Welcome to the Second in Command Podcast, produced by the C.O. Alliance and brought to

its founder Cameron Herald.

In the second-in-command podcast, we talked to top COOs who share the insights, strategies,

and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief. And now here's your host

Cameron Harold.

Michael Koenig is the chief operating officer at Time Doctor, a remote company made up of 150 people, spread across 40 countries.

He was brought on in May of 2020 to operationalize the company during a phase of explosive growth and to scale the organization.

Michael's a passionate promoter of remote work. He got his first taste of it as an early employee at

automatic, the makers of website platformpress where he spent six years helping increase their market share to power over 35% of websites

Through his years of a leadership experience at automatic time Time Doctor, and Sweet, he participates as a

tech store's mentor and serves as a board member and advisor to the startups and non-profits.

So Michael, welcome to the Second Command Podcast.

Thanks for having me on. Delight. Michael, welcome to the Second Command podcast.

Thanks for having me on, delighted to be here. Yeah, I would love to kind of go back into some of your past

and then I want to talk a little bit about what you've kind of pulled

from being involved in TechStars as well, but why don't you just walk us through kind of how you got to hear, where your career started and what got you here?

Wow, yeah, it's been quite a serendipitous route to be honest. And what I mean by that is I studied philosophy in college, which as one of my friend says prepares you for everything but also prepares you for nothing and so when I got out of college

I played the bass guitar and I ended up falling into a band with two other venture capitalists and some other famous folks and it was an 80s punk cover band. I hated the music so they named it the Michael

Canig experience despite me and they liked me and took me under the wing one became my mentor and he got me into tech. So going from philosophy to tech, I mean, it's pretty serendipitous there just in terms of making that connection and finding that first mentor to bring me in.

And then beyond that, I started off in early stage tech companies and have the opportunity to wear many hats,

which is something that you always get to do in those early companies

and early days where everyone just needs to, it's all hands on deck, everyone needs to do what they have to do. And I was fortunate to again learn from some great folks along the way go through a couple of

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