Venture Backed Episodes

Ken Sobel — Co-founder and CEO of Hyperframe. Ken is an engineer and repeat founder whose entrepreneurial path started early — out of college he launched a fingerprint payments company that predated Apple Pay, which he took through Y Combinator and ultimately was acquired by Visa in 2016. Ken grew up in construction though… recalling memories being in his father’s workshop as a kid — and his longstanding passion for construction coupled with his love of engineering and problem-solving has ...

Carson Morell and Daniel Scott Mitchell, Co-Founders of Takton — a manufacturing technology company building fast, affordable tools for small and mid-sized manufacturers. Carson and Daniel came into manufacturing from different paths — Carson as a founder and operator, Daniel as an engineer at companies like Tesla and Rivian — but arrived at the same realization: there is a massive gap between the most advanced manufacturing technology and what is actually accessible to the majority of shops ...

Will Zell — Founder and Managing Partner of Vessel, founding CEO and now Executive Chair of AssetWatch, and a leading voice in rethinking how venture capital works across Ohio. Will’s path into technology and venture isn’t conventional. He grew up — and still lives — in Bellefontaine, Ohio. At 17, he ran for city council under the slogan “A Voice for the Future.” He spent time in ministry, built a real estate portfolio during the financial crisis, and ultimately found his way into technology...

Chad Delligatti — CEO of InnoSource Chad Delligatti is the CEO of InnoSource — a more than two-decade-old, Ohio-based company that has grown into a national workforce solutions platform serving Fortune 500 and midsized organizations across the country. Since joining InnoSource in 2000 as one of its earliest employees, Chad has devoted his entire professional career to building the company — helping it evolve from a regional staffing firm into the leading HR, talent, outsourcing, and data s...

Matt Kalina — Founder and CEO of TandemStride Matt Kalina is the Founder and CEO of TandemStride, a healthcare marketplace that connects trauma survivors with peers, care partners, and providers to support long-term recovery. Inspired by his family’s firsthand experience with traumatic injury, Matt is dedicated to building solutions that close the gap between emergency care and ongoing support. With his leadership, TandemStride is advancing a more connected and compassionate model of recovery...

Akram Boutros — Founder and CEO of Nexus Bedside. Akram brings more than 30 years of experience as a healthcare leader, executive, and clinician. He previously served as CEO of The MetroHealth System in Cleveland from 2013 to 2022, where he led a team of more than 6,000 employees and 3,500 medical staff, overseeing a nearly billion-dollar revenue operation and the complete transformation of the MetroHealth campus and care model. Prior to that, Akram held senior leadership roles at multiple he...

Tyler Dunagin is the founder and CEO of Turnserv, a Northeast Ohio–based platform company behind brands like ApartmentPainters.com, ApartmentFlooring.com, and Liquid Liner — each rethinking a critical piece of the residential turnover and value-add process for property owners and operators. In our conversation, Tyler traces his journey from early curiosity in real estate and the unlocking of his entrepreneurial spirit, to building a multi-brand platform that now partners with some of the lar...

Michael and Tory Waxman — the founders of Sundays for Dogs, the Cleveland-based company designed to make dog parents’ lives easy. What began with their own dog, Mabel, and a simple but powerful question — why does feeding dogs well have to be so difficult? — has grown into one of the most exciting consumer companies to emerge from Ohio. Led by loving dog parents Dr. Tory Waxman, a veterinarian, and Michael Waxman, a serial entrepreneur, Sundays pioneered human-grade, air-dried, zero-syntheti...

Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist and someone whose work has shaped the modern internet as we know it. Long before Craigslist became one of the most enduring, important, and frequented platforms on the web, long before the internet even connected all of us, Craig was a computer science student here in Cleveland at Case Western Reserve University — tinkering with early programming languages, studying neural networks and AI, and exploring the frontier of software engineering. The res...

Jerry Schill is the founder and CEO of Schill Grounds Management — a company he launched in 1993 with his brother after a chance summer job revealed a passion for landscaping. What began as a two-person side hustle has grown into a large-scale commercial grounds management company, now one of the fastest-growing platforms in the industry. In 2020, Jerry began a bold new chapter—scaling Schill Grounds Management through strategic acquisitions alongside organic growth. Under his leadership, th...

Andrew Hurst is the founder and CEO of Delivered, a fast-scaling logistics platform revolutionizing parcel shipping with faster, more reliable deliveries at lower costs. He also serves as CEO of Ark Transportation, where he led a fivefold revenue increase in just five years, and is the founder of Veroot, a compliance platform now trusted by thousands of logistics teams nationwide. Under his leadership, and across all three companies, Andrew is bringing an entrepreneurial lens to the freigh...

Max Pennington is the Co-Founder & CEO of CLEANR, an innovative company that uses filters to prevent microplastics from entering water streams. Max graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Chemical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, where he co-developed CLEANR’s innovative VORTX filtration technologyb. Inspired by nature, VORTX biomimcry is capable of removing over 90% of microplastics from washing machine wastewater. Microplastics pollution is a severe and growing environme...

John Knific is a serial entrepreneur and investor who has built three venture-backed software companies here in Cleveland. His latest venture, Squad, is a peer discovery platform designed to gamify ratings and rankings for Gen Z, starting on college campuses, delivering valuable preference data to marketers. Before Squad, John co-founded Wisr, a virtual communities platform that transformed how universities engage students. Wisr ultimately served nearly one million active users before bein...

Rob van Haaren is a Dutch-born entrepreneur and CEO of Proximal Energy, a Cleveland-based SaaS company transforming asset management for solar and energy storage projects. Rob has long been interested in renewable energy engineering — he holds a Master’s from Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Engineering and a PhD from Columbia as well with a focus on utility-scale energy storage optimization and engineering. He also has over a decade of experience blending bridging academia and ...

Stephen McHale — a long-time Cleveland serial entrepreneur with a 40-year career founding, investing in, and building companies. Most notably, Steve served as Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Explorys, which he formed in 2009 in partnership with The Cleveland Clinic. He co-founded and funded Explorys with Charlie Lougheed, one of my former co-founders from Axuall, where Steve is also a board member. In six years, Explorys became the leader in leveraging electronic medi...

Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Lay of The Land podcast. Today, we're doing something a bit different as I take on the role of guest on other podcasts to discuss recent developments in my journey and offer a glimpse of what lies ahead. As some of you may know, I've recently embarked on a new professional path by joining the founding team of The O.H.I.O. Fund. In the near future, I'll be recording a dedicated episode to delve deeper into The O.H.I.O. Fund alongside some of my part...

Ryan Schreiber is a long-time Clevelander and major advocate for the city, as well as the founder and CEO of Streamline, an innovative mobile platform tackling one of the streaming industry's most pressing challenges—helping users navigate the increasingly fragmented world of content and entertainment, from sports to shows and movies, across over 200 streaming platforms. With over $1.6 million in funding raised since founding the company earlier in 2024, Ryan is on a mission to transform how...

Jim Weisman, CEO of Ingine, exploring deep into the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare In our world where healthcare costs are soaring and drug development timelines stretch into decades, Ingine is revolutionizing how we can analyze complex medical and healthcare data to produce better knowledge to create better medicine. By leveraging quantum mechanics principles and advanced probabilistic mathematics, they're tackling some of healthcare's most pressing challenges - from...

Lance Hill, CEO of Within3, has led one of Cleveland's most well-capitalized startups, raising over $100 million to transform how the healthcare and life sciences industries communicate. What began in 2007 as a secure peer-to-peer platform for physicians quickly evolved into something much more ambitious—a solution to break down communication barriers in life sciences and accelerate the development of life-changing therapies for patients worldwide. Under Lance’s leadership, Within3 has become...

Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Lay of The Land podcast. Today, we're doing something a bit different as I take on the role of guest on other podcasts to discuss recent developments in my journey and offer a glimpse of what lies ahead. As some of you may know, I've recently embarked on a new professional path by joining the founding team of The O.H.I.O. Fund. In the near future, I'll be recording a dedicated episode to delve deeper into The O.H.I.O. Fund alongside some of my part...

Aaron Hoffman and John Zinno — co-founders of DeliverThat, based in Canton Ohio. Friends for life, the two of them started this business out of Ohio University in 2016 off the bat of a viral tweet and have since proceeded to revolutionize catering delivery with over $300 million dollars of catering delivery under their belt, a network of over 25,000 active drivers on their platform, operational in all major cities in all 50 states, helping over 500 brands elevate their catering. This is ...

Andrew Rising, CEO of Encore Ventures Labs. As someone who believes deeply in the opportunity for Cleveland’s future, I find Andrew’s journey to be an inspiring and optimisitc one… …Deeply rooted in the heart of Cleveland’s west side where he grew up before embarking on a decade-long adventure in the Bay Area—a place where innovation and venture capital converged to create world changing technologies. Andrew has spent his career at the intersection of talent and venture capital — from Google to...

Franco Kraiselburd — Co-Founder and CEO of Asclepii — building the next generation of tissue engineering therapeutics for wound healing. I’ve recently heard a life’s work described as a lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are. It feels to me that Franco is not just building a company, but has found his life’s work and is truly pursuing a grand mission. Grounded in an international childhood living across the United States, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, ...

Ian Maurer — Chief Technology Officer at GenomOncology and co-lead of the Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers’ AI working group. With over two decades of software experience, Ian has led GenomOncology — a Cleveland-based software company — in their pursuit to provide the healthcare community with data-driven insights to improve cancer care and strengthen precision oncology programs by transforming valuable, but unusable data, into actionable oncology treatment options and strategic insight...