Lay of The Land

Our guest today is Jamie Van Doren — Founder & CEO of NeverEnding, a Cleveland-based gaming and entertainment start-up that aims to change how stories are told and by whom. NeverEnding is a new kind of social media platform, with easy-to-use art and animation tools that help you bring your stories to life! With NeverEnding you can create fantastic custom illustrations and animated videos, with...

Our guest today is Ryan Lambacher —  Founder & CEO of Graffle, a venture-funded web3 infrastructure provider for projects built on blockchain (starting with Flow) — which recently closed on a nearly $4 million-dollar round.  Ryan has a unique cross-section of skills that accelerated him ahead of the competition in the world of NFTs. First, his technical experience building product at Drips (wi...

Our guest today is Cal Al-Dhubaib — Founder & CEO of Pandata. Pandata helps innovative organizations design and develop human-centered, trusted AI. They are a team of creative thinkers, relationship builders, and problem solvers from diverse backgrounds, both professionally and personally. They believe that diversity leads to Trusted AI. Their high-performance AI solutions drive business trans...

Our guest today is Daniel Brown — Co-Founder of Rust Belt Riders and Tilth Soil. Rust Belt Riders provides businesses, organizations, and individuals with a clean, timely, and community benefiting alternative to landfills for their food waste — namely composting! These services produce Tilth Soil a line of organic, biologically active soils that help to advance regenerative agriculture. Together t...

Ryan Young is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Fello (formerly FlashHouse) where he's on a mission to create a seamless real estate experience, empower realtors, and simplify the stressful process of buying and selling homes. Ryan was born with real estate in his blood as a third-generation in this industry. He is also the CEO of the Young Team, named by Real Trends and The Wall Street...

Our guest today is Jack Grover — Founder and CEO of Grove Bags, a provider of cannabis packaging specifically tailored for the unique physiology of the plant to create the perfect climate for cannabis preservation. After graduating from Babson College in 2014, Jack was inspired by his brother Charlie’s battle with cerebral palsy to enter the cannabis industry and create packaging that preserves me...

Our guest today is Dr. Daniel German — founder & CEO of orthobrain! Dr. Dan German is a man who loves smiles. All kinds of smiles. So much so, he’s devoted a lifetime to bringing more of them to the world. Thirty-plus years ago, Dr. German started an orthodontic practice that became one of the largest privately held practices in the country; he has cared for 30,000 patients. Through this, he b...

Our guest today is Jane Alexander, who is the Chief Digital Information Officer for The Cleveland Museum of Art where she is responsible for creating awe-inspiring and iterative digital projects supporting a vision of innovation, technology implementation, and digital transformation that exemplify the CMA’s mission.  In her tenure at the museum, Jane has moved the organization to be a data-driven,...

Our conversation this week is with Eric Diamond who is the co-founder and CEO of Central Kitchen, which has a massive physical presence here in Cleveland, hundreds of thousands of square feet out of their main food hub headquarters located at 7501 Carnegie Ave. off East 77th where former lay of the land guest Cleveland Kraut (now Cleveland kitchen) operates out of in addition to other staples like...

Our conversation this week is with David Boone Jr. — co-founder and CEO of BlendED — an education technology company which has raised over $1mm in funding from leading education-technology investors and local-Cleveland investors like Jumpstart. David is a Cleveland native who has recently boomeranged back to Cleveland from Seattle, where he gained experience leading data teams at Microsoft, to fou...

Our conversation this week is with Mike Belsito who is the Co-Founder of Product Collective — an organization he started here in Cleveland back in 2015 which now boasts a thriving community for over 30,000+ product management professionals —  and Co-Organizer of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference & New York Product Conference, two of the top rated conferences for product people anywhere. For his...

Our conversation this week is with Robert Baskette — founder and CTO of Roundtable Learning (originally founded as Knowbase) — on immersive learning and the commercial applications of virtual reality. Bob founded Roundtable Learning in 1998 as a learning management technology (LMS) company where he shaped the vision and led technical growth to where it is today as a leading corporate training comp...

Happy holidays everyone! We’re revisiting a topical and popular episode now that Justin Bibb has secured his position as Mayor-Elect of Cleveland.  We cover a lot in this conversation — through a lens of technology, entrepreneurship, and equity, we explore Justin’s vision for the city of Cleveland. Really enjoyed this conversation and hope you do too! We’ll be back next week with new founder stori...

Lay of The Land’s 50th episode is a reflection on the 50 before it, my own professional journey & how Lay of The Land came to be, and some musings on what gets a startup ecosystem’s flywheel going. Thanks for tuning in for a year now! Please enjoy and let me know if you all have any feedback. To the next 50! ———— Learn more about Jeffrey Stern @ https://jeffreys.page Connect with Jeffrey Stern...

Our conversation this week is with Michael DeAloia — CEO at Evergreen Podcasts  — on the business of podcasting, building a media company here in Cleveland, content creation, and Cleveland startups! Evergreen Podcasts is a fast growing podcast network designed for the creative class to create, listen and inspire. To date, Evergreen Podcasts has grown from four podcasts to over 30 with millions of...

Our conversation this week is with Scott Colosimo  — Founder at Cleveland CycleWerks & LAND Energy  — on Cleveland manufacturing, commitment to design, and the future of motorcycles, electric vehicles, and energy distribution! Scott founded Cleveland CycleWerks, a global motorcycle lifestyle brand, back in 2009. More recently he founded LAND Energy which focuses on distributed power and e-mobi...

Lay of The Land's 47th conversation is with Stan Garber & Alex Yakubovich — Co-Founders of Scout RFP (now known as Workday Strategic Sourcing) — on serial entrepreneurship and Scout RFP’s journey from inception here in Cleveland to acquisition by Workday for $540mm in 2019, where both of them still work leading Workday’s strategy and growth in the source-to-pay space. Stan Garber is Vice Presi...

Our conversation this week is with Steve Potash  — Founder, President, and CEO of OverDrive. Steve founded OverDrive here in Cleveland back in 1986. Over the last 3 decades Steve has led OverDrive to become the leading digital reading platform for ebooks, audiobooks and other digital media for libraries, schools, government agencies, corporate learning centers and colleges and universities worldwi...

 Our conversation this week is with India Johnson — Founder of UAVistas. With a background in biology and computer science, India Johnson is an unmanned aerial systems pilot, entrepreneur, public servant, and geospatial developer. India is responsible for flying, processing data from, and maintaining the Cleveland Metroparks drone fleet flying. Applications of her work include natural resource man...

Our conversation this week is with Jake Bailosky  — CTO & Founder of OnStation — on revolutionizing how road workers locate and communicate in the field. Jake spent 10 years as a construction project engineer with the Ohio Department of Transportation after studying and becoming a Civil Engineer. Through his time working on transportation projects in the field, he experienced firsthand the cha...

Our conversation this week is with James Barnes Jr. — Founder & President of Immaculate Cleaning — on building Northeast Ohio’s fastest-growing janitorial services company. James launched his first successful business endeavor as a high school student. From this experience he learned the basic principles of running a profitable business enterprise which he then leveraged to build Immaculate Cl...

Our conversation this week is with Charlie Lougheed — Co-founder & CEO of Axuall, a Cleveland-based company which recently closed on $10.4mm in financing. Axuall is a bot-enabled, real-time HR data network that empowers healthcare providers to manage and share their verified career data and credentials with healthcare organizations and plans. This enables these organizations to build better ne...

Our conversation this week is with Aaron Grossman — Founder & CEO of TalentLaunch. TalentLaunch, which Aaron founded back in 2016 after over a decade working in the staffing industry, is a network of independently operated staffing and recruitment companies that share back-office support, now generating hundreds of millions in sales and employing over 200 employees. TalentLaunch was establishe...

Our conversation this week is with Brian Zimmerman — CEO of The Cleveland Metroparks.  As CEO of the Metroparks, Brian is responsible for the management of over 24,000 acres of green space in Northeast Ohio including 18 park reservations, eight golf courses, and the nationally-acclaimed Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, roughly 1000 employees, hundreds of miles of parkways and trails serving roughly 40 mi...

Our conversation this week is with Aaron Christopher (A.C.) Evans — co-founder & CEO of Drips.com recently ranked one of the 20 fastest-growing companies in North America. Drips is the first conversational texting company of its kind, founding a new market category and leading the way for some of the biggest brands in the world to use automated, humanized conversations at scale. On a daily bas...