Blake Becker

About

“Why hasn’t anyone built this yet?”

I used to ask that rhetorically, because the answer was always immaterial — no budget, no engineer, nobody whose job it was. But in the last two years, those answers stopped holding up. AI removed the constraint that made them true, and I now ask the question literally.

I started my AI journey with myself. My sleep, my workouts, and how I eat run on systems that I built. It taught me what I’ve applied since: AI does not do the work for you; it removes the reasons you had for not starting.

I co-founded MELO my freshman year because Michigan had no undergraduate entertainment law organization. Education sessions and speaker panels could only take our members so far, so we built them an AI-powered law school admissions platform: LSAT diagnostics that isolate the question types costing points, GPA recalculated to LSAC methodology rather than the transcript figure, school lists banded against published ABA 509 medians, essay critique, and a rolling-deadline tracker, since the same application carries less weight in February than October. A sophomore can open it and learn what to fix while there’s still time.

At Michigan Private Equity and Venture Capital Club, I now lead the AI sector. Rather than building AI companies, I evaluate them, learning to screen the market until I can see where value remains unclaimed.

The Business with Intelligence Conference (BIC) is where I work on adoption at scale. As Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer, I meet with deans, researchers, and innovation directors to secure real institutional AI access for students, and I brought the Maize and Machine newsletter to campus, covering the best AI workflows and tools to truly help my peers stop merely adapting to AI and start setting the standard for the rest to follow.

But that work is slow. Students worry that using AI will be penalized. Faculty read it as a threat to how they teach. Administrators wait on policy while every company outside the university moves. Some of that caution is warranted, but most of it is stagnation, and the cost falls on students who never learn to leverage the tools that will fundamentally dictate their careers.

If you’ve been told something can’t be built, or you’re working to get an organization to adopt something it isn’t ready for, I’d love to hear about it.

Résumé

The current résumé. It previews here and downloads in one click.

AI Systems

Two systems I built because I needed them and still run every day. Farai governs the agents, and Career Command Center is the first venture running underneath it.

• Farai, One screen for running every venture (33 agent roles)

  An all-in-one control room for a team of 33 AI agents that run my ventures. Every agent is a written contract with its own authority level, token budget, turn ceiling and escalation target, and a separate governance tier audits the rest and reports to me instead of to the commander it is auditing, so no agent can quietly widen its own permissions. I talk to one point of contact, a chief of staff that knows what every seat does and hands each job to the right one. The cockpit is a single screen showing everything running in the background and everything waiting on my approval, and my calendar and to-do list sit on it too. The roster is also drawn as a town where each function tier is its own district and every agent is a character with its own look and job, so I can see who is working rather than read a log. It tracks how each seat performs, refines its own playbooks from that, and projects the whole knowledge base into Obsidian.

  Built with Claude Agent SDK · Next.js · TypeScript · SQLite and Cloudflare D1 · three.js with React Three Fiber · an in-repo MCP server · Obsidian

• Career Command Center, Optimizes the odds of landing a role (84 opportunities tracked)

  Recruiting software built to raise the analytical odds of landing a role, by running four things as one system that normally sit in four separate tools. It sources opportunities across several industries at once and pushes them back to you instead of making you go looking. It holds every person you have talked to along with the context and who else they are connected to, so for a given role it can name the relationship most likely to get you in the door and put that person on an outreach sequence that keeps working until it converts into a referral, a coffee chat, an interview or more. It measures what you already know against what that specific role requires and teaches you the gap on a schedule that finishes before the first interview. Every deadline, interview and coffee chat from all of it lands on your Google Calendar, so the sourcing, the relationship, the preparation and the timing move together rather than being reconciled by hand.

  Built with OpenAI Codex first, then migrated to Claude Code · Next.js · TypeScript · Drizzle ORM · Cloudflare Workers and D1 · Google OAuth

Ventures

Organizations I co-founded and still run day to day.

• Business with Intelligence Conference, The first AI and business conference at Michigan (November 6, 2026)

  I co-founded the first conference at Michigan built on where AI and business actually meet, running November 6 out of the Ross School of Business. The premise is that students have to become the specialists in this, and that reaching it takes undergraduates, graduate students and working professionals in the same room. I run growth, which here means widening both what students are permitted to use and what they know how to do with it. To make that case I authored an AI-equity study, surveying 300 Ross undergraduates on what they pay for AI out of their own pockets. That figure sits against UMGPT, the tool Michigan provides, which goes largely unused because it does not do what students are already paying elsewhere to get, and against the free Claude rollout at Wharton. I presented the findings to the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education. I also write Maize and Machine, a newsletter for students that names the specific tools worth using for coding, slides, design and research and explains why each one and how to work with it.

• 516 Socials, Bringing AI into a business that had none

  An events company on Long Island that had barely a website and no AI anywhere in how it operated. I brought AI into the business and rebuilt what it runs on, so a crew competing in a young and very fast market can work at the pace that market sets. The companies moving quickest in this industry are already the ones using these tools, and this one had none of them.

Licenses & Certificates

Each one carries its issuer and credential ID, so any of them can be checked.

• Building with the Claude API, Anthropic, issued September 2026, credential ID 3npb76dfor36
• AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, Anthropic, issued September 2026, credential ID oafnq7ymg69o
• Applied AI Foundations, OpenAI, issued September 2026, credential ID h5l4cj2wen
• Agents and Workflows, OpenAI, issued September 2026, credential ID gyzft4x0f8
• Campaign Manager 360 Certification, Google, issued December 2025, credential ID 170641229
• Microsoft Excel Certification, Coursera, issued December 2025, credential ID TWIZZ3HGMXPF