, accept the work and keep returning to it. The finish line may come first in the plan. Someone still has to cover the ground.