The company needed a name before it needed a brand strategy. Mike Schmidt and Luke Bucklin were on their way to their first client meeting, with Bucklin piloting the plane. An unnamed software business was about to introduce itself. Schmidt and Bucklin reached for the aviation alphabet: Sierra for Schmidt, Bravo for Bucklin. Mike Derheim, their third co-founder, lost his Delta to the demands of brevity. Even the founding paperwork had an editor.
Sierra Bravo began in 2003. The three had worked together at Minnesota Internet before setting up on their own. Their starting capital, in the founders’ account, was $153 in pooled pocket change. That is a sum small enough to remember without a spreadsheet. The more consequential investment came afterward: work, retained profits and the willingness to keep building a company whose main resource was its people.
By December 2010, the business had announced that it would become The Nerdery, a name it had already been using alongside Sierra Bravo. Schmidt retold the airborne naming episode in a memo to employees, including the apology to Derheim. The new name described the people doing the work more directly. The original name, meanwhile, preserved an unusually literal piece of founder history: two surnames, translated for radio.
The programmer who arrived after school
Schmidt’s entry into software came later than the familiar childhood-computer story. Technology was not part of daily life at home. He encountered an Apple IIe in high-school classes, but the interest did not immediately become a career. He initially chose against college. In his late twenties, he enrolled in an evening software-development program and discovered an aptitude for the work.
His first software job brought early advancement and the two colleagues with whom he would start Nerdery. Recalling those years, he credited Bucklin with teaching him about people, integrity and the quality of the work. He also described a revealing hiring question: “Tell me about one of the biggest mistakes you made.” An applicant unable to discuss a meaningful mistake raised doubts about experience or humility.
Away from work, his interests include fishing, skiing and wake surfing, along with time with his family. The public biography has room for both the executive and the person who would like to get outside. His career began with evening classes; it eventually included helping establish another route into the profession.
When everybody got the president’s title
Nerdery developed an unusual answer to a familiar management problem: give employees the title co-president. Bucklin had urged colleagues to think beyond the boundaries of their formal roles. After his death in a 2010 plane crash, Derheim and Schmidt carried the idea forward. New hires learned the story and what the title was meant to require of them.
The practical meaning was freedom paired with responsibility for the business. Employees could raise concerns through an internal forum and speak at Friday gatherings in the “nerdatorium.” In Derheim’s account of distributed leadership, the company depended on the contributions of people across design, development and quality assurance. The joke in the title came with an expectation of participation.
This history also has its less decorative passages. During the company’s early growth, staffing cuts followed periods when expectations ran ahead of business. The founders’ description of financing emphasized cash reserves, sweat equity and reinvested profits. The co-president idea existed inside a business that still had budgets, difficult decisions and customers to satisfy. A generous title did not abolish the arithmetic.
“Tell me about one of the biggest mistakes you made.”
Mike Schmidt / a question for job candidates
Seventeen years before the CEO job
Schmidt co-founded Nerdery in 2003 and became chief executive in 2020. Between those dates he held technology and board leadership roles, including CIO and board chair. The interval matters: the company had been through multiple stages and leadership arrangements before he took the chief executive’s seat. Founding the business and running it as CEO were separated by seventeen years.
He was involved in choosing other leaders along the way. When Adrian Slobin became CEO in 2018, Schmidt publicly emphasized his willingness to lead change and develop the company’s capabilities. In October 2020, Schmidt himself stepped into the role. The stated direction remained work on complex projects for larger companies, rather than a larger collection of smaller engagements.
Early in his CEO tenure, Nerdery appointed Laura Etches to lead marketing and Chris Cobb to lead design. The February 2021 announcement put experience design within the company’s broader business strategy. Schmidt described the appointments in terms of serving clients’ digital needs. The company was selling the combined work of strategy, design and engineering, with leadership roles to match.
Another organizational change brought former general counsel Peter Carlson into a vice-president role leading a new partnerships division. Its remit included cloud and product relationships, new client opportunities and joint product accelerators. Schmidt’s explanation placed partners within the work of delivering digital products. Even a company full of software specialists needed relationships outside its own walls.
Archival photograph: Nancy Kuehn / Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
Opening another door into technology
In 2014, Schmidt co-founded Prime Digital Academy, a bootcamp for full-stack engineering and user experience. It addressed Minnesota’s technology talent pipeline through focused training. Alongside his work at Nerdery, the academy adds an education venture to his record: another organization concerned with who gets to do technical work, and how they acquire the skills.
Nerdery’s October 2022 partnership with Amplify addressed a different point of access. Amplify’s Featured Founder sessions brought attention and connections to entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities. Nerdery agreed to cover the subscription costs of Amplify’s software. It was a specific commitment behind the broader language of support: somebody had to pay for the tools that made the program possible.
Schmidt endorsed the effort to help underfunded and underrepresented founders share their stories and reach partners. The sessions had featured entrepreneurs including Bella Lam of Coconut Whisk, Mu Okonkwo of SitEatApp and Jules Porter of Seraph7 Studios. The arrangement concerned access to people and resources as well as technology itself.
- 2003Co-founds the business
- 2014Co-founds Prime Digital Academy
- 2020Becomes Nerdery CEO
An AI argument with people in the middle
In his 2023 outlook letter, Schmidt argued for continued investment in digital transformation during an uncertain business environment. He described work on revenue opportunities, operational efficiency, customer value and the integration of new technology with existing infrastructure. The emphasis was on what a business could accomplish with its systems, rather than the simple fact of buying newer ones.
His later “AI From the Inside” essays bring that discussion into his own organization. In one account, he describes telling a cross-functional group that Nerdery would rethink how it builds and delivers software. Roles, processes and team structures were all open for revision. The group questioned the details and then worked on a vision over two days.
He also acknowledges that a company with twenty years of established habits had become too slow for the change ahead. Nerdery adopted the Entrepreneurial Operating System, then re-examined roles and reorganized. His account includes people moving into different positions and others leaving. He uses Asimov’s Foundation to discuss organizational resilience, but the work he describes is recognizably terrestrial.
A separate essay begins with a client asking about developer rates and availability for an AI project. Within twenty minutes, the conversation had widened into strategy and organizational change. Schmidt organizes the problem into three interacting parts: technology, operations and people. A decision about a tool can require decisions about workflows, authority and skills. The three have to be considered together.
That framework is useful because it gives each part a question. What outcome should the technology achieve? How would the work change if it succeeds? Who needs to understand and support the change? Schmidt describes applying the same thinking internally while advising clients. The executive signing off on transformation is also responsible for a company undergoing it.
The software still has to deserve the trust
Schmidt’s caution about AI becomes concrete in an account from a technology-leaders’ roundtable. An employee at another organization had used AI to create a reporting tool that automated manual work. People began using it. The apparently successful tool was exposing customer information to anyone who could find its URL. The problem was discovered by luck.
His response draws a boundary between proving an idea and putting a system into service. A prototype can help test whether something is useful. Software connected to customers, live users or infrastructure needs experienced engineering and security judgment. His concern is the gap between a result that looks complete and the responsibilities that come with operating it. A working button is a persuasive little thing.
There is also a current example of the work he wants AI to do. On April 21, 2026, Nerdery announced a Google Cloud Partner of the Year award in Services and Industry Solutions: Education. Working with Google’s Rapid Innovation Team, it developed a Gemini-powered Virtual Teacher’s Assistant designed to give conversational support grounded in course content.
The company reported a 4.6-star student rating and, at one research university, 75 percent retention through the semester. Those are measures of use and experience, rather than proof of improved learning outcomes. Schmidt’s stated objective was concise: “Our goal is to deliver tangible value through AI that works at scale.”
The distance from Sierra Bravo to an AI teaching assistant spans more than two decades of changes in the tools. Schmidt has occupied several seats along the way: programmer, technology leader, board leader, CEO. His recent writing keeps returning to the people responsible for the result. The business once needed a name before landing at a meeting. Today, the harder work is deciding who owns what happens after the software is delivered.