Career | Side Hustles | Entrepreneurship
Meet Michael
Ex Disney and Netflix Executive | Founder
Podcast Host | Coach
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Howdy. I’m Michael Merrill. I spent the first part of my career taking one step forward and two steps back. Frustrated, I became a student of fast risers and realized there was a method to the career advancement madness. Like Neo taking the red pill in the Matrix, I began to see the world differently! Over the next 15 years I increased my earnings by 16X while advancing from an independent contributor to manager, to executive, and to a global leader at Disney and Netflix!
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Standing out as a top performer also opened up other amazing perks; autonomy, flexibility, choice of projects, bigger bonuses, and my favorite: being paid to travel all over the world to places like Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Spain, Hong Kong, Iceland and more!
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Along the way I founded The Velocity Labs. Now I help ambitious professionals fast track their careers, fatten their paychecks and bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to go in their career and life!
Meet Artin
Bestselling Author | Ex Disney Executive I Founder
Podcast Host | Coach
Shortly after graduating from film school I landed at the Walt Disney Studios. At Disney, I quickly climbed the ladder and had an executive position before I turned 30.
After several failures in filmmaking and tech startups, it finally happened. I raised $4 million, built a product, a company and a team from the ground up. As soon as we started to scale the startup got acquired. Now I was a founder with an exit. Whoot whoot.
With all the knowledge and wisdom I had gained in both the startup and corporate world in the 2 decades, I decided that I wanted to give back and help others who are in the same shoes I was in in my mid 20’s to early 30’s.
This led to the founding of “The Aspiring Founders Academy” where through books, like my Amazon Best-selling “Side Adventure: The playbook to leverage your corporate job, pursue a side venture and find happiness and fulfillment, online courses, coaching and this podcast, I’m on a mission to help 100,000 less privileged aspiring founders fast track their journey into entrepreneurship or climbing the ladder.