Michelle grew up in Ennis, a town of roughly 25,000 people in the west of Ireland, far from any startup scene. Growing up, she watched her mother put in long days for years on end, working incredibly hard particularly through the Irish financial crisis and subsequent recession in the early 2000s. She took two things from the experience: a work ethic she has never lost and a resolve to build something of her own. After a first attempt at a company, she enrolled in a Master's in Entrepreneurship at 21 to learn the craft properly. Still not feeling fully equipped to launch, and wanting to make sure she did it right, she decided she would learn from inside the companies that were winning, before building one of her own.

At Dell she managed multi-million dollar agreements that often took months of back and forth to negotiate. On one particular occasion, a client signed an $8m agreement for a new server renewal. A few months after signing, the client challenged the company on a term, and nobody could say with certainty what the contract actually promised. Fifty clauses, fought over line by line, had become a static document stored in a folder. She saw the same thing happen at HubSpot and again at Revolut, where she launched Finland and built the Nordic sales team from the ground up. Epidemic Sound took her from Head of Europe to Global Head of Sales Operations in under two years, and at Legora she worked hands on with legal teams as they adopted AI.