A little about Mike:
In 2026, Mike became Chief Policy and Legal Officer of EverDriven Technologies, the country’s leader in providing alternative transportation to kids experiencing homelessness and those with disabilities, in 36 states and counting. As a C-suite executive, he oversees all legal, policy, and compliance efforts of the company.
From 2022 to 2025, Mike was North America Policy Director for Airbnb, the publicly-traded travel and hospitality technology company whose community includes millions of guests and hosts around the world. He oversaw a team of 50 skilled public policy professionals representing the interests of Airbnb and its thousands of guests and hosts in thousands of markets across the United States and Canada, spearheading additionally the company’s work on issues from economic empowerment, housing affordability, and trust and safety.
From 2017 to 2022 he was Partner, VP and General Counsel of WillowTree (now Telus Digital), where he led the development of a new 85,000 square foot headquarters involving state and local support, negotiated successful agreements with Fortune 100 companies, and founded and led the Social Impact practice. Earlier in his career he was counsel to Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, where his work included complex matters including death penalty appeals and National Guard and homeland security, and an attorney at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the firm’s Public Policy and Strategy and Government Litigation groups.
From 2016–2020, he served on the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, including as the mayor from 2016-2018. Charlottesville is a AAA-bond-rated city that was ranked the #4 city for entrepreneurs by Entrepreneur magazine during his tenure and where his accomplishments included expanding the city’s technology tax credit, spearheading initiatives to support political refugees and immigrants, protecting historic neighborhoods from gentrification, and expanding voter registration. He served during the violent Unite the Right rally of 2017. He also served on major boards and commissions overseeing infrastructure and social policy, including the Social Services Board, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, and the Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP).
He founded and chaired Communities Overcoming Extremism: the After Charlottesville Project, a bipartisan coalition including the Anti-Defamation League, the Ford Foundation, the Charles Koch Institute, the Fetzer Institute, and New America. National Public Radio featured Mike’s work “sharing painful lessons from the fight against hate.”
From 2010 to 2016 and again in 2025, he was partner and head of the domestic practice at Madison Law & Strategy Group, PLLC, where he provides expert guidance to clients on corporate and transaction matters; regulatory and policy strategy, with a special focus on state and local; and policy communications. His clients have included the Southeast’s largest hedge fund, a major alternative energy company, dozens of early-stage technology companies, and elected officials, campaigns, and NGOs. He is a member of the Virginia and Washington, D.C. Bars.
He is the author of three books: Cry Havoc: Charlottesville and American Democracy under Siege (PublicAffairs, 2020), Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins of the Least Likely Founding Father (PublicAffairs, 2015), and Demagogue: the Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Time, and has been interviewed on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, The Rachel Maddow Show, AC360, and NPR. He has taught at the University of Virginia’s Batten School for Leadership and Public Policy and in the fall of 2022 was the Inaugural Democracy Fellow in the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development Fellow at Reichman University in Israel. He is a Berggruen Fellow.
He has an extensive record of community and civic involvement. He is a volunteer at SHARE of McLean and the McLean Little League. In Charlottesville, he served as Chair of the Emergency Food Network from 2013-2016, a 40 year-old nonprofit providing emergency food supplies to thousands of families in need. From 2009-2012, he was a gubernatorial appointee to Virginia’s Board of Medicine, overseeing the discipline of over 50,000 medical professionals in Virginia. He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Truman Center for National Policy.
In 2010, he was an election monitor on behalf of the US government in wartime Afghanistan, traveling to Kabul and Panjshir. He has been a election protection and voter rights attorney for over 20 years. He served as Chair of the Pro Bono Commission of the Young Lawyers Conference of the Virginia State Bar and was later appointed to the Virginia State Bar's Access to Legal Services Commission. At UVA Law, he founded the Coalition for Progress on Race, which founded the Center for the Study of Race and Law. Working with Professor A.E. Dick Howard, he founded and oversaw the Legal Fellow Program in the Office of the Governor. He began his career as a Legal Aid Law Clerk in Charlottesville working on predatory lending cases.
He is a recipient of the Levenson Family Defender of Democracy Award from the Anti-Defamation League, the Courage in Political Leadership Award from the American Society for Yad Vashem, and the Rob DeBree & David O’Malley Award for Community Response to Hatred from the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Forward Magazine has named him one of 50 most influential Jewish leaders in America. He is a Ruderman Foundation Executive Fellow and a Rodel Fellow. As a chief legal officer and general counsel, he has been the subject of professional profiles in Law.com and Corporate Counsel Now. He has also been profiled by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and The Guardian.
He holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia; a Ph.D. in political science from U.C., Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow; and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he was a work-study student.
Personal
Photo credit: Jen Fariello
Mike’s grandfather Herb was a jeep mechanic with the U.S. Army on the European front during World War II. His grandmother Esther was a secretary at the New School in New York City, where she worked with the scholar Hannah Arendt, who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Mike’s parents were professional journalists.
Mike was raised in Arlington, Virginia, where he attended majority-minority public schools and began working in 9th grade.
He lives in Fairfax County with his wife Emily, a national security expert whose areas of expertise include Iran, the Middle East, mass communications, and propaganda; their twin 11 year-old boys, who attend public school; and their springer-poodle Summer.