Almost anyone you ask about how a Farmer School of Business student become successful in business will at some point mention the importance of networking.

But for Michael Layton, a junior Accountancy major, it turns out that the networking that landed him with a startup company started long before he came to Oxford.

“Elementary school, actually. He lived two blocks away from me, and so we were friends all the way through high school, and then kind of parted ways in college, but he kept in touch,” Layton said.

Layton came to Miami from the Chicago area. “I'm learning I really like the Midwest. I also really appreciate the smaller class sizes, because I have some friends at bigger schools. And having a class of 20 people where you know the teacher personally, that for me goes a long way,” he said.

He started as a Business Analytics major but pivoted to Accountancy. “I knew I want to do consulting, and I got really close to my accounting teacher Michelle Frank during my first semester of freshman year,” Layton said. “I was thinking, ‘OK, get a good business background, financial background, master’s degree in four years, and it would allow me to do consulting.”

But then this summer, he got an unexpected call.

“He's like, ‘Hey, we're doing this startup,’ and it started as AI consulting and automating manual processes. He and the other co-founder are Computer Science majors at the University of Illinois. And he said, ‘We want someone that knows accounting better and has more business knowledge,’” Layton said.

Layton and co-founders Evan Meyer and Jeet Singh Chugh spent the summer building the platform, making changes to it, and tried it out at an insurance firm, using it to automate the firm’s invoices. The results of that test encouraged them to take another step forward.

“We had applied to this place called Y Combinator, it's like an incubator accelerator,” Layton said. “We got an interview, then went for the interview, and found out that we got in. And once we got in, we thought that this is something real that we could go do.”

Doing it meant taking time off from college this fall to go to San Francisco to work with Y Combinator. “Everything's fast and different, super-fast paced. A lot more like the real world, lots of just talking to people, lots of hours, and it's really enjoyable. We have an Airbnb that's way overpriced because it's in San Francisco, and we're in the living room working for 15 hours a day, seven days a week, which is a lot, but it's super cool,” Layton said.

“it's also teaching me how good of an alumni network we have at Miami, because even if someone’s not interested, they ask, ‘How can I help? What can I do? Always want to help a RedHawk,’” he said. “Our outreach is based around school alumni just because Miami has such a good alumni network.”

This month, the trio took the wraps off their product, Mod AI, which is designed to automate the accounts payable process using AI agents. Layton has been in Chicago this month meeting with people that could help fund the company’s future.

Layton credits joining the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity at FSB with building his business acumen. “You have all these juniors and seniors that are so high achieving that you can look up to and see what they're doing, and they are able to pass that knowledge down to you,” he said. “For two years straight, it’s been interview prep, resume reviews for consulting, case prep, networking. It’s allowed me to get really involved with the school and for me, it was a total game changer. I think it’s the reason I got that call from my friend, because I was so pushed by a business case that I built up the skills to be able to do something like this.”

The journey so far is making it difficult to predict the future for Layton, but he’s taking it in stride. “If we go raise $4 million, I think I'd be hard pressed to have my parents make me go back to school next semester,” he laughed. “We’re going to see where we're at in December. And if we don't raise the money or something goes wrong, then we go back to school, finish our degrees, probably continue building something.”

Layton said that regardless of the outcome, the experience has helped him become better prepared for whatever comes next.

“Learning how to talk to people and how to interact with people, I think that's just something that goes so far, and it's something that I had to do a lot over the summer that paid off well,” he said. “Because what you do in a class is so different from what you're doing in an actual job. I’m learning how to interact with leaders, really be able to sell anything and have those conversations. I just think everything in business is such a people business.”