Mitch
Mitchem
He exists to remind humanity of itself.
Where It Started
Mitch is a Virginia-born country boy at heart. His family moved to Marion, Ohio, where he developed a love for chill vibes and good people. He was a basketball benchwarmer who kept the team loose, a soccer standout, and an unapologetic theater nerd.
His father was a founding member and designer of the Marion Popcorn Festival. That's where Mitch caught the bug, performance and production, a mindset he carries into everything he builds today.
Mastering the Art of Connection
Mitch's career began in entertainment, where he disrupted the stage with a blend of comedy, music, and audience engagement nobody else was doing. He studied Meisner technique at Baron Brown Studio in Los Angeles and improv at the legendary Second City in Chicago, sharpening a commanding presence as a DJ, emcee, actor, comedian, and television host.
His groundbreaking creation, Comedy You Can Dance To, ran for two decades at Chicago's Excalibur Nightclub, fusing stand-up, music, and high-energy interaction to turn a room full of strangers into a community by the end of the night. Mitch headlined it for five years before taking his act to Universal Studios Orlando.
From Entertaining the Room to Transforming It
For nearly 15 years, Mitch took everything the stage taught him about owning a room and aimed it at something bigger, building leaders. He mastered leadership development, large-scale conference facilitation, and experiential learning, the kind of training people actually feel, not just sit through.
He became the first sales leader in the company's history to land a single $6,000,000 innovation-training contract, with Purina. Those same methods are the engine inside HIVE today, powering AI enablement, skills training, and every keynote he delivers. Amplify, not automate started right here.
From the Stage to a Startup That Caught Fire
Driven to connect people in new ways, Mitch took a bold leap into tech and founded High There, the world's first social network in the cannabis space. Launched in one of the most controversial industries on earth, the app scaled past 300,000 users in under eleven months, faster than Twitter's first year.
It almost didn't happen. Stuck at 11,000 users, Mitch listened, people felt isolated, not connected. He pivoted, adding a "My Story" feature capped at 420 characters, and growth detonated, 20,000 to 30,000 new users every single week. That's where the lesson that now anchors everything was born: technology means nothing without the human element.
One human insight, capped at 420 characters, turned a stalling app into 20,000–30,000 new users a week. The product didn't need more features. It needed more humanity.
He Took It to the TED Stage and Named the Real Cost
When the lesson from High There grew too big to keep, Mitch carried it to the TED stage. His thesis was simple and uncomfortable: when we over-customize technology only to suit ourselves, we don't get freedom, we get "a narcissism that is unparalleled in our culture." The answer was never less technology. It was more of the human element inside it.
Strip it down and it's one choice. Technology built only around the individual quietly pulls us apart. Technology built around connection pulls us together. Same tools, opposite outcomes, and the difference is whether a human being is at the center of the design.
Same technology. Two completely different futures. The TED stage is where Mitch turned a startup lesson into a thesis for everyone.
The Idea Became a Company, a Book, and a Movement
The lesson never stayed on a stage. Mitch built it into everything. Today he leads HIVE, which spans three fronts: the My HIVE AI app for anyone, living avatars and custom tech for cities, sports franchises, and companies, and AI and human-skills training. He wrote the book taking dead aim at the systems stealing our time and money, and he travels the world as the keynote voice reminding rooms of what only humans can do. One throughline runs through all of it: amplify the human, don't automate them away.
AI avatars for anyone, with memory, voice, and real wisdom. A companion that remembers you and grows with you.
Living avatars and custom technology for cities, sports franchises, and companies, with human engineers on whatever's novel to your business.
Hands-on training that makes people fluent in AI and stronger in the human skills no machine can replace. 97% implementation, 100,000+ trained.
My HIVE AI · live now
"You're not crazy. You're not lazy. You're being robbed."
You'll lose 730 days of your life to friction. The phone trees. The doom-loop apps. The subscriptions you can't cancel. This isn't bad design, it's the business model. Second City alum, three-time founder, and HIVE CEO, Mitch cuts through the corporate lies and hands you the receipts.
