Michael Seifert

Seifert was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in February 1969 to Erik J. Thomsen and Kirsten Seifert, who divorced when he was two years old. His great-grandfather was Carl Seifert (d. 1935), a Danish blacksmith and manufacturer who was recorded in the Krak's Blue Book (Kraks Blå Bog) of well-known Danes in 1929.

Throughout his childhood and high school years, Seifert resided with his mother and two brothers on the Danish island of Bornholm. From the age of 11, Seifert spent summers and Christmas holidays in San Rafael, California with his father, who immigrated to the United States and founded the microcomputer products firm Sun-Flex Company, which was later sold to Xidex Corporation. There, his father co-invented an anti-glare device for computer terminals, which was awarded United States Patent number 4,253,737 in 1981. It was during the first summer holiday with his father that Seifert became interested in computers and wrote his first computer program. At age 15, with the help of a friend and his mother, Seifert started his first IT company, Danbyte, which imported computer disks to Bornholm.

From 1990 to 1996, Seifert attended the University of Copenhagen, where he received a Master of Science degree in computer science and an exam.art in human computer interaction. His 135-page university thesis, Evaluation and Implementation of Operating System Support for Multiple Network Interfaces was co-authored with Ole Sas Thrane and published in 1995. It was at DIKU (Danish: Datalogisk Institut, Københavns Universitet)—the department of computer science at the University of Copenhagen—where Seifert got involved in the DikuMUD project and also met the colleagues with whom he would later found Sitecore.