About Mike Langone
Two tracks have run simultaneously for twenty-five years. One inside schools and learning platforms. One inside creative studios and manufacturing floors. They've never been separate.
For fifty years my father ran Langone Studio, from a humble little darkroom and shooting space in our basement to a full-service commercial studio and color lab on Loring Street in Springfield, MA. I grew up inside it, developing film at six and learning Photoshop and Illustrator on his Mac Quadra 950 before I had any professional reason to. That training led to Bloom's, a pre-press equipment company, and then to Pioneer Packaging, whose Creative Director hired me after I trained their team. Learn it, use it, teach it. The pattern was in place before I had a name for it. I enrolled at SCAD while at Pioneer, where that commercial instinct was stripped of its shortcuts and rebuilt as artistry.
A year in Indianapolis television production led back east to Digital Learning Interactive and iLrn, one of the first learning management platforms ever built. Three years there, with a $22 million raise, placement in 400+ colleges, and acquisition by Thomson Learning, taught me what a learning taxonomy actually is: the principle deciding whether information reaches a learner or slides past them. Ten years as Creative Director at OmniGlow followed, and commercial photography and brand design with my father ran concurrently throughout. Perpetual Groove has run alongside all of it since 1999.
A return to schools in 2018, first at UP Education Network and then as a consultant with Veritas Prep Charter School, is where two weeks became five years: a school technology function built from the ground up and handed off to an internal team. In April 2025 I founded Thinkhole LLC to bring both tracks under one name.
A consistent thread runs through every chapter: arrive before the transition, become fluent before it's required, then make that fluency accessible to others.
Building iLrn's learning management infrastructure came before the category even had a name. OmniGlow's eCommerce store went live before my competitors understood the channel. Veritas was the sharpest version: COVID arrived before an LMS was in place, and the PowerSchool migration happened at the height of the disruption, seamlessly, while schools everywhere were scrambling.
I like to tell people I was lucky enough to be there — really, I was just old enough to see it happen. Pre-sales and post-sales have tracked the same arc all along: demonstrate, establish the capability, then teach it.
Creative and analytical have always coexisted. While managing Veritas's data fidelity and SIS migrations, I was art directing photography shoots, and creating Design Systems for freelance clients. Same mode, different problems.
None of it was done alone. The vision was mine; the execution always involved people who brought skills and judgment that sharpened it. I've led teams and worked within them: at iLrn, at OmniGlow, and at Veritas, where the team was measured by whether it could operate without me.
Based in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Available for remote engagements nationwide.
If you'd like to talk about a problem that doesn't fit neatly into one category, reach out.
Get in touch