MichaelAaron Flicker and the trouble with the clock

A grandmother’s $100 check is an unusually modest opening scene for a venture firm. In 1997, MichaelAaron Flicker and a high school classmate used that backing to start XenoPsi, an internet programming business. The founders were entering high school. Nearly three decades later, Flicker is still working on the business that began there. Its ambitions, however, have moved well beyond getting a website to work.

The early company had a practical assignment: help businesses use the internet and prepare their computer systems for Y2K. Flicker was learning entrepreneurship while other people were learning algebra. His father, who had started his own law practice, supplied a model of independence. Being his own boss appealed to Flicker because it offered freedom over his time and the ability to change direction. Freedom would turn out to involve quite a lot of obligations.

The football game that lost to a website

At Boston College, on a day when the football team was playing Maryland, Flicker had a client website to launch. He joined the tailgate. Then the launch ran into trouble. His friends went to the game; he stayed behind with his laptop in the bed of a pickup truck, working for hours until the site was live. A truck is a versatile vehicle. On this occasion it also served as an office with particularly poor access to the match.

Another college summer offered the opposite problem. He and his founding partner had cleared their schedules for substantial projects. The work moved, changed or disappeared, leaving them together with nothing to do and no money coming in. The lesson he took was to keep several opportunities alive. These two memories make a useful pair: sometimes the customer needs everything at once, and sometimes the calendar’s promised riches evaporate. Neither experience rewards a founder who has confused a plan with a guarantee.

One company, several reinventions

The company’s own chronology reads like a record of the internet acquiring new jobs. Business consulting arrived in 2005, when the founders graduated from college. Political consulting followed in 2007. Marketing and advertising became a discipline in 2009. Each extension placed the original technical business in a different relationship with its customers: helping them solve operational problems, reach voters or sell products. Flicker stayed with the enterprise as its work changed.

In 2014, XenoPsi opened its New York headquarters with 30 full-time team members. By 2018, the team numbered more than 60 and a fund for XenoPsi Ventures had opened. In 2022, the business moved to separate operating companies, with an aggregate team of more than 90. The sequence matters more than any single headcount. It shows a founder gradually giving distinct kinds of work their own organizational homes. A business started by school friends had become something requiring a portfolio rather than one description on a business card.

The clock was the problem

Flicker’s dissatisfaction with agency economics centered on a simple incentive. When payment rises with hours worked, finishing quickly can reduce the agency’s earnings. The client wants speed; the supplier’s clock rewards duration. In 2022, he described Function Growth’s alternative: agree on a fixed price for defined work, then participate in revenue or profit growth. XenoPsi Ventures could also supply investment capital. It was an attempt to make the financial arrangement reflect what both parties wanted to happen.

“We put skin in the game.”

MichaelAaron Flicker

Shared returns bring shared exposure. The arrangement places the agency closer to an owner’s position, where an attractive campaign is useful only if the business benefits. By 2022, XenoPsi was using revenue shares and equity agreements alongside its launch of independent operating companies. That year it entered the Inc. 5000 at No. 4,625, with reported three-year growth of 93 percent. The figures describe that period, rather than a promise about what comes next. The choice of compensation, though, remains central to Flicker’s account of how he builds businesses.

Shady Rays supplied a concrete case. Flicker recalled meeting a sunglasses business whose founder had products shipped from his father’s living room. The brand needed help with its identity, website and advertising. He said its monthly sales were around $300,000 when XenoPsi became involved, and its annual sales later exceeded $40 million in 2021. Those are different time periods, and they should stay different on the page. The useful point is the scope of the relationship: a young company needed a functioning commercial operation, with several capabilities arriving together.

A sock business puts the theory on the shelf

Wellow brought Flicker across the line from advising a consumer brand to operating one. It launched in November 2021 without outside investment. His professional services businesses and his owned brands now sat in the same portfolio, giving him a place to apply ideas with his own capital at stake. A brand consultant can recommend a course of action and await the client’s decision. An owner has to live with the resulting orders, costs and customer experience.

The early commercial result was measurable: Wellow generated more than $1 million in sales in its first seven months. The name was an application of sound symbolism, chosen to suggest ease and likeability. It is an especially small piece of business architecture, just six letters. Yet a name must work before anyone has encountered the product itself. Flicker’s interest in consumer behavior reaches down to decisions of that size.

Why a familiar brand works

His partnership with behavioral science author Richard Shotton gave that interest a public outlet. Together they co-founded the Consumer Behavior Lab and host Behavioral Science for Brands. The program examines brands, campaigns and research with an emphasis on practical use. Its guests have included Rory Sutherland and Adam Alter. The setting lets Flicker move between running businesses and asking questions about the choices people make, with a collaborator whose own work concentrates on the psychology of buying.

By the hundredth episode, the pair were looking back over an archive of examples. Flicker singled out their discussion of Eleven Madison Park and the peak-end rule. In the example they discussed, a wine pairing directed more of its budget toward a memorable final glass instead of spreading the expenditure evenly. Flicker liked the idea of making a particular moment unforgettable, even at the cost of spending less elsewhere. It is a telling preference for someone who has spent years reconsidering how resources are allocated.

They also revisited the Don’t Mess with Texas campaign. Flicker drew attention to the possibility of using an audience’s existing state pride, rather than first trying to remake its entire worldview. The practical attraction is obvious. A marketer has a budget and a task, and the audience has a life already in progress. Finding a motive that is present can be a more manageable assignment than installing an entirely new one. His questions keep returning to the smaller job that might accomplish the larger goal.

The collaboration became Hacking the Human Mind, published in September 2025. The book examines 17 brands through behavioral science, including familiar names such as Apple, Dyson and Starbucks. In their episode about the book, Flicker recalled an idea that had begun well before their fiftieth podcast installment: take what they were discovering together and develop it into a deeper project. Holding the finished book, he spoke with the pleasure of someone seeing a long-running conversation acquire a spine and a cover.

In a March 2026 conversation, he made a useful correction when the host suggested he had worked with the book’s 17 brands. The book analyzes those brands; inclusion does not mean they were his clients. He explained that the purpose was to use academic studies to make their choices intelligible to entrepreneurs. It is an important distinction for a writer whose business also involves consulting. A case study earns its place through what it teaches, rather than through proximity to a famous logo.

Grandmother gets a second vote

Persuasion invites a question about limits. In the same radio conversation, Flicker described a publicity principle: consider whether you would be embarrassed if your tactics appeared in the newspaper and your grandmother read them. His discussion concerned the way brands suggest national origins and borrow cultural associations. The test does not remove difficult judgments, but it gives the entrepreneur a recognizable audience for them. The grandmother who helped fund the business reappears, in principle, as someone whose opinion the business ought to survive.

Speaking about strategy, he brought similar care to everyday language. He advised businesses with many capabilities to concentrate their message on the buyer’s most pressing problem. A long list of things a company can do may feel reassuring to its owner while becoming less convincing to its audience. For individuals, too, he recommended a central thesis supported by other strengths. Coming from a founder with several companies, the advice has a certain dry charm: a crowded portfolio need not require a crowded sentence.

His teaching method follows a clear sequence. He begins with a story, then considers the research and its application. The examples make an abstract commercial problem visible. This is where his professional interests meet his education: at Boston College he studied political science and philosophy in the Honors Program, writing his senior thesis on language and communication. Words, arguments and the listener’s interpretation were subjects of study before they became tools in his marketing work.

The conversations continue. In October 2026, Flicker and Shotton reached episode 139 with a discussion of a KitKat campaign built around a stolen truckload of chocolate. The subject brought scarcity, unfinished business and audience participation into the same episode. Even a supply-chain mishap can become something to examine: what did people notice, and what made them want to join in?

An experiment without a winner

Away from the portfolio, Flicker serves as executive director of Super Science Saturday in northern New Jersey. He is a former student of the event’s founder, teacher Jim Wallace. In 2015, the two accepted the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame’s Advancement of Invention & Process Award on behalf of the event’s volunteer executive committee. The recognition went to a science celebration sustained over many years, a different kind of enterprise from a consumer brand.

Flicker has emphasized its noncompetitive format, where children and adults present projects together. The point is to talk, learn and enjoy the demonstrations. That arrangement offers another version of the question running through his career: what does the setup encourage people to do? An hourly fee encourages one behavior; a shared return encourages another. A science event with no winner gives curiosity room to take the lead. He has kept building settings in which a different incentive might produce a different result.