Venture Backed Episodes

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...

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...

Aaron Slodov — CEO of Atomic Industries, a company he co-founded back in 2019 and has raised over $20 million from leading investors like Toyota Ventures, Impatient Ventures, Narya Capital, 8090 Industries, and others! Atomic is on a mission to exascale the American manufacturing sector, starting with making tool and die-making orders of magnitude easier and faster through advanced automation. Through the lens of Aaron’s underlying techno-industrialist philosophy, we’ll unpack what exasca...

Darren Small, co-founder and CEO of Oko. With over a decade of experience on Wall Street, Darren’s analytical background from the world of investment banking, stocks, and data, equipped him with a keen eye for efficiency and growth opportunities which he’s now applied to the world of logistics! Darren co-founded Oko back in 2021 after witnessing firsthand the transformative power of streamlining logistics operations. Since then, as CEO, Darren has raised $4 million in funding for the bus...

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...

Adam Graybill, co-founder and CEO of Journey Biosciences. With a robust 20-year tenure in the diabetes market, Adam has been at the forefront of assembling purpose-driven teams and forging impactful strategic partnerships across the healthcare landscape; having played an instrumental role in building the Cardinal Health At Home business to a billion-plus dollar entity, ultimately serving over 300,000 individuals with type 1 diabetes each year. Deeply understanding of the demands and burd...

Phil Londrico, Founder & CEO of JaTango — an interactive broadcasting and e-commerce platform that gives individuals the power to host their own live shopping channel anywhere. For many years now, we’ve seen e-commerce grow, sparking an entire industry of new brands, channels, and technology stacks. Today, everything from a legacy department store to your local grocery store to a faraway fashion boutique is “online” and at your fingertips. But the actual experience of shopping hasn’t changed...

Ryan McManus — founder and CEO of SHARE Mobility Ryan is passionate about solving workforce and rural mobility challenges, creating and affording equitable access to transportation, and ultimately changing the way people actually commute. To this end, SHARE Mobility, which raised over $12 million in funding from investors like JumpStart Ventures here in Cleveland, JobsOhio, Iron Gate Capital, Seamless Capital, and Venn Ventures among others, is a mobility-as-a-service platform empowering co...

Kyle Maggard, Founder & CEO of Over Easy. Kyle started OverEasy in the fall of 2018, reflecting on his time as a former college athlete at Westpoint and as an Army Captain where living a healthy and active life wasn’t just his passion, but his job. As a busy father, husband, and entrepreneur, he came to recognize that staying fit and eating healthy were harder than they sounded in his busy lifestyle, and without a convenient and nutritious option to start his day, set out to create one for h...

Mohamed Kamara, founder and CEO of InovCares. Grounded in a sobering reality: The United States has the highest rates of maternal mortality in the industrialized world. In May 2017, having lost both his sister and aunt to preventable pregnancy-related causes, Mo found himself in a place with the motivation and determination to confront this maternal mortality crisis head-on. Mo ultimately founded InovCares to this end — to address the concerns of women of color who are, unfortunately, of...

Every 50th episode on Lay of The Land thus far, I’ve tried to honor the request I occasionally get, that from time to time, listeners would like to hear more of my own thoughts and flip the proverbial script from host to guest. ...On the 50th episode, I explored my own professional journey, the concept of startup ecosystems, and what it takes to get the entrepreneurial flywheel going …On the 100th episode, I reflected on what universal lessons I think we can take with us from Lay of The La...

Andrew Maurer is the co-founder and CTO of Rise Works, an all-in-one compliance and payment platform designed for companies with global workforces. Rise, which is based in Pepper Pike and has raised $3.8 million in seed funding from investors like Draper Associates, Polymorphic Capital, Sino Global Capital, Hashkey Capital, and other angels — offers a platform with flexible payment infrastructure along with automated routing between fiat and cryptocurrencies, enabling Web2 and Web3 organizations...

Gerald Hetrick (CEO of Docket (formerly Bezlio) & Professional EOS Implementer) Gerald has been on the show once before; those of you who’ve been with Lay of The Land from the beginning may recall Gerald as one of the first entrepreneurs to make an appearance back on Episode #6, which I’d encourage anyone interested in learning Gerald’s personal and entrepreneurial journey co-founding and leading two companies from inception to exit — spanning his time building Vox Mobile and Able — to take a l...

Jack Greco, co-founder and former CFO and COO of ACV Auctions, a Buffalo-based wholesale online marketplace for cars (ACV Auctions went public in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $3 billion dollars) Now an active angel and venture investor through his fund Far Out Ventures, Jack runs a weekly newsletter called Buffalo Bridge which tells the stories of Buffalo’s startup community and has made nearly 200 investments in other founders and startups! Jack is the first guest to com...

Adam Rakestraw — co-founder, chairman, general counsel, and chief business development officer of MediView XR, based here in Cleveland Ohio! With approximately $29.5 million in capital raised from strategic partners like the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic GE HealthCare, JobsOhio, and many others since its founding in 2019, MediView is a medical technology company working to advance human health through its digital augmented reality ecosystem. MediView's AR visualization platform aims to unloc...

Andrew Wolfe, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bloomfilter. Andrew is a software engineer turned entrepreneur who is passionate about improving the ways people build software. Prior to Bloomfilter, he and his co-founder Chris Stoll co-founded Skiplist, a consultancy dedicated to refining the software development lifecycle (SDLC) — an experience that led Andrew down the path to work on Bloomfilter addressing the same problem space. Businesses rely on software development to solve problems, delive...

David Levine — Co-Founder/CEO @ Wireless Environment (Acquired by Ring, Acquired by Amazon) & Co-Founder/CEO @ My Home Park Having made a career of invention and serial entrepreneurship, in 2005 David Co-Founded Wireless Environment to revolutionize the lighting industry with a belief that off-grid, wireless, LED lighting would be the future of lighting. Over the next 13 years, David proved that thesis as he lead the organization as CEO to over $30 million in sales on just $1.1 million in equ...

Mitch Kroll, co-founder & CEO of Findaway (acquired by Spotify). Mitch started Findaway back in 2004, a time when audiobooks were available only on CD and cassette, in order to revolutionize this business of audiobooks, connecting storytellers with listeners at scale. With this vision of audiobook democratization in mind, Mitch led the company over the next 17 years to sell over 6 million units of its Playaway audiobook device and through a honed focus on innovation, became the global leader...

Andrew Spott — Founder & President of HR Signal, and the Founder & Chairman of the VividFront. Andrew founded VividFront back in 2009, growing it to become the acclaimed strategic Cleveland marketing agency it is today with recognition spanning The Inc 5000 fastest-growing companies and Northcoast 99 Top Employer awards multiple times over while driving success and impact for dozens of Ohio-based organizations and beyond. After transitioning from CEO to Chairman of VividFront, Andrew shifted...

Tory and Michael Waxman — the founders of Sundays (>$14 million raised, Cleveland-based) — on building Sundays for Dogs to become a leading dog food brand offering the first human-grade, air-dried dog food, made with 100% all-natural ingredients, that is healthier than kibble, but easier than refrigerated foods since it doesn’t require a freezer, prep, or clean-up. In pursuit of their mission to make it easier to be an awesome dog parent and feed millions of dogs, Tory and Michael have grown...

Dom Raban — Founder and CEO of Xploro® While originally founded in the UK, Xploro has recently established its headquarters here in Cleveland accompanying the closing on over $1.7mm in funding in a round led by local investors including Comeback Capital, University Hospitals Ventures and JumpStart Ventures! Xploro is an award-winning and clinically validated health information platform that uses augmented reality, gameplay, and artificial intelligence to deliver health information to young pa...

Mike Bruckman, CEO of Haima Therapeutics. With a PhD in organic chemistry and additional training in biomedical engineering and management, Mike joined the founding team at Haima as CEO in 2018 and has led their commercialization. Having brought in over $13mm in government funding to support their program over the last 5 years, Haima was the sole team selected by DARPA to receive funding in pursuit of manufacturing a fully-dried whole-blood product. Haima is a biopharma Cleveland-based comp...

Our conversation this week is with Lindsay Watson, CEO & Founder of Augment Therapy. Augment Therapy was founded in 2017 when Lindsay — who is a pediatric physical therapist from Chagrin Falls, Ohio — was searching for a way to solve the problems she was experiencing in her own physical therapy practice. Lindsay had spent years working with children and was frustrated with the inefficiency of treating kids once a week, with no way to help them exercise on a daily basis for faster progress. A...

Dr. Onas Bolton — Founder and CEO of Octet Scientific, a specialty Cleveland-based chemical manufacturer unlocking the full power of safe, economical, and sustainable energy storage by providing better electrolyte chemistry for zinc and other aqueous batteries — on the potential for zinc-based batteries, the history of energy production, storage, and use, and how the work Octet Scientific is doing will facilitate our transition to carbon-neutral sustainable power! Dr. Bolton is a 14-year vet...