Episodes

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...

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...

Mike Maczuzak — a product designer, early-stage investor, and founder of SmartShape Design — an innovative product development and industrial design firm he started here in Cleveland back in 1989. SmartShape's beginnings were richly steeped in this world of industrial design leveraging Mike’s own background and experience in it — however over time, Mike evolved the firm’s competencies and capabilities to cover mechanical engineering, integrated manufacturing, and strategic product developmen...

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...

Michael Sirpilla, co-founder and CEO of Society Brands. Under Michael’s leadership as CEO, Society Brands has raised $205 million in capital to continue their rapid consolidation in the e-commerce sector with many completed and successful acquisitions since inception. Society Brands, based in Canton, Ohio, is a tech-enabled consumer products company that acquires e-commerce native brands and powers them with a global growth platform, scaling and evolving them into household brands. They provi...

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...

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...

Mike Schroeder, Founder & President of Roundstone. Mike founded Roundstone Insurance in 2003 — when they launched the first Group Medical Captive of its kind, and have since revolutionized the self-insurance industry. Roundstone’s captive approach to insurance allows small and mid-sized businesses to take advantage of the benefits of self-funded insurance that previously only larger enterprises could enjoy — such as plan flexibility & control, transparency, and cost savings. By banding smalle...

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...

Stewart A. Kohl is Co-CEO of The Riverside Company — a $14 billion global private equity firm founded to invest in premier companies at the smaller end of the middle market, with headquarters in Terminal Tower in Tower City here in Cleveland! Since 1988, Riverside has invested in more than 960 companies globally, growing assets under management from $1 billion in 2004, to as much as $14 billion dollars under management today, employing more than 300 people in offices across North America, Eu...

Bill Manby, Founding & Managing Partner at Interstate Fusion Ventures. An entrepreneur at heart, Bill grew up in NEO and has always been passionate about working every day to make his home better through investments, philanthropy, and whatever else it takes. In late 2016, this vision led to the creation of his first fund – Akron Fusion Ventures (later rebranded as Interstate Fusion Ventures). While Bill knew the benefits of living in NEO and the strong entrepreneurial spirit, he felt he ...

John McKenna, CEO of Peachtree VA, a virtual assistant staffing organization & President of The Emerald Group, a premier mortgage recruiting firm. Based here in Cleveland, John acquired Peachtree VA early in 2022 to grow their vetted virtual assistant offering in the wake of a flourishing virtual assistant industry where entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses, nonprofits, executive directors, and other business models are often stretched thin, and using a virtual assistant can gain back some...

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...

Michael Crawford — Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO of the Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment Company, which he joined in December of 2018. The Hall of Fame Resort & Entertainment company is a publically traded organization (trading as HOFV on the NASDAQ) headquartered in Canton, Ohio. Spanning media, gaming, entertainment, resorts, and sports — the company is dedicated to making legendary moments for fans and leverages the power and popularity of the Hall of Fame Village, the 100-...

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...

Angie Dianetti — President and driving force behind Radcom, a company specializing in performance improvement consulting, which she founded back in 1996. Under Angie's guidance, Radcom has earned the distinction of a Weatherhead 100 Outstanding Growth Company seven times over since then as one of Northeast Ohio’s fastest-growing companies that Angie has successfully navigated through various challenges over the years spanning the dot-com bubble burst, offshoring, reshoring, the Great Recessi...

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...

Justin McLoughlin — Founder & CEO of airCFO — on building a bootstrapped company, scaling a professional services organization, the future of work, the importance of taking care of your employees, and finance! Justin McLoughlin is a midwesterner who fell in love with the tech startup scene and turned entrepreneur when he realized that when other people start startups, payroll, back-office management, account reconciliation, taxes, and general accounting is not what they have in mind. Just...

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...

Brendan Anderson and Donnie Bedney on their work at ScaleCo — a Cleveland-based entrepreneurship-through-acquisition organization that has invested more than $165 million in over 20 regional companies. In our conversation today, we explore what entrepreneurship-through-acquisition even is, the advantages of buying a business over starting one from scratch, ScaleCo’s unique approach to unlocking value in partner companies, and why Donnie and Brendan have double-downed in ScaleCo’s commitment t...