Michael
Zacharski

A career in three tickers and one interim title

Michael Zacharski is currently the Interim Chief Executive Officer of Decide, the St. Louis company that started life as LockerDome and spent a decade explaining social ad tech to publishers. The word "interim" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Boards use it when they want a real operator in the chair without the ceremony of a permanent search. In Zacharski's case, boards have used it, and its more permanent cousins, roughly four times.

He has been CEO of bRealTime, CEO of EMX Digital (ENGINE Media Exchange, a Big Village subsidiary), CEO of Balihoo Inc., and CEO of Brand Engagement Network, the personalized-AI company that combined with DHC Acquisition Corp. and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker BNAI in March 2024. When Paul Chang was promoted to CEO of BEN in August 2024, Zacharski stepped down as co-CEO. He did not, however, sit down.

He runs his own consulting shop, M2M5 Co, where he is titled CEO & Lead Consultant, which is a polite way of saying he is one person with an LLC. He is an Executive in Residence at Progress Partners, the merchant bank that likes to keep senior operators on the bench between deals. He is on the board of the IAB Tech Lab, the standards body that decides what "programmatic" actually means before the rest of the industry has to comply. And now, Decide.

From CPXi to BNAI, one acronym at a time

Adtech loves acronyms. It also loves career paths that look, on paper, like a random walk through venture-backed logos. Zacharski's is more coherent than most. He started at CPXi, an ad marketplace, and moved up from Vice President to Chief Operating Officer, working on business and product development. Then COO at Digital Remedy. Then CEO at bRealTime, where he spent 2016 to 2018 building an automated global exchange for demand-side and supply-side partners. Engine Group acquired bRealTime, and Zacharski absorbed the acquirer's technology practice along with his existing marketplace. That got repackaged as EMX Digital, and later as ENGINE Media Exchange, and eventually Big Village.

Somewhere in there, he also ran Balihoo. When BEN went public via SPAC, he was in the CEO chair. All told, that is more than two decades of running programmatic infrastructure, and roughly twelve years focused specifically on the messy middle of digital media buying, the part where publishers, exchanges, and DSPs argue about auction mechanics.

Zacharski's own take, from a 2018 interview: relationships still matter. Automation is fine. Machine learning is fine. Someone still has to pick up the phone.

Why St. Louis matters right now

Decide is the current name for the company that used to be LockerDome. LockerDome, for anyone who missed it, raised roughly $16.3 million in venture funding, including a $10 million Series B in December 2014, employed something in the neighborhood of 43 people, and operated out of an office on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis. It was co-founded by Gabe Lozano and pitched itself, at various times, as a social sports network, a native advertising platform, and a decision engine. That last framing is the one that stuck. The renaming to Decide is doing more than cosmetic work.

Zacharski's job, as best as can be inferred from the pattern of every previous role, is not to invent Decide's next act from scratch. It is to figure out which parts of the old business can be salvaged, which parts have to be shut down, and which conversations with customers, partners, and creditors need to happen in the next 90 days. That is the interim CEO job description in adtech. He has done it before.

The path, roughly annotated

Passionate. His word, not ours.

Asked in a MarTech Series interview to describe his work in a single word, Zacharski picked "passionate." That is the kind of answer you give when the interviewer is expecting "driven" or "curious" and you want to skip the corporate warm-up. He also volunteered that he stays organized with list-making and notebooks, which is a very analog admission from a person whose day job is automated auction infrastructure. He said the best advice he ever received was to do what he loved, because time is short and money cannot buy happiness. He said it, and then took an AI company public on Nasdaq. Both things can coexist.

He has founded and operated multiple startups in music and entertainment, with two successful exits, before pivoting fully into adtech. That helps explain the pattern. Founders who exit music companies do not usually end up steadying B2B SaaS balance sheets. Except when they do.

Where Decide sits, in bars

Figures reflect publicly available data on Decide (formerly LockerDome) at time of writing. They are provided for context, not audit.

Small details that stick

How search engines will find him

Questions people actually ask

Where to find him