Mike LeBlanc // Founder
Mike LeBlanc is a former U.S. Marine Corps major, Harvard Business School graduate, entrepreneur, and author of What If Anger Is the Answer? He served 13 years in the Marine Corps, deploying multiple times to the Middle East, including Afghanistan, and later served as an economic and technology advisor to the Pentagon. After leaving the military, he cofounded Cobalt Robotics and Foundation Future Industries, a defense-focused robotics company building autonomous systems for the U.S. Department of Defense. His work sits at the intersection of leadership, technology, and human judgment under pressure.
LeBlanc co-founded Cobalt Robotics to reimagine how autonomous machines could improve real-world security. Backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Coatue, the company deployed hundreds of robots for organizations including Amazon, Uber, Salesforce, FedEx, and Citi, operating across four continents before its acquisition in 2024.
Today, LeBlanc leads Foundation Future Industries, where he is helping advance the next generation of humanoid robotics for national defense and industrial applications. Under his leadership, the company moved from founding to customer deployment in less than a year, demonstrating autonomous systems designed for the dull, dirty, and dangerous work that still places people in harm’s way.
In What If Anger Is the Answer?, LeBlanc draws on combat experience, classical philosophy, literature, and leadership failures to challenge the modern assumption that anger should be eliminated rather than disciplined. Through firsthand war stories, Marine leadership lessons, and insights from thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli, he argues that anger—what the Greeks called thumos—can become a force for courage, loyalty, and leadership when aligned with reason.
LeBlanc’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, NBC Nightly News, CNBC, Fast Company, and Business Insider. He lives in Newport Beach, California, with his wife and three children.
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Mike LeBlanc // Marine
In Afghanistan, Mike lived and operated alongside Afghan soldiers in a combat zone, conducting missions with partner forces and seeing war at ground level. Later, as part of a Special Operations Task Force, he was involved in one of the most consequential moments of the post-9/11 era, when ISIS surged and his team took command of Iraq. That experience placed him close to the center of modern American war, where battlefield reality, national decision-making, and the burden of command come together.
As a Major, Mike was originally assigned to a new billet with the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon, but was soon pulled into a technology advisor role, where he worked with the Defense Innovation Unit to evaluate emerging technologies being proposed to the Marine Corps. That experience gave him his first real understanding of how the military buys technology and a clearer vision of what the future of warfare might look like.
Those years gave him a permanent distrust of abstraction. War, as Mike knew it, was never theory. It was men, machines, pressure, improvisation, and responsibility. His time in uniform shaped the way he thinks about leadership, strength, and the obligations of a serious nation. It remains the foundation beneath everything he has built since.
“Master Yourself; Master Your Craft; Master The World.’’
– Mike LeBlanc
Mike LeBlanc // Author
Mike LeBlanc is the author of What If Anger Is the Answer?, a book that challenges one of the strongest assumptions of modern life: that anger is always a vice, always a loss of control, and always something to be suppressed. Drawing on the Marine Corps, the war in Afghanistan, ancient philosophy, and the hard lessons of leadership, Mike argues instead that anger is a form of human power, and that the real question is not whether it exists, but whether it has been trained.
The book is part argument, part memoir, and part call to recover an older moral vocabulary. Rather than treating aggression as something shameful or pathological, Mike writes about shaping it into courage, discipline, loyalty, and command. It is a book for readers who suspect that modern culture has become too suspicious of strength, too eager to flatten the soul, and too uncomfortable with the very forces that often make men capable of protecting, building, and leading.
Mike’s work sits at the intersection of war, leadership, philosophy, and ambition, and asks what kind of character is required to stand upright in a world that increasingly rewards passivity. What If Anger Is the Answer? is his opening argument, and the beginning of a larger body of work about strength, responsibility, and the moral uses of force.