Mike Tempest

Real Impact

At Risika, I've led the transformation from VC-funded to profitable in 18 months. I restructured the engineering and data organization from a predominantly in-house team to a high-performing distributed remote organization, cutting costs by two-thirds while improving both performance and culture. The key wasn't just structure. It was rebuilding culture around ownership, accountability, and psychological safety.

At RefME, I scaled the team to ~50 people and the platform to 2 million users. I made one of the toughest calls of my career: rewriting the core business functionality from JavaScript to Pascal. Performance and accuracy issues were threatening the business. It was high-risk. If we got it wrong, we could have destroyed the company. We pulled it off. Running Elysium Studios as Founder/CEO taught me hard lessons: trust your instincts, hold your ground with investors when it matters, and stay obsessively close to customers. One of my proudest achievements? Hiring Chandjen as a mid-level engineer years ago. He's now a technology lead, excelling at every step.