#250 Chris Heivly - 250 Episodes Later — Reflections on Entrepreneurship, Community, Storytelling

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today's conversation is a special one. This is the 250th episode of Lay of the Land and to market I wanted to do something a little different. Most episodes of this podcast are centered on founder stories. What drives someone to do the very difficult thing of trying to build a company to solve whatever problem they feel compelled enough to devote their life to solving, and what they have learned along the way. But for today, I wanted to step back and talk about the thing that underpins and ties these stories together, our community itself. And there is no one I would rather have for that conversation than Chris Hively. Chris is a serial entrepreneur, early stage investor, startup community builder, and the founder of Build the Fort.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:52]:
He also was a co founder of MapQuest, is a bestselling author and writer today, and someone whose thinking has had a real influence on the direction of Lay of the Land. And when I started it back in 2018. Chris actually came to Cleveland back in 2018 and shared his assessment of our community at the City Club. And a lot of what he relayed stayed with me and fueled the origins of this podcast. Over the last 250 episodes, lay of the Land has grown into something much bigger than I originally imagined. Not simply a repository of entrepreneurial stories, but a kind of connective tissue for entrepreneurship in Cleveland. Dozens of events, thousands of introductions, new friendships, mentorships, hires, investments and funding rounds, and even co founders and I'm sure many second and third order consequences that I will never even know about. So for this episode, it felt worth reflecting on that whole journey and explore how entrepreneurial communities actually form, what makes them stronger, what gets in their way, and what has that looked like here in Cleveland? In our conversation, Chris and I talk about what he saw when he first came to Cleveland, why density and storytelling matter so much, why founders have to be at the heart of it, why confidence is contagious, why you have to build upon your credible strengths.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:14]:
We talk about the give first mentality, about mentorship, trust, meaningful relationships, the limits of top down ecosystem design, and a whole lot more. Chris has spent years studying how startup communities form, evolve and endure and I'm grateful to have him here as a thought partner today. I am also grateful to all of you who have listened, who have shared, supported and helped make 250 episodes possible, and will help make the next 250 possible as well. So thank you. It really does mean a lot to me. Lay of the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Serity Partners. As a wealth management firm, Serity Partners shares Lay of the Land's same dedication to serving local business owners. And the Serity Partners Cleveland team understands the challenges that entrepreneurs and founders face here in Cleveland, Northeast Ohio and beyond.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:05]:
Wealth comes with complexity and increased demands on time and resources. It is easy to become overwhelmed. Serity Partners clients benefit from a unified team of local specialists who coordinate across both business and personal needs. With Serity Partners commitment to transparency in putting clients needs first, complexity can become clarity. To learn more, please visit seritypartners.com or call 216-464-6266. Today, Serity Partners proud to be recognized as one of the top financial advisory firms in the country. Well, Chris, first off, I want to thank you for being here.

Chris Heivly [00:03:45]:
Well, it's my pleasure. Anytime we can talk about this stuff is a good day by me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:49]:
Yeah, it genuinely feels sort of like a full circle moment for me. And if you don't mind, I just, I'll preamble a little bit here because this is a special episode. It is 250 in the making and thank you. When you came to Cleveland and gave the City Club Talk back in 2018, a lot of it resonated with me. You talked about, you know, the importance of culture, how it sits upstream of everything else, and how founders need to know who each other are and support each other and operate in an environment of trust and visibility and generosity. This whole kind of give first mentality, which we'll talk about, but in an environment where that compounds. And you offered to me kind of a roadmap, like an honest, reality based assessment of Cleveland. That to me felt like tough love.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:46]:
But I took it seriously. And at the time back in 2018, I was building a venture backed company in Cleveland, trying to find my own footing as a, as an entrepreneur. And I increasingly came to feel that if I was going to build something there that I wanted to do whatever I could to try and help strengthen the environment that we were all building in and to make sure that other founders knew who each other were and to reduce some of the, you know, the isolation that permeates entrepreneurship and to make it really this bottoms up founder led movement where people actually help each other and in doing so increase our collective likelihood of success. And over the last five years that that conviction has amounted into Lay of the Land. Most of of the podcast has been dedicated to founder stories. What motivates someone to do the very Difficult thing of trying to build a company to solve whatever problem they're passionate enough about solving. But for today, I wanted to take a step back and talk more about the community itself as a concept, because it's really at the heart of why I wanted to do this in the first place. And it's been such a core inspiration for so much of the work.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:00]:
And when I was, like, thinking back on this whole journey, I can trace it back to this talk that you gave.

Chris Heivly [00:06:08]:
That's pretty cool.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:08]:
And so I'm grateful that you're here and we can just kind of talk about it.

Chris Heivly [00:06:12]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:13]:
Not that we've solved all the problems, by the way, but.

Chris Heivly [00:06:15]:
No. Or that we're ever done solving the problems. Jeffrey. So, yeah, this is a lifetime journey.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:22]:
It certainly feels like it, but it's a lot of fun. And what's cool now, just being honest with myself about it, is there's a good faith group of a few hundred local founders in Cleveland who I think at least understand directionally, like, what we need to do, where we need to go. And a lot of that, I think, is. Is shaped by some of the ideas that. That you've kind of put. Put into words.

Chris Heivly [00:06:48]:
Yeah, thanks. I mean, I. That makes me excited for Cleveland as an ecosystem, so. Can't wait to talk more about that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:54]:
Yeah, yeah. So I was trying to think where the best place to start actually is. And I guess what. What sticks out to you when you reflect on when you came to Cleveland? Like, what was salient about your understanding of the city and how it was operating at that time?

Chris Heivly [00:07:12]:
Yeah, sure. So for a little context, David Cohen, Brad Feld and I decided in 2017, late 2016, 2017, to create a business unit inside TXARS to share all of our kind of common ideas about how ecosystems get built in Boulder, me and Raleigh, Durham and a few other places. And what if we could help other people out? I mean, so it's, you know, it's. It's from that pure give first in a way. Right. Like, can we build, obviously, was also a business, so there was an exchange of dollars. But other than that, it's like. Like we really want to help entrepreneurs and in places that are still kind of figuring out the way to go.

Chris Heivly [00:07:53]:
That year, we did five pilots. Now, I want to tell you this because I want to put Cleveland in context. Richmond, Virginia. Fort Wayne, Indiana. Lima, Peru. A place. The region's called the Okanagan, but it's. I just blanked on the name of the town.

Chris Heivly [00:08:13]:
Shoot. It's up in Canada. Near Vancouver, Kelowna, K E L O W N A One of my favorite places in the world now. So. So Kelowna and then Cleveland. So you have these kind of like two internationals, one being quasi in Canada. Right. You got a place like Lima, Peru, you got little places like Fort Wayne, and you got a place like Cleveland.

Chris Heivly [00:08:33]:
And so in that context, what was exciting to go into Cleveland was, I knew, kind of former Rust Belt kind of place. A place that was still weeping over LeBron going and coming and doing whatever he was, you know what I mean? So, you know, the Browns, I'm a sports guy, so, you know, I kind of know. But I'm also. I'm originally from Philadelphia, so I have kind of a Northeast and Cleveland kind of maybe a little more Mid Atlantic or slightly Midwest. But I knew I was going to kind of find a lot of people that I understood. And I also knew that it was a city that had been challenged for lots of years. We were talking earlier about the whole Rust Belt kind of thing. So I was really excited to go into Cleveland and see what I was going to find.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:12]:
Yeah. To kind of frame the whole conversation, I think that we'll have. How did you come to, like, build the vernacular to describe what an entrepreneurial ecosystem looks like? What are the kind of raw ingredients? What. What goes into your, like, diagnostic as you would go into those cities to figure out what was going on?

Chris Heivly [00:09:36]:
It's a great question and I'm glad to share it with you and your audience because you guys were a pilot and so you're on the early days of some of that. We certainly had our individual experiences and some language about that. Brad had his Startup Communities book, which had come out in 2012, which was a bible for me. I was a Jeffrey Stern of Raleigh Durham. So my partner and I, Dave Neal, who were running an accelerator at a time, we kind of came to that book and really loved a lot of the ideas and thoughts in it. But I thought that the book ended too early. We needed more stuff. And as a.

Chris Heivly [00:10:14]:
As a. As a funny aside, when Dave and I shut our accelerator down and I was looking for something interesting to do, I had a conversation, went out to Boulder to hang out with David Cohen and Brad and I sat down with Brad. I'm like, I think you need to write Startup Communities Part two, and I want to help you do that. Which, by the way, that's the way I heard it in my mind. I think what it probably sounded like, because I think Brad's an amazing guy, was like, Mr. Feld. I was thinking maybe that maybe we could, you know, write a book together. And anyway, he laughed.

Chris Heivly [00:10:46]:
And. And then we decided to build this business. Right. So part of that was all of our individual things, but we had a very intentional way of saying, like, all right, we need to do this in a way that isn't about Boulder or Raleigh. Durham. Right. That's bigger than that. And a couple really smart people.

Chris Heivly [00:11:02]:
Mark Nagar, who kind of, you know, ran startup weekends and startup weeks and kind of basically put that into the. Into our world. Ian Hathaway, who Brad had already started working with, to write that book, which is called the Startup Community Way. So a lot of smart people. And we just kept. And I do have to say, after, you know, years of my accelerator preaching, lean startup and the business model canvas and all those things, now I have to fricking use it myself. Right. So I can tell you, Jeffrey, I probably did close to 75 interviews in that first year of 2017.

Chris Heivly [00:11:41]:
Just a lot of it was inbound, which is the amazing part about techstars, but a lot of it just kind of splintered. And I ran the community Discovery, or customer discovery playbook to hilt. So all of that stuff got thrown into the stew, and. And we started to kind of put some frameworks together, which, by the way, seem to change about every month. Right. So that's kind of how what we brought, the language, the ideas, the idea of, like, the five themes, culture being the primary one. I don't think any of that changes today. Maybe how we talk about it kind of has evolved, but, yeah, that's where.

Chris Heivly [00:12:16]:
That's the soup or the stew or whichever you prefer.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:21]:
Um, I do think it would be fun to unpack some of the. What the. The concepts are, because. Yeah, I mean, I have. I have so many questions. I just want to ask about kind of the tactics of it and then kind of overlaying what the last five years of Lay of the Land have been like and how I've kind of interpreted that playbook, if you will, but. But maybe just frame what some of those ingredients are like when you think about founders, corporations, institutions, community organizations, you know, like, who. Who are all the players? How do they generally operate when it's working really well? What does it look like when it's not working so well? Where do you typically see it kind of struggling? Where's the friction?

Chris Heivly [00:13:02]:
Yeah, well, that'll occupy our first two hours just answering that question. Let me start simple, and then we can kind of pick at things as we go forward. So one of the first things that I determined being a former founder multiple times was this. I need to go talk to founders. And the first thing that people want to do, because in most places it's not the founder or founders that are hiring you, right? It's economic development folks, you know, government folks, whatever. That's usually the case. And the first thing they want you to do is talk to all the stakeholders. And I'm like, Matt, so quickly.

Chris Heivly [00:13:40]:
And every place I've done this with, not including those probably 16 to 18 places that I've done at least a multi month deep dive and audit, some of them then turned into longer term consulting. But the most common thing is like I, and I kind of, I think Ian came up with this. It's like a hundred founders in a hundred days, right? And by the way, it was actually probably more like 75 to a hundred founders in like three weeks is what we tried to prove. So you could just, just by that statement you're gonna understand that our approach is a little not or atypical, right? Most consultants would come in and talk to all the stakeholders first. In fact, I see, you know, the big consulting companies sometimes dabble in this and they'll be like, you know, they'll be like two thirds will be stakeholders and one third will be entrepreneurs. And that's only at the end after they've already figured out what they need to figure out. So I was like, the heck with that, like I'm gonna go right to the source. What's really interesting is that sets you up for the next discussions going forward, right? Like what should we do? Or what's happening.

Chris Heivly [00:14:46]:
Some of the other themes in that were like talent. Cleveland has plenty of good enough talent to start with. Universities, population size, you have capital, which I always try to save for last. You have the institutions that you just referenced. Government, universities. And government isn't just government. It's, it's county government, city government, maybe any kind of regional organizations like Jumpstart, right? You have even feds getting in and out in some places. So you have that kind of dynamic and then so institution density, that was the thing that was, I think kind of stood out as not working in Cleveland.

Chris Heivly [00:15:25]:
Met some really great people, but there was a group on the east side, there was a group downtown, there's a group kind of slightly west side, right. And they knew each other and kind of were courteous and said hi to each other, but they weren't working to create some density. And density can be a funky thing. It's, it's the only thing that can be engineered, but it can also easily be engineered wrong. So those are those five themes that we had stumbled upon that we thought represented all the important drivers of, of the startup community. I'll pause there because you, I know I said your question could do two hours, but I'll let you hear the next phase.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:59]:
Well, density certainly resonates also because I, that that was my diagnosis as I came to Cleveland. And you realize quickly, someone on, on the full east side versus the full west side are actually like 45 minutes driving from each other. And so the like pockets where you might have natural collisions, they just don't happen as much, certainly not to the

Chris Heivly [00:16:24]:
level that a large populated place should have or expect. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:29]:
To me, one of the real salient takeaways I remember from, from your talk was really around the importance of storytelling. And to me, I saw at that point this density problem and I saw this storytelling problem and I felt it was so strange because all the folks that I had gotten to know in Cleveland were these incredibly inspirational, aspirational people. They have built companies that had they been in New York or San Francisco, I was pretty sure, like everyone would know who they are. They would've had the venture funding that they need. And I came to an opinion. My like, diagnosis of the situation was it's, it's, it sort of lives on the flip side of the Midwestern. Kindness and warmth is a certain humility and modesty, which I also love and appreciate about about everyone here. But it, it never lends itself particularly well to talking about, about like the things that are going well, the, and so, and success and excellence and like quality at that level.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:35]:
And so we never talk about it. And so because we don't talk about it, no one knows about it.

Chris Heivly [00:17:40]:
Right. And because no one knows about it, many people don't believe it can actually happen here. Which means that no one ever gets started. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:48]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:17:48]:
No collective regional confidence. Right. That you could take an idea to something special.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:55]:
And that really was the core thesis of Lay of the Land was like, what if we just tried to amplify some of those stories?

Chris Heivly [00:18:04]:
Yeah. And you know, here's what I try to tell people. The stories don't have to be about massive multimillion or billion dollar exits. The stories can be smaller, they can be parts of the journey along the way. They can be, hey, I just reached my 100th customer, or I just hired my hundredth person, or we just landed a big distribution deal. Right. All those little stories add up to a big collective story that says, man, there's shit going on here. Like, if they can do it, I can do it.

Chris Heivly [00:18:34]:
Right. So the stories can be small but just as impactful.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:39]:
Yeah. And I, I think I've found that to, to be the truth and that, that really does compound over time as people begin to understand that they're not like alone in that journey and that you can celebrate those small things along the way.

Chris Heivly [00:18:54]:
Yeah. The best ecosystems do celebrate all the things, not just the most obvious one. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:01]:
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Chris Heivly [00:20:07]:
Well, that's going to be the second set of three hours that we'll spend time on.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:11]:
You know, like how, how does it actually work?

Chris Heivly [00:20:13]:
How does it work? I mean, I don't know. It's a complex system and where the complexity is that there's lots of variables, ingredients, whatever you want to kind of say. And they seem to work different at different times in different places. It's why there's not a playbook. As Brad always reminded me during this pilot, five pilots we did in 2017 is like be careful that we start to sound like we know what we're doing because we don't really know what we're doing. And so it's why I've used terms like mindset or framework as opposed to recipe or playbook, which by the way, was an evolution for us in 2017 is in terms of language. So I, I today, here we are, eight years later, I use the word mindset, which gets to approach. And mindset also tells you that it's individual and human, not a machine.

Chris Heivly [00:21:08]:
Right. Because machines don't have mindsets, at least not quite yet. We're getting there. So how does it work? Like doing all the good things in a good way over a period of time. Right now, there's a lot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:24]:
And one thing, like measured in years.

Chris Heivly [00:21:25]:
Yeah, measured in definitely years now, by the way, I can tell you things that could probably have an impact in three months, but they're just one small piece of the whole. Right. So in complex systems, there's a lot of. You're building the right environment, not the right machine. In complex systems, you're creating room for serendipity, for two people to collide and decide to start a company or set up a new activity that supports ecosystem. Right. And it's very difficult, if not impossible, to consistently engineer those things over time. Back to mindset.

Chris Heivly [00:22:02]:
The mindset has to be, I can't control an outcome. I'll give you one example specific to Cleveland. How's that blockchain conference working out for you?

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:13]:
Fair point.

Chris Heivly [00:22:14]:
And I say that, and with no disrespect to the people who spent a lot of time and effort and money putting that together. And I was in the room a few times in the beginning and tried to warn people of across. That idea was that if we do this one thing really, really well, that that will kind of put us on the map and that will fix everything. And I doubt that it fixed anything. Maybe gave you a little bit of awareness, a little bit of spotlight for a while. But I got to tell you, there's probably 15 other blockchain conferences that are all thinking the same thing, just in the United States. So there's that kind of silver bullet strategy that never. Here's what I'll tell you what won't work is putting all your eggs in one activity.

Chris Heivly [00:22:57]:
I use that in the broadest definition possible, like a conference or a venture fund or even a space. And only doing one of those things is not enough.

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:07]:
I want to use that to introduce the idea of playing to strengths, because that's really the remedy and kind of the alternative that I always felt like, what does Cleveland have an authentic right to win if you were to actually think about all the sets of things that it could compete in. It was probably not blockchain, but it credibly could be a whole variety of other things.

Chris Heivly [00:23:36]:
By the way, it could have been blockchain if they had also done all the things around it, Right? But to say, well, this is the. This is the. This road will lead us to prosperity again, I just picked three of them, right? A big venture fund, a big conference or Maybe a big building. Those are typically my favorite blog posts I wrote is sometimes a $20 pizza beats a $20 million building. Right. Because the building's like I don't have any affinity to a building, but I could meet really cool people that are going through the same journeys I am over a $20 pizza or, or multiple thereof. So to answer your question, I can't. Decent sized population, good, good set of variety of colleges and universities.

Chris Heivly [00:24:24]:
Hardworking, good kind of Midwest slash east coast kind of motivations and work ethic. Certainly known for healthcare. Right. Certainly. Those things are kind of almost like table stakes. They're almost like the ante into the poker game. They're not enough in themselves. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:41]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:24:41]:
You take a place like Fort Wayne, Indiana or even Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina, state capital, big university. Still only 400,000 people in the whole metro area. Probably 200,000 downtown. I mean compared to Cleveland, that's, that's a neighborhood. Right. Anyway, so yeah, all the, there's, there's a baseline of stuff. You still got to do all the hard work from that.

Chris Heivly [00:25:07]:
So I got to play poker. I guess if I'm going to complete my analogy.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:11]:
Right.

Chris Heivly [00:25:11]:
You still got to play, still got to play the hands.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:14]:
I would be remiss to not ask what, what, what are some of the three month low hanging fruit things that, that a community should do?

Chris Heivly [00:25:21]:
Yeah. And I think there's always a little bit of this going on, but I was trying to encourage them in the places that I. After the three month audit, if you will, and the readout after that first year, we learned that, you know, they actually don't need to be told what could be happening, they actually need help doing it. So we extended our kind of practice to being more like a one to three year kind of practice. And in some places like Buffalo, we actually hired someone, embedded them as a full time techstars employee, you know, to actually try to go implement the advice that we had given. So given that that doesn't exist today, let me tell you the first thing. The first tool out of the toolbox is to get founders together consistently. And I mean probably weekly, at most every two weeks.

Chris Heivly [00:26:11]:
It could start small, 10, 15, 20 people, hopefully if it does the right thing, tries to keep out most if not all the vendors. Right. All the people that want to sell them something, all the economic development, development folks who are supposed to love them but really don't know how, but just getting the founders together so they feel like you're building your tribe. Right. This is a little bit of kind of language geekiness. But one of the insights that we learned over a couple years is that you have to have a strong community before you can have a strong ecosystem. And people say, well, aren't those the same words? And I said, yeah, even I still use them interchangeably sometimes. But the notion is that the community is really the founders and maybe a few like full time investors and those people who are 100% dedicated to the task of running their company.

Chris Heivly [00:27:01]:
The ecosystem also encourage includes economic development folks, bloggers, podcasters. Right. Everyone else in the community. But if you don't have a strong community, you don't have a strong ecosystem. And so it was almost like I think Brad or Ian talked about, they're like Russian nesting dolls. Do you know what I mean?

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:21]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:27:22]:
And so back to the point, you got to get the community strong, which means founders, and the founders are at the center of that whole thing. And it's almost building more power and control with the elevating founders to leading positions, having them figure out how to put a conference, whether it's a, you know, once a month or once a year. Like, how do we, how do we kind of showcase and highlight what we're doing as founders? I think that's the core. And by the way, you're never done that. Like that might splinter in. Maybe there's a women in tech thread and you know, maybe there's a, you know, maybe a sector tech, right? Healthcare tech only. And that's fine. But I'll give you an example.

Chris Heivly [00:28:04]:
Here in Raleigh, Durham, one of the longest standing entrepreneurial support organizations in the country, Cedar called the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, has been around, I believe more than 40 years, if not the first, certainly the longest standing. Great people, some of them are really good friends of mine. But in an organizations have been around 40 years, you kind of start to feel like, you know, you're the mack daddy, right? And there's a little bit of Jumpstart in that. Like it can't help but be. Jumpstart's done amazing things, but there's many people there think like, well, Jumpstart's the Mac daddy. They're not. The founders are the mack daddy. I'm really overusing this word.

Chris Heivly [00:28:42]:
It feels like it's from like a Chris Farley movie or something, I don't know. But you know, like that, that may seem subtle to some people, but how do we kind of really focus everyone's attention on the founder? I'll finish with this thought. One of the things that when I started doing at my readouts, I don't know if I did it in Cleveland is I say, all right, everyone who's a founder, stand up. If I don't do it that way, I say, everyone is a founder. I want you to stand up and go to this side of the room. And everyone else, stand up and go to this side of the room. And so like I just say really simply to that side of the room, the non founders, your job is one job. How do I support them to make them grow bigger, faster, better? And this side of the room, founders, how do you interact and show up vulnerable and.

Chris Heivly [00:29:31]:
And seeking new information to help you go faster, better, stronger? That's it. That's it. So what do you do? Make sure you elevate founders and have those activities to support them and make them easy and frictionless to get. To get. That was really long, by the way. Sorry.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:48]:
No, it's great. I layer deeper than that. Cause this is something I've also thought a lot about over the years now is I. I've tried to quantify it as much as I can, but it's sort of a hard exercise. But the facilitation, I want to talk really about kind of the give first mentality, which you kind of gave me the language for, but also like how to actually facilitate meaningful connections. Because one thing that I took from the whole philosophy, if you. If you will, was it's really important to introduce people to each other.

Chris Heivly [00:30:24]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:24]:
That should know each other, that maybe don't know each other.

Chris Heivly [00:30:27]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:28]:
And so over the years now, I think it's been probably close to 2,000 introductions of value, which is another phrase that I've come across. And I'm really proud of that. I know it's been material in some way, really hard to quantify, like, what downstream comes from that, but I would love to hear how you think about, like, how you. How you approach that, what it means to actually facilitate meaningful connections and.

Chris Heivly [00:30:53]:
Yeah, well, the key word is trust. And it shows up in a couple different ways. First of all, I'm a very active connector of people. I'm just talking about just me connecting with people and wanting to. I hold open office hours. I have for 12 to 15 years. They're at this stage three to five a week. You know, it's on.

Chris Heivly [00:31:17]:
It's a calendar block. There's a calendly or a Google appointment. You know, anybody can go to my website@Hybelee.com and sign up and I'll meet with anybody. There's no curation no filtering. And you never know what you're going to get, right? So that starts my trust. I trust that the people coming in are going to be interesting to me. I also assume, and it happens more and more, that I'm going to get something out of it as much as they do. So it's not a one way kind of transaction.

Chris Heivly [00:31:46]:
And so that's how I kind of view like that connecting and getting connected to people is really important. And in fact, it's a, it's a superpower or, or it's my gold, right? My network is my gold because I know how to use it and support it. So I always talk about just, you should be making new connections every day, every week, right? Figure out how to do it. You can, you know, try to engineer it a little bit if you want to, but just be open that some of them are going to be turds and some are going to be awesome. And if I try to engineer for awesome, I'm going to miss people that maybe, you know, look like I shouldn't use the word turd, but you know what I mean, that don't look like it'd be valuable. And they surprise me with the amount of connection we create. And then the second thing Jeff is really about the meaningful part, making those connections meaningful. And in fact, I've even blogged, like, here's like a script that you could follow during your networking meetings.

Chris Heivly [00:32:47]:
And what I say is that at some point near the end, you need to look that other person in the eye and say, what can I do for you? Now, if you've spent the appropriate amount of time not just talking about what you need or want, but understanding what's driving them, that question becomes pretty simple. What can I do to help you? And a lot of people go, and you can't let up. You go, no, no, tell me what some, you know, you're trying to hire someone, you're trying to do this. You never know what I could do to help you in some ways. So once you get someone to give them, give them, give you their answer, then it's acting on it. Okay, so how do you build trust? Well, I said I was going to do this, and now within 24 to 48 hours, I'm doing this. I'm making introduction to someone connecting you to my neighbor who's looking for a sales job. And you're looking for a salesperson.

Chris Heivly [00:33:40]:
Right. You know, I'm, I'm thinking about writing a business book and I'd love to talk to someone who's written one before so I can figure out what the challenges are, whatever it is, right? Like you never, you know, oh, by the way, my, you know, my sister is an editor in New York or whatever, right. So again, everyone has this own their own like gold. How do you share it and share it and make that that to me that's how you get to meaningfulness. And part of that is trusting that the other person will act in good faith like you do. So if you do it, I assume they're gonna do it and if they don't, then nothing lost. Just you know, they didn't do it, move on. It's not a, it's not a mark on your reputation or any of that kind of crap.

Chris Heivly [00:34:20]:
That's just, I just hate that kind of feeling. So I trust my network. I trust the people in my network. I trust when I make, I don't believe in double opt in introductions unless it's really someone very super important that I want to make sure I don't overuse that thing. But for 98% of the people, I will make an introduction to you somewhere along the line. Not because you asked or they asked, just because I think you both are in Cleveland. You should know each other, right? Could be as simple as that. And I trust that you two will make something of it if there's something there to be made.

Chris Heivly [00:34:52]:
Another long winded answer.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:54]:
No, it's awesome.

Chris Heivly [00:34:56]:
Let me jump in. I think the key word is meaningful and meaningful is a journey. It's not a transaction. Right. Meaningful builds over time. You and I have met today really in a bigger way than email. I have no idea if a month, six months, two years from now, there'll be a reason for us to connect. But if we've treated each other well, with respect, and we're curious about what each other doing and inevitably there's probably going to be something that will connect us again and then we just continue to build on that and some of those happen the next day and some of them happens the next month.

Chris Heivly [00:35:31]:
I love that. Like that is so cool. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:35]:
I love that too. Sometimes it's like years after and you don't know.

Chris Heivly [00:35:40]:
By the way, this is all the essence of give first, right? I'm happy to give first. I don't know what, how it's going to come back. I don't know who it's going to come from. But I know I put enough of this goodwill out, I'm going to get a healthy amount back.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:52]:
How would you denote give first? What does that mean to you in Your words.

Chris Heivly [00:35:58]:
Yeah. You know, Brad does a much better job. And in fact, he just last year released a whole book on this called Good First. But for me, it's certainly goodwill. It's just taking a meeting when I don't know why it's being asked to do a podcast when I've only met the person by email. It's just saying, you know. And I didn't ask whether you have five listeners or 500,000. It didn't matter.

Chris Heivly [00:36:24]:
It wouldn't have mattered to me. I know by doing this, at some point something will happen. You and I will do something. Someone in Cleveland will listen to this, call me up, say, how can I help? I'm like, well, I'm writing my first novel. Oh, well, my brother's the president of Random House. You know what I mean? Like, I just don't know where it's going to come.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:43]:
Are you writing a novel?

Chris Heivly [00:36:44]:
I am.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:46]:
Cool.

Chris Heivly [00:36:46]:
I just finished the first draft. Make sure we put a pin in that. I don't want to talk, by the way. I've been scared. I put it off for a year and a half and was a total wimp. So I finally started it kind of November, December. 435 pages later, by the way, and. About a founder and a venture capitalist.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:04]:
Oh, cool.

Chris Heivly [00:37:04]:
It's a really deep. All right, I'll finish here. Someone told me years ago, you can tell more truth in fiction than nonfiction. I can write about how to be a founder. I can blog about it all you want, but sometimes when you put it in story form and with deep characters like, my parents aren't around anymore, but I wished they could read this book because they would have understood what I went through, because they could never understand what it was like to be a founder. Right. Back to meaningfulness. I'll tell you a story.

Chris Heivly [00:37:35]:
So it's probably about a year and a half ago, someone jumped on my open office hours, 20 minutes, this woman gets on, and she said, so I talked to you three years ago. I was coming out of the military. Wasn't sure where I was going to live with my husband and kids. I think they live in Denver now. And I just want to tell you, you gave me some advice that really gave me a North Star. I now have two different startups, one kind of a servicey one, one a product one. They're going, fantastic. And I'm just here to say thank you if that doesn't give you the feels.

Chris Heivly [00:38:08]:
Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:09]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:38:10]:
So people say, why do you do it? I want more of those.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:13]:
Yeah, that's yeah, that's amazing.

Chris Heivly [00:38:15]:
Yeah, yeah. She's now becoming a certified LEGO instructor. That LEGO is a tool used by a lot of people to do design thinking stuff. And she's doing that because two of her three children are autistic on the spectrum and Legos is, calms them down. So she wants to teach that to other kids. And you're like, God, I could be part of that. Freaking sign me up every day.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:43]:
Yeah, that's quite motivating.

Chris Heivly [00:38:45]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:45]:
What today sticks with you as the biggest learnings from that whole exercise of trying to understand communities and all that work that you did.

Chris Heivly [00:38:55]:
You know, this is going to sound like a duh, you know, moment, but, you know, human systems are so complex and so touchy and so, you know, we all show up, we're all, you know, we're all who we are at any one moment because of all the things that have happened in our past and what we're trying to be in the future and all that shit shows up in a startup ecosystem. And I think one of the things, when we were corresponding back and forth in email, one of the things I was thinking about what, like, what's the thing I've learned, it's that, you know, humans are still going to be humans and which means, like, sometimes it's beautiful and sometimes it's a pain in the ass and you have to, you know, I focused on the founders, elevating them, but I also now understand that the stakeholders, I didn't say they didn't have a role. I was just trying to kind of even out their roles a little bit by elevating the founders. But darn, those stakeholders are tough some days. Right. And they're not wired the way we need them to. Wired. I used to say about 50% of the stakeholders I would sit and talk to, I could kind of bring them over to kind of our side of thinking, but that means 50% of that I didn't.

Chris Heivly [00:40:15]:
And so this 50%, if they control funds or buildings or programs, that's still, that hasn't changed. And maybe it's could have, should have spent more time. And I'm still thinking about, I still do like a lot of keynote stuff. How do I get through to them to get them to have a different mindset? Bring it all back to mindset.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:35]:
No, I like your phrase of they, they don't. They, they love entrepreneurs, but they don't really know how to.

Chris Heivly [00:40:41]:
Yeah. And they're bringing all the experiences slash baggage from what made them successful. And it turns out that most of those muscles actually not only do they not work in ecosystem development, but they're actually a negative force. So if I was younger, I'd spend more time figuring that out and probably going on the road and trying to fix some of those people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:04]:
Do you think it's like a systems level incentive problem or is it, is it just institutional and people?

Chris Heivly [00:41:12]:
Yes and yes. I mean just every human is driven by different motivations and factors. So it's really understanding that money, respect, whatever control, you know, some of it is the institutions create that environment by the way they're structured. And so when you are successful in it, why wouldn't you stop doing what you're doing? And then obviously one way to change behavior is by changing the incentives. But in many large corporations and you know, government organizations, universities, they're just never going to change the incentives because that's how that system works. It's a problem, or let's say it's a challenge.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:52]:
Is there, is there something in that same reflection that you've changed your mind about, that you used to believe about all of this, that doesn't feel grounded in reality anymore?

Chris Heivly [00:42:05]:
That's a fantastic question and I should have been more prepared for that. Being that we were talking about Cleveland. Eight years later. Here's a thing that I have from a purely personal Chris Hively point of view. Spending a number of weeks over three months in Cleveland, spending every couple whatever, weeks, months in time in Buffalo, over almost a two year period, spending three years, not every day, obviously, or even every week in Columbia, South Carolina. I got my own ego, right. I think I. The good news is I've spent probably more time thinking about ecosystems than, you know, other than maybe a handful of people in this world.

Chris Heivly [00:42:48]:
And I've been to a hundred cities either speaking or diving down deep and doing the audits. And even with all that and my ego that says I can, I can help founders, I can help this place, there's only so much an outsider can do. It's really up to the people that live and breathe every minute and every molecule of oxygen in that community. They really have to make the long term change. And I can tweak it and I can poke at it and I give them some ideas. I can tell them, well, I probably do more of A than B. I can do all those things, but there's only so much one individual can do to kind of lift, right? And maybe years ago I thought I could make bigger changes faster, but it turns out, not so much.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:33]:
Hively, how do you think about mentorship when we're talking about meaningful relationships.

Chris Heivly [00:43:39]:
Yeah. Well, I don't think you get the optimum or you can't optimize mentorship without having meaningful relationships. Mentorship is a two way thing. It's not a one way. One of the cities I don't remember, they all kind of blur together. I remember probably a early 60s year old man who had built two different businesses and had successful exits and, and I remember giving a mentorship kind of workshop for all the mentors in this city and giving me an idea about how to make their mentorship most effective. Now, by the way, they were associated with a program that assigned a mentor to a founder, which I abhor. Right.

Chris Heivly [00:44:24]:
I understand why they're trying to systematize and kind of engineer things. I get it. But I don't think. And then he asked a question. Well, Chris, what if I know that what they're doing is wrong? And I just kept saying it's not your company. But Chris, what if it's not your company? You don't get to decide. And so you got to show up with. And you know, my wife gets so tired of hearing it because sometimes I leave this door open and they could, she could hear me doing the mentor thing.

Chris Heivly [00:44:53]:
One of my most common refrains is like, listen, this is one person's advice. It may work for you, it may not work for you, but at the end of the day, I'm going to sleep the same tonight whether you use my advice or not. Right? Like, I'm not gonna attribute my reputation or, you know, ego or respect for myself based on how you take my mentorship. I'm just one person. By the way, if there was a playbook to run, we wouldn't be sitting here talking. Right? We would just be running the damn playbook. There's no right answers. Right.

Chris Heivly [00:45:25]:
There's probably more right things than wrong things to do with certain moments. So back to your point about mentorship. I believe it's built on a two way relationship where you're almost two peers just with different sets of experiences and you're sharing those, by the way. It's heart, it's. It's part and parcel of the whole book I'm writing is how the new founder takes. Takes advice or doesn't. Right. And who he takes advice from.

Chris Heivly [00:45:50]:
So when it's really done well, it's just like two people sitting down that kind of know each other at a level that's pretty deep. By the way, mentorship only really works at that level if you don't show up vulnerable. I think I wrote a post this week that's like, you can't get good mentorship if you don't ask for help. How many founders never ask for help? They may tell you what they're doing, but they're like, can you help me? What would you do? Right. So that's a little bit of vulnerability. I could go on another hour on that one.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:20]:
Yeah, well, there is definitely a lot there because it's like, it's clearly an important part, but it is hard to facilitate, I think.

Chris Heivly [00:46:30]:
Yeah. So let me come around to something we've already talked to. I think mentorship in a perfect world is not organized or part of a program. It's just that there's a community who is super connected, which is super frictionless, where people make introductions all the time. Where. Back to the Kevin Bacon thing. We're only ever two people away from anybody in our community. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:57]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:46:57]:
Like, think of an environment like that. And mentorship is more ad hoc. It's you and I go to have a coffee. We. Turns out we both love hockey and reading books and, you know, numerology about the number three. I'm just making stuff up. We bought. We bought bond on something that doesn't even have to be about the very thing we're doing, but there's something there.

Chris Heivly [00:47:20]:
And then we get to say, hey, let's chat again in a couple weeks. Right. And sometimes it's about the weather, and sometimes it's about the company, and sometimes it's not even about a challenge that I need. Very transactional. Sometimes it's just kind of meta thinking. Right. But those relationships can evolve over time and become very, very interesting. I still have a mentor, and we are friends.

Chris Heivly [00:47:44]:
I go visit him in Arizona. He's 10 years older than me, and he. Every time we sit down, he goes like, all right, tell me what it's like to write a book. Because he's never written a book, Right? Yeah. Tell me what it's like. How are you using this? There's images in your blogs like they're AI. Right. Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:47:58]:
How does that work? Well, let me show you. So there's an example of I'm still learning from him and getting some probably more emotional advice at this point. And I'm sharing with him functional advice. Right. About how to do things. That's a great mentor, mentee relationship. But I'll build on connection. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:18]:
Right.

Chris Heivly [00:48:19]:
So more connected of places, the more chances you have of finding two or three or five of those people that you can call up. And say, I want to run something by you. You got time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:29]:
Right. It's like a, it's a signal that there's a good foundation in place.

Chris Heivly [00:48:33]:
Yeah. Which by the way, gets back to like, foundations are norms and culture and that it's okay to reach out to someone or have someone introduce you and say, you should go grab a coffee. Like that has to be the foundation. Because all those things like mentorship and they all kind of spring forward on top of that, in my opinion.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:51]:
Yeah, no, it's why it's upstream. It makes total sense. Why do you put capital at the end?

Chris Heivly [00:48:58]:
Yeah, well, you know, capital to me by definition is a risk management gain. And so typically, you know, from, from a hundred thousand feet, it's a lagging indicator of what's happening. It's not in like, it's been proven with tons of research that more capital in an area does not create more or better outcomes. Now, that doesn't mean capital doesn't play a very strong role. It's just not the only thing. And yet most complicated thinkers, government, are all used to thinking that money buys outcomes. And in entrepreneurship, it doesn't. Right.

Chris Heivly [00:49:36]:
I mean, if it did, I can tell you there's hundreds of cities around the world that have thrown a ton of money in entrepreneurship, and yet we still only have one Silicon Valley. Right. We may have a strong London, Berlin, New York, maybe even LA has done, you know, as a top tier. But money has not been the driver. Obviously more money helps build bigger, bigger companies, but it's not the problem. Isn't that it's last. I put it last, so it became not first. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's important, but not the only game in town.

Chris Heivly [00:50:10]:
Back to capital, big buildings and God, what was the third thing we talked about earlier? You know, that are. Anyway, remember pizzas? Pizzas, yeah, pizza beats all those things.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:22]:
So to kind of revisit something we were talking about before, we were recording this pessimism, optimism, you know, framing of, of the situation. We could talk about Cleveland, but. But also, have you seen cities get better?

Chris Heivly [00:50:40]:
Yes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:40]:
Or was it like more academic? So that, that, that's good.

Chris Heivly [00:50:44]:
No, I've seen cities get better. When I arrived in Columbia, South Carolina, there was no coworking. There's a small coworking space, but also had architects and, you know, all these different people just needing a coworking space. You know, over time, we created a new coworking space just for founders. They've started a small fund. It's got more and more awareness, even up to the governor level, They've taken a couple big swings at things like Quantum and you know, our first coffee meetup that I started, I think six or eight people showed up and now it's probably 60 to 80. Right. So that's progress.

Chris Heivly [00:51:22]:
Now in the full arc of where we want that to be, the, you know, Brad's 15 to 20 year kind of arc, they may think that there's still only two steps, but man, those steps are really super hard to do. Right. So to me, that's progress. There was another question in there, but I can't remember where I was.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:41]:
Well, about Cleveland and your.

Chris Heivly [00:51:43]:
About pessimism. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's always more room for more and there's always things we could do to be tighter connected. You know, there's not a city, I don't go into that. There's not what I would call a bad actor, someone who's operating selfishly, who wants to control things. These are all aspects that don't make for good ecosystems. Right. And some of them are important people and some of them are not.

Chris Heivly [00:52:10]:
Frankly, they're all a pain in the butt to me, but, and I never met one that I didn't think I could convert to a, to a, to a good person. However, that being said, one of the best ways that you can move around that is to focus on the founders and to tell their stories. And I don't care whether you're talking about eight people or 16 people or 64 people. And a phrase that I either stole or borrowed is that confidence is contagious. And so that's where the storytelling. So you know what, even if you have some bad actors, even if you don't have enough money to run the event you want, you know what, find a back bar on a 4:30 on a Wednesday or a Thursday, everyone buys their own beer, so it's no cost to anybody. And you know, organize a bunch of people and share each other's stories and then go podcast and blog and, and then one on one, tell people about, hey, did you hear that Dan? Just, you know, did this and this. That doesn't really cost anything.

Chris Heivly [00:53:07]:
Right? But, but that has a material effect and that can happen. You could see that effect in the course of months, right? Yeah, do that weekly. Make it consistent. Ask everyone to bring someone new, throw up a little Facebook group or put a little webpage together. Don't name it anything. Startup Cleveland founders for Cleveland. Just start getting people together, coffee, beer, lunch, whatever, and get it started. Or take what you have and enhance it and tell the stories over and over again.

Chris Heivly [00:53:40]:
And that'll turn a native pessimism into at least some quiet optimism. Because there's always that one founder who's sitting there thinking, I might want to do this, who somehow either finds or gets dragged into this and then says, this is my community. I want to be a part of this. If they can do it, I can do it. I'm going to go do this. I'm going to make the leap.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:01]:
Yeah. I would really struggle to understand how you would come out the other side of this exercise more pessimistic about things.

Chris Heivly [00:54:10]:
It would be a pretty warped head.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:13]:
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. It's been a lot of fun.

Chris Heivly [00:54:16]:
Excellent.

Jeffrey Stern [00:54:16]:
So what, what, what are you most excited about now? Like, what do you find yourself drawn to? Obviously you still write and you have the blog, so, I mean, these are topics you're still thinking about all the time.

Chris Heivly [00:54:28]:
Yeah, I mean, I still write podcasts and speak about this, so, you know, probably 7 to 10 kind of keynote y kind of things, mostly in the US today. I really don't like travel as much as I used to. I'm not a young buck anymore. I still talk to people in cities big and small about what's happening. Obviously, a lot of that's inbound, which is even cooler. So I get to say, like, what's happening and learn from them. Certainly the application of AI into our lives is going to affect entrepreneurship, which in effect is going to change the ecosystem. In fact, I just spoke this week at a conference here in North Carolina called all things AI and there's 2,000 people.

Chris Heivly [00:55:14]:
And what I was asked to talk about in my keynote was the intersection of startups and AI right in front of a bunch of AI people. Frankly, I was a little afraid because I don't know AI to the level they do. No Claude code in this head yet, but it's like a lot of things, the same issues are the same, and so we still have a lot of work to do on those same issues. And a lot of times it's kind of old men who are in the power positions, so who better to help change their mind than another old man? So I'm happy to do so. It's two to six hours of effort, depending on whether I have to travel or not. So, yeah, speaking, writing a podcast I'm doing with techstars, which we kind of did a soft launch on. I think we're up to 13 episodes every other week. I'm really enjoying that because I get to go into a little bit more detail than I can in a blog.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:06]:
Yeah.

Chris Heivly [00:56:07]:
Yet it's still only 14 to 16 minutes. So it's an easy car drive or dog walk or whatever. So that's fun. And I, I've already kind of created like a hundred topics, so I'm good to go.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:20]:
Yeah. I bet.

Chris Heivly [00:56:20]:
I just gotta sit and kind of think about them and record them.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:23]:
Yeah. One of the things I've thought about recently, I mean, as it's sort of impossible to not think about AI, is like what AI will not have as much of a profound effect on. And I think it's largely this stuff. It's the community aspect of entrepreneurship.

Chris Heivly [00:56:42]:
Well, here's exactly what I said. I said maybe to paraphrase, there's still a process to entrepreneurship. Find an idea, work on that idea, take it to some people, see what they think the idea, find out half of it sucks, work on the other half, build out an MVP test that engage with that. Like AI can help you in any one of those segments, probably do it a little faster. But what it can't do is understand the difference between a potential customer saying I would pay for that tomorrow. And that sounds kind of interesting. Right. And actually maybe AI can help you with that.

Chris Heivly [00:57:21]:
But in that, in those responses are pauses and looks on their faces. So there's a human element that goes all the way through the process of starting a company and building a company and launching it. That's not going to go away.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:34]:
Yeah, the meaningful connection part, the trust part, the human part.

Chris Heivly [00:57:38]:
Exactly. And there's no amount of AI that's going to help you fix that. Now certain elements can go faster. Maybe if you do 75 interviews and you loaded them all up, you could get probably better insights and better managing instead of using kind of your brain. And probably you can do that better and faster. But you still have to figure out what to do next, Right? Yeah. That's still human based. And then by the way, let's just think about, I say most mentorship bringing this full circle is less about functional things and more about our mental state.

Chris Heivly [00:58:09]:
And so I still think the best mentorship is human, not a machine telling me what to do or how I should think. So none of that's going to change. And because of that, the community surrounds that has to focus on the human element, which is, I think everything I've just talked about in the last hour. Right?

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:25]:
Yeah, no, for sure.

Chris Heivly [00:58:27]:
That's my thinking. Ads of, Let me see, March 26, 27th, 2026. Maybe changes in Two months.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:35]:
It seems to change pretty fast these days.

Chris Heivly [00:58:38]:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:41]:
Well, I definitely want to ask about the book, but I want to. Greenfield, you know, is. Is there something particularly important about these sets of topics that. That we haven't really talked about?

Chris Heivly [00:58:53]:
Well, I think for anybody who's kind of new to this stuff or interested in Cleveland or elsewhere, I think what I tried to do and all my work has tried to do is lay out kind of the building blocks of how this improves your city and its city's economy, how to become more. More of an innovative city with a better ecosystem and a community. Right. So you got community and ecosystem, and then you're like your city's economy. Right. In this kind of Russian nesting doll that Ian laid out so well in their book. And so, you know, I think Net Net is. There's a role for everyone in this, but I'd like you all to have the right mindset when you go into that.

Chris Heivly [00:59:33]:
And so I think we covered a whole bunch of those things so that. That feels good and important and appropriate on any one of those things. As we joked about, we could go an hour, two hours deeper. Those are kind of my reflections. And I don't think those challenges are going away like tomorrow because they're mostly human challenges and mindset.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:54]:
Yeah. That's the part AI won't automate.

Chris Heivly [00:59:58]:
No. And the part that's the hardest to figure out.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:01]:
Yeah. So where did this book come from within you?

Chris Heivly [01:00:05]:
Well, I mean, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that. So there was two motivations. One is I started thinking about a story and would it be cool to write a novel? And for a year and a half, I'm like, it'd be cool, but you can't do it. You don't know how to do this. You know, we all. This is a typical startup founders, you know, dialogue in their head. And so I wimped about it for a good part of a couple years, and I kept saying to my wife, I'm going to someday, I'm going to do this. And I kind of had some rough parts about the story.

Chris Heivly [01:00:38]:
And I knew my motivation was I wanted to follow like a founder. In this case, it's through about 18 months of an arc of their company and the different people that come in, because we know these people, like, there's good VCs and there's bad VCs. Right. There's like, good consultants and good friends and there's bad consultants and friends and family. Right. Why would you ever do this? That's Crazy. Just keep working for IBM, everything will be fine. Right? You'll have a great life.

Chris Heivly [01:01:08]:
You know, girlfriends or spouses or, you know, significant others who don't understand the ups and downs. And so I'm like, I'd love to tell that story. And then I started thinking about characters, which was the most fun, especially the first investor in this company is a really. And I modeled him over my mentor in Arizona and a TV character that I kind of smushed together. Yeah, kind of sounds like fun, right? And so, and Jeff, what I'll tell you is that it was kind of late November, early December last year, that I was somehow on YouTube and I. I stumbled on a interview with John Grisham, okay? Noted author, former lawyer, little small town lawyer. And they walked through like, I'm not a writer. I was a lawyer, small town lawyer, barely good at it.

Chris Heivly [01:02:00]:
And then he jumped ahead later and said, January 1st of every year I start a book. I've done this for 20 years. Every book I've written, I start on January 1st. And I wrote right through kind of May, June, and then I hand it over. Now I have people I hand it over to. And I also, at the same time was reading a Stephen King book, which is like 20 years old. And it's about his writing process.

Jeffrey Stern [01:02:25]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay.

Chris Heivly [01:02:26]:
Very cool book. And basically what both of them said is, stop being a wink wimp, get off your butt or get on your butt and just start writing. And so a week later I'm like, I'm going to start writing. Now, I've used AI to a certain level. A very good friend of mine, well known in our industry, is also considering or starting. He hasn't told me yet, but we were considering like, how to do this. And he said the right AI companion is like your best friend sitting in your room, always like ready to go, that you can riff with. And so I'm like, hey, I think this character should be like, from a.

Chris Heivly [01:03:06]:
They're actually from Pittsburgh. Right. Because that has that kind of like, how'd I grow up? Rust belt. Like, I'm going to do a tech startup. How's this? But I was smart, you know, so you can imagine as a character, it's got all those layers to it, right?

Jeffrey Stern [01:03:18]:
For sure. But.

Chris Heivly [01:03:19]:
But like, you know, I'm like, I think he should wear this. And, you know, and then the AI would go like, well, you know, how about this? And I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. And then I take that and I turn it up. So I Did that for about three weeks, which gave me. Started to give me confidence. Confidence is contagious, right? So I started feeling like, I. I can do this. And then I started arcing the novel.

Chris Heivly [01:03:41]:
Cause I knew. By the way, the other thing is, John Grisham said he's. He says, I kind of know my first paragraph, and I kind of know my last paragraph, and then I just have to fill in. John Irving, another author that I love, literally writes the last sentence of the book before he starts, Right? So I'm like, I can do this. So here we are about roughly three months to get a first draft, and now in editing mode, which is harder than writing. And I'm never really had to edit to this level, so it's a lot of reading and saying, God, that was kind of weak. Then you write a sentence, and you're like, wait, did I use that sentence already? I can't remember. You know, then I got to go back.

Chris Heivly [01:04:21]:
And so anyway, that's. That's. That's the story. And by the way, the. The other character, the investor, is probably who I always wanted to be, right? Someone who really can get through to someone like a child or, you know, a peer, and really help them in the moment they need it the most by saying the most perfect things and understanding at a really deep level what that person's going through.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:47]:
That's awesome.

Chris Heivly [01:04:48]:
I'm not excited about it at all. Can you tell?

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:50]:
Yeah, yeah. Is there a name?

Chris Heivly [01:04:53]:
It's called the Offer.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:54]:
The Offer.

Chris Heivly [01:04:55]:
And you got to figure out what that means.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:57]:
Yeah. Nice. That's awesome.

Chris Heivly [01:05:00]:
Very cool. Yeah. Probably give it six months. I have an agent that I've used in my other books. When I'm done this first edit, send it to her. She'll start taking it up to New York and see if we can get someone to buy in. If not, I'll publish it myself. Don't really care.

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:15]:
I'll keep an eye out for it.

Chris Heivly [01:05:16]:
Yeah, we'll let you. You'll be on my spam. I mean, my email list, I'm sure.

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:21]:
Cool. I think we can work to bookend it here. I'll close with our traditional closing question. Which for you is your favorite part of Cleveland?

Chris Heivly [01:05:31]:
My favorite part. So I thought about this a little bit, and there's probably two elements. One is walking around one night. It was a Beautiful night, probably 70 degrees. And I stumbled on the map room, the bar. Right now, I don't know if you know, but I'm an old map guy, right?

Jeffrey Stern [01:05:51]:
So kind of real cartographer.

Chris Heivly [01:05:54]:
Yeah. So seeing a place called the Map Room and being able to walk in there and have a drink was. It's still a memory I think about because it was also like probably had been cold and all of a sudden it went to like 70 and it was a, you know, people were starting like spring, I think people starting to get out in the streets. So that's kind of a little favorite memory. But the other thing was just meeting, you know, 20, 30 real founders that, you know are working their ass off. And many of them I've still keep in touch with. I mean that happens in every city I've been through, even if it might be three or four years later. And I have to say, remind me.

Chris Heivly [01:06:30]:
Oh yeah, we met in Cleveland. I think there's a guy that just reached out recently and so that's. I get excited by other people's getting excited about their thing and I'm like, how can I help?

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:40]:
So it's contagious.

Chris Heivly [01:06:42]:
So that's. Those are the two parts of Cleveland. Cool.

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:44]:
Well, Chris, I just want to, I want to thank you. I'm, I'm grateful you took the time to have this conversation. It's, yeah, it's, it's fun to, to kind of do a meta episode on all of it.

Chris Heivly [01:06:56]:
I'm glad I could be part of your journey and part of this. Anxious to see if anybody gets excited about some of the things we talked about?

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, because you didn't ask about the audience. I'll tell you because it, it's, it's, it's cool because it's been largely like the whole movement itself, pretty founder led. So each person that's been on over the last 250 episodes kind of shares it to their network and that's kind of organically how it's grown. So it's a few thousand local Northeast Ohio folks and my mom in New York, that's like, that's what's been.

Chris Heivly [01:07:32]:
Well, I love especially the last part. So this is one of the things I do. Ma. She can actually hear it and listen and touch it, right?

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:39]:
Oh yeah, all the way to the end. She'll listen.

Chris Heivly [01:07:42]:
That's awesome. Cool.

Jeffrey Stern [01:07:43]:
Well, if people had anything they, they wanted to follow up with you about, where would you, where would you point them?

Chris Heivly [01:07:48]:
Yeah, you can put it right in your show notes if that, if you do that or if listening. I get my email out easily. So it's chris@buildthefort.com. you can also go if you want to meet one on one for 20 minutes. The easiest place is go to hively.com office hours, open office hours, something like that. You'll see it up at the top, right? And we find a 20 minute session. And then I have, you know, the podcast and the blog. Blog you can show up on my site.

Chris Heivly [01:08:15]:
And the podcast is at techstars. It's called your startup community. So those are the places you could get my stuff and listen and happy to chat with anybody about just about anything.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:26]:
Yeah, I like the blog.

Chris Heivly [01:08:29]:
Thank you.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:30]:
It's a staple of my information digest.

Chris Heivly [01:08:33]:
Well, I'll tell you, probably 400 blog posts in now. I'm getting more and more feedback in the last year. Sometimes I think it just takes you that long to build the audience, right? Yeah. But the feedback's really, really been kind of amazing over the last year, so very cool.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:50]:
Well, thank you again, Chris.

Chris Heivly [01:08:51]:
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:56]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffreyoftheland fm or find us on Twitter oddlayoftheland or @sternhefe j e f E. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.

Jeffrey Stern [01:09:33]:
The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UP Company LLC at the time of this recording. Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next week.