In the fifth grade, Michael Laine was sent to the Vice Principals’ office. There, he was forced to look up ‘insubordinate’… He’s been branded a “troublemaker”, since. His high school GPA was 1.17, caused by skipping over 130 days. He remains convinced he learned as much out of school, as he ever could have by attending class.
It’s probably no surprise that upon getting his diploma, he enlisted. He completed four years in the U.S. Marine Corps. The surprise was in his earning many ribbons, badges and medals and a meritorious promotion. He taught hand-to-hand combat and was a member of the Color Guard and Ceremonial Drill Team. Tired of crawling through the mud in California, Japan, Korea and Virginia, he left the service with an honorable discharge and moved to Portland and Boston.
There, he worked as a personal and corporate investment adviser; licensed for investments, insurances and real estate. To that end, he immersed himself in advanced technologies, communications, infrastructure, and global investing. As the youngest person at the firm, he regularly was handed ‘scutt-work’ the partners were uninterested in doing. Using this to his advantage, he learned a great deal in a short time – about corporate finance, business structures, and tax-advantaged partnerships. He had direct authority over $4M in capital, and held an advisory position on an additional $40M. All this by the time he was 25 years old.
He attended Boston University for business, marketing and organizational behavior. He was part of the stroke-pair while competing with the schools’ nationally ranked Crew team. At a limited and scaled-back level, he continued to manage other people’s money while in school.
Moving back to the Seattle-area, he built a ‘dot-com’. It was expert in large database management. It produced the first online grocery-store shopping system for Safeway and created a 750,000 listing “eMerchant Directory”; a search engine of companies doing business online. Concurrent to that, Laine also invested heavily in the local real estate market, buying a five-story building at 28 years old. The property allowed for a certain level of financial independence (and offset the losses of the dot-com).
At 35, he joined as a member of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts research project. There, he investigated the possibilities of building an Elevator to Space. From that point, everything changed. This project inspired and transformed him. It also set the course for the rest of his life.
LiftPort Group was created to pursue this vision of the future – and build the “biggest thing, ever!” At its height, LiftPort’s team was only 13 people. Yet, by careful allocation of resources, we coordinated and leveraged a community of 40+ university research groups. We were one of the first waves of companies to create carbon nanotubes. We built robots that climb string into the sky. They expect to develop a Lunar Elevator as a precursor to the Earth system. The company motto: ‘Change the world, or go home’ is taken seriously.
Now, at 42, Michael wouldn’t change a thing.
