Meet our Team: Mike
Thanks for coming back for our second team member feature article! We hope you read last week’s article about Ashwin, if not you can find it here. As mentioned in that article, we want to be able to point to our passionate team members who have built this company up from the very foundation, boot-strapping funds and working countless hours all the while completing their educations at Ohio State.
Today, we’re proud to introduce another founder, one of the creators of the concept, the man credited with the name and logo, and another great friend of ours: Mike Gargasz.

I draw a lot of motivation from our team and the goals we set for ourselves.
Mike is a humble guy, but you wouldn’t be able to obtain that from his resume. Another Co-Founder, Mike has been absolutely crucial in the development of the concept of NXTSTOR towards solving a lot of the problems seen in the self-storage industry. He leads multiple aspects of the company as COO and Head of Product Development. In a typical workday with NXTSTOR, Mike can be found pushing UI/UX changes to the web app, or accompanying Brandon on-stage at some event giving a pitch, or collaborating with the marketing to ensure we can get in front of as many potential users as possible, and everywhere in between. Mike is yet another example of a d*mn good team player, and an even better leader.
Origins
Hailing from Amherst, Ohio, he has a thing for spicy foods, Kanye West (the good stuff anyway), and college football. He is currently chasing down the remainder of his fourth and final year of an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree at The Ohio State University with a minor in German. Mike’s been able to complete multiple competitive internships, which have allowed him to develop a passion for embedded systems design and programming. These, of course, contribute heavily to the work he is able to do for NXTSTOR.

The story of NXTSTOR begins with Mike and Brandon, in their freshman year no less. A lot can be said for people who are able to back up an interesting idea with considerable action.
Humble Beginnings
Sometime in 2016 during Mike’s freshman year, he and friend Brandon Gotlieb decided it would be a good idea to join a club on campus called the Business Builder’s Club, and compete in a so-called IdeaPitch competition. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for next week’s article about Brandon to understand the motivation to create a concept for peer-to-peer self-storage. Let’s just say for now that with the IdeaPitch competition happening the next day, Mike and Brandon put their heads together and came up with the idea to create a company to solve some of the problems they saw in the self-storage industry. Namely, they wanted to give hosts the opportunity to monetize the space that they already own but aren’t using, and give renters the ability to decide for themselves where, for how long, and for how much money they’d like to store their things. The concept got great reception at the competition, and actually won them some money to kickstart the company.
The next day (or maybe a few days later), Mike and Brandon founded the company, and started building. Multiple iterations of name, logo, and scope were worked through for months, eventually landing on NXTSTOR and our current logo with the stacked triangles. Mike is personally credited with company up with both the current name and logo for the company.

In a lot of ways, this self-starting energy that Mike and Brandon began with defined and continues to define the working ideals of our team and our motivations & strategies for moving forward. We choose our own direction as a company in real-time and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Peer-to-Peer Storage: A Concept
In the early days of the concept generation, Mike was critical in working through the ways that our future users (the hosts & renters) will engage with such a marketplace. He, with the help of Brandon and Ashwin, thought of a myriad of customer interface scenarios, strategies for enabling and guiding the self-storage process, and laid the foundations for the democratization of the platform.
In the beginning and since, the main ideals that Mike and the team stressed in the generation of the NXTSTOR marketplace are as follows:
- Localization
The universal ability for people in any location to have access to nearby storage solutions with neighbors. The hope is to eliminate the need for long treks outside the city to access cheaper storage facilities. The average city has millions of square feet of unused space in residences, commercial spaces, and beyond.
2. Centralization
Self-storage is a very fragmented industry. Prices, features, security, quality, and availability differ significantly from place to place. There are few large storage providers with a large enough local, region, or national reach to ensure those variables stay fixed for the large majority of the American population. The hope, then, is to provide a marketplace that fills those gaps by encouraging quality and economically friendly local storage spaces for everyone from urban professionals to rural small business owners and everyone else in-between.
3. Democratization
With the above variables stated, it was clear that enabling the marketplace of hosts & renters total control of prices and features was the best way to enable a positive competition place in which both supply & demand benefit both sides of the marketplace. For example, hosts can vary prices based on demand and competition, renters can choose cheaper, less feature-packed spaces based on needs. This hands-off approach will ensure a dynamic economy of storage solutions that will work for everyone.
Mike advocated early and often for the customer, and it shows in the way that he engages with current and potential hosts & renters. He is the guy that the team goes to for issues regarding customer journey and experience.
What’s next?
It’s an exciting time for the whole team, and it shows in Mike’s energy at every meeting and every speaking engagement and every industry event. He and Ashwin as the software dev team are working on something massive that we will be announcing very soon that will further embed the ideals mentioned before and positively change the way that people engage with the NXTSTOR marketplace. Mike hopes to make the next few months a period of growth that we can stand on in the coming years, as we hope the marketplace explodes and we can offer potentially thousand and hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to benefit from NXTSTOR.
In the meantime, Mike will continue to be an aggressive force of nature on this small and tight-knit team. Danke für alles, was du tust, Mike!
Check back next week for our next team member bio, in the meantime — check out our social channels to stay updated in real time on what we’re up to:
Instagram: @store_with_nxtstor
Twitter: NXTSTOR
Facebook: NXTSTOR Inc.
To get in touch, email us at info@nxtstor.com

