Community Episodes

Sandor Gyerman and Jared Anderson, the dynamic co-founders of Andor Creative. Founded in 2018 when they were Sophomores at Cleveland State University, Andor Creative was born to find more innovative ways to produce advertising and marketing content for companies, bridging the gap between Gen Z and established businesses in Greater Cleveland. Since inception, their campaigns have generated over 100 million organic views across various social media platforms and their impressive and growin...

Joshua Edmonds, CEO of DigitalC. The digital divide — this gap between people who have access to the internet and those who do not — is something you may have heard me bring up a few times before on this podcast — while not uniquely a Cleveland issue, Cleveland historically has been one of the most challenged connected large cities in the country with roughly 35% of Cleveland households lacking at-home internet access. DigitalC, a non-profit based in Hough right in midtown Cleveland, was...

Mike Malley, President and CEO of Malley's Chocolates. If you grew up in northeast Ohio it’s very likely you know of Malley’s Chocolates, a staple of this community, providing delicious chocolate candies & treats for over eight decades now with nearly two dozen retail stores across the region and a modern chocolate-making 60,000 sq foot factory off Brookpark Road in Southwest Cleveland! Under Mike’s leadership, the company has not only preserved its cherished traditions, but also embraced i...

Craig Hassall, CEO of Playhouse Square Craig is a mainstay in the international theater community, with decades of experience operating and curating the most prestigious venues across Europe and Australia. Over his career, in addition to his role as CEO of the Royal Albert Hall in London, he was also CEO of Opera Australia which oversees the Sydney Opera House, and he was the managing director of the English National Ballet. He also held senior roles for major projects including the 2000 and 20...

Keith Gerchak and Marisa Guterman — Founders @ Double G Films This is a truly special episode — I always love exploring the parallels between entrepreneurship and art and in our conversation today, we get to explore the fascinating journey behind 'Lost and Found in Cleveland,' the upcoming feature film and brainchild of Keith and Marisa, which brings the captivating magic of antique appraisals to the big screen through the powerful narratives of five individuals in quest of the American Dream, a...

Mitchell Vargo, Partner at Forward Hospitality Group. Since its founding in 2015, the Cleveland-based Hospitality Group has built out unique entertainment, bar, and restaurant experiences locally and all across the country — from here in Cleveland to Chicago, Miami, and beyond! The breadth of concepts spans FWD — the large-scale day and nightclub built on a shipyard in the East Flats with a quintessential Cleveland industrial backdrop, coined the Ibiza of the midwest and pulling some of ...

Umberto P. Fedeli — Founder, President, and CEO of The Fedeli Group I first had the opportunity to speak with Umberto on this podcast just over a year ago! At the time, our conversation extended far beyond what we were able to include in the original episode exploring his Italian heritage & Cleveland upbringing, the evolution of his career, life philosophies, the power of networking & connecting people, and his approach to business as both an investor and entrepreneur as the founder of one o...

Matt Buder Shapiro — Chief Marketing Officer at Vytalize Health, Previously Founder at MedPilot (Acquired) I first spoke to Matt on this podcast 3 years ago. At the time, as a co-founder and chief marketing officer of MedPilot, he was navigating an acquisition to Vytalize Health after having built the company to help service over a million patients. I said at the time that Matt’s journey is a big win for Cleveland startups and the ecosystem writ large, and today’s conversation underlines that p...

John Kempf — founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA), a regenerative agronomy company started back in 2006 to share the knowledge, tools, and systems that regenerate farm profitability, soil health, and plant health, all while reducing the need for fertilizers and pesticides. Under John’s leadership, AEA has grown to be trusted by over 10,000 growers across the world to deliver exceptional yield and quality improvement results on over 4 million collective acres of fruit, nut, vegetable, a...

Dr. James Kenyon, Director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio The road to the Moon goes through Cleveland. With a budget of approximately $900 million, a staff of more than 3,200 civil servants, over 725 patents, and over 120 R&D 100 Awards, Glenn — under Dr. Kenyon's leadership and in accordance with NASA's mandates — is providing integral support to Artemis, NASA’s mission to return us to the Moon, overseeing the service module that will propel the Orion Space Capsule out of E...

Today we’re running a replay of one of my favorite conversations from 2022 with Lila Mills of Signal Cleveland. Since we last spoke, Signal Cleveland has continuously produced reliable daily journalism across a plethora of local topics and built Cleveland Documenters, a group of nearly 700 greater Cleveland residents, representing nearly every zip code in the county, who are trained and paid to cover public meetings. Additionally, launched in December 2023, Signal Akron joined Signal Clevelan...

Andre Cisco — Manager for MGK and XX Brands, Brand Strategist and Investor, co-owner of the 27 Club — the coffee lounge and kitchen here in Cleveland — and Managing Partner at Dead Logic, a marketing strategy and brand management firm. Andre is a serial entrepreneur with more than 10 years of entertainment, international logistics, and merchandising experience — Invested in wealth building through ownership and community, he is dedicated to creating businesses that disrupt, educate, and enha...

Nick Dadas — Co-Founder of University Tees, SISU Lifestyle, Acton Academy Lakeside, ISI, and MasterPlan Coach. In 2003, still a sophomore at Miami University, Nick co-founded University Tees after trying to organize a t-shirt order for his business fraternity and becoming frustrated with his experience; so he and his co-founder, Joe, decided there had to be a better way and like all good entrepreneurs, they started their own company. Since then, University Tees has gone on to grow into the pr...

Meg Mayhugh, Founder and Managing Partner at People Architects as well as the Head of Talent & people at Ninety.io the leading cloud-based business operating system and only officially licensed software for EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System), which recently closed its $35 million Series B funding, valuing the company at over $200 million! Meg has decades of experience in talent and people management, leadership strategy, and HR writ-large with an amazing set of roles that led her profes...

Tracy Strobel — CEO of the Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL) Tracy Strobel was appointed Chief Executive Officer of CCPL in July 2019 after serving in the Deputy Director role for nearly 15 years. CCPL has 27 branches that serve the 610,000 residents of 47 communities in Northeast Ohio. CCPL has earned the prestigious five-star rating in Library Journal’s Index of Public Library Service for the last decade; and received the publication’s highest overall score among America’s largest metr...

Ethan Karp — President and CEO of MAGNET: The Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network which, founded in 1984, has been dedicated to fostering local manufacturing and supporting local manufacturing businesses across technological innovation, workforce training and improved management practices. Ethan joined as CEO of MAGNET in 2013 after a consulting career at McKinsey & Co. and academic studies in biochemistry and physics and ultimately a Ph.D. in Chemical Biology from Harvard. We cove...

Umberto Fedeli — Founder, President, and CEO of the Fedeli group — one of the largest risk management and insurance firms in the state of Ohio. This conversation is packed full of Umberto’s earned wisdom over his career and his life — as a true maven and master connector of people, it is easy to understand through our conversation how and why Umberto has become so renowned for his first-class hospitality, powerful network, and influence across the business, political, and philanthropic worlds...

Michael Goldberg, Executive Director of the Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship, as well as an Associate Professor of Design and Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management at CWRU where he teaches courses on entrepreneurship. Notably, Goldberg created a massive open online course — also known as a MOOC — for CWRU called "Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies", a course which has attracted over 175,000 students from over 190 countries across the w...

Michael Murphy, on a mission to bring professional soccer to Cleveland as the Co-founder and CEO of the Cleveland Soccer Group. Previously, Michael served as President of Gravitas Ventures — whose story we featured back on Lay of The Land’s 68th episode with Gravitas’ CEO (linked here), Nolan Gallagher, Michael’s current co-founder at Cleveland Soccer Group! At Gravitas, Michael was instrumental in growing the company’s distribution footprint, managing their library of more than 3,000 titl...

Dr. Elad Granot — Dean of John Carroll University’s Boler College of Business, co-founder and managing member of an early-stage technology Venture Capital fund, and advisor to a $450mm VC fund — on what Cleveland can learn from Startup Nation and Elad’s time in Israel, the role of academia in fostering an entrepreneurial mindset, the tolerance for risk in North East Ohio, technology transfer out of academic institutions, and a lot more!

Jeffrey Stern — host of the Lay of The Land Podcast and co-founder at Axuall — reflecting on the 99 conversations prior, what draws people to entrepreneurship in the first place, where do company ideas come from, and the real importance of culture!

Kris Snyder — founder of Vox Mobile and Impact Architects & Head of Finance and Partnerships at Ninety.io — on working with entrepreneurial leaders to create impact and pursue a world where small and medium organizations and their employees can become more humane, productive and resilient in order to live their best lives!

Pat Conway & Mark King — Co-founder & CEO respectively of Great Lakes Brewing Company — on building Ohio’s original craft brewery, celebrating 34 years of sustained success and continuous innovation, the history of beer production in Cleveland, br

Lila Mills — founding editor-in-chief of Signal Cleveland — on starting a newsroom from scratch and building the trust required to be the source of daily news and information for Greater Clevelanders.