Origins: From Tech to Strategy
In the early 2000s, after Michael's tech company was acquired by a Fortune 500 corporation, he joined their strategy group and identified a critical pain point: executives spent more time creating PowerPoint slides and formatting charts than thinking strategically.
Michael started building interactive tools to solve the painpoint years before "AI strategy" became the latest Silicon Valley obsession. Instead of drowning in spreadsheets and slide decks, strategists could focus on what humans do best: the creative thinking, the tough trade-offs, the insights that drive real competitive advantage. Back then, AI meant if-then logic, switch statements, and decision trees. Neural networks lived in university labs, but interactive software was the original breakthrough for making strategic frameworks actually useful and approachable. We even filed for a patent decades ago for our human-AI assisted scaffolding for professionals, setting that as recorded prior art preventing anybody else from patenting it (so long ago it would have expired by now).
The INSEAD Years
When Blue Ocean Strategy creators Profs. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne discovered the interactive tool, they embraced the project and invited Michael to INSEAD as a research fellow at the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, a part of INSEAD Research. For over a decade in Fontainebleau, France, he refined the interactive system: building software, writing case studies, stress-testing frameworks with executives who had real problems to solve. Much like generative AI itself emerged from serious research labs, VSTRAT continued being developed from rigorous academic development at one of the world's elite business schools.
Integrating Generative AI
When generative AI finally matured, Michael, working with Anastassia who was also at the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, started working with INSEAD Dean of Innovation Prof. Peter Zemsky who embraced the inclusion of generative AI.
The world split into people who discovered AI last Tuesday and promised magic to those of us working on deeper solutions based on long-term thinking. VSTRAT is decades of interactive design fused with serious strategic analysis and generative AI. Elite business schools and elite thinkers use VSTRAT for teaching and research.
From Fontainebleau to Austin
Like General Georges Doriot, the Harvard professor who pioneered venture capital and founded INSEAD, this team eventually faced a choice between academic comfort and commercial impact. Doriot left the safety of Harvard for far away Fontainebleau instead of the obvious Paris enabling him to focus on substantive thought. We chose Austin over Silicon Valley for the same reason: substance over hype.
Today, while consultants peddle "AI strategy" based on a few months of ChatGPT chatting, VSTRAT represents two decades of methodical development. We don't replace strategic thinking; we augment people. We enable people to work faster, think harder, and discover non-obvious options through interactive tools that guide real strategic work, not PowerPoint theater.
Our Guiding Principle
As Professor Doriot taught: "Without action, the world would still be an idea."
- Michael, Anastassia, & Peter
