Michael Borchetta

Managing Director M2 Ventures

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Michael Borchetta is Managing Director of M2 Ventures, a Stamford, Connecticut holding company built around two businesses he co-founded and runs as Chief Executive Officer. M2 Media Group provides online marketing and circulation services to magazine publishers, working with Hearst, Dotdash Meredith, and Condé Nast among others; Funderworks is a patented avatar-based fundraising platform used by schools and nonprofits including the Girl Scouts of the USA. Both trace back to the same expertise: roughly fifteen years spent in magazine circulation and consumer marketing at Cahners Publishing, The Petersen Companies, and Synapse Group, learning how to acquire subscribers at scale and at a known cost.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded M2 Media Group and Funderworks, and serves as Co-Founder and CEO of both, under M2 Ventures.
• Built M2 Media Group into a marketing and circulation services provider for publishers including Hearst, Dotdash Meredith, and Condé Nast.
• Developed Funderworks into a patented avatar-based fundraising platform used by the Girl Scouts of the USA among others.
• Founded and presided over Freebizmag, a leading distributor of business and trade publications, while a VP at Synapse Group.
• Built out consumer marketing properties including Blue Dolphin, Reward Survey, Birthday Rewards, and Mercury Magazines, with partnerships including T-Mobile, Barnes & Noble, and Groupon.
• Former Circulation Director at Cahners Publishing and VP of Consumer Marketing at The Petersen Companies.

Professional Journey

Borchetta took a BA in Business Economics at Colorado College and went into magazine circulation, a discipline that is far more quantitative than its name suggests: the work is about acquiring and retaining subscribers at a cost that the eventual advertising and subscription revenue will justify, and it rewards precise understanding of channel economics. He was Circulation Director at Cahners Publishing, then Vice President of Consumer Marketing at The Petersen Companies, and later spent around five years as a Vice President at Synapse Group, the subscription-marketing division of Time Inc. At Synapse he founded and ran Freebizmag, a distributor of business and trade publications.

That background positioned him for the disruption that followed. As print circulation declined, publishers needed to acquire subscribers through digital channels and partner marketing rather than direct mail and insert cards, and most lacked the internal capability to do it. Borchetta co-founded M2 Media Group to supply it, building online marketing and circulation programmes for magazine publishers including Hearst, Dotdash Meredith, and Condé Nast. The company’s partner-marketing programmes have been credited with helping Zinio grow its early digital magazine subscription business.

M2 Ventures grew into a holding structure encompassing consumer-facing marketing properties — Blue Dolphin, Reward Survey, Birthday Rewards, and Mercury Magazines — and partnerships with T-Mobile, Barnes & Noble, and Groupon, all drawing on the same core competence in acquiring consumers through offers and partner channels.

Funderworks applies that competence to a different market. School and youth fundraising is a large, deeply traditional business that still runs substantially on paper order forms and door-to-door selling, with the attendant problems of safety, administration, and shrinking participation. Funderworks built a patented avatar-based platform that moves the activity online and gamifies it for children, and it has been adopted by organizations including the Girl Scouts of the USA. Borchetta serves as Co-Founder and CEO alongside fellow M2 Ventures Managing Director Michael Frank.

Education

Colorado College

BA, Business Economics