#132: David Levine (Wireless Environment & My Home Park)

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:00:00]:

We are trying to get everyone to take control of the piece of the earth that they own, which is their yard and say okay, you can use your yard to help the pollinator population. Are we going to be able to stop our neighbors from using different chemicals and pesticides? Probably not. Are we going to be able to stop mono culture AG? Probably not. Neonicotinoids? Probably not. But we do control our yard and therefore what is the best way to use that little slice of the earth that we own? It is to plant native plants.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:40]:

Let's discover what people are building in the greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders and those supporting them. 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 I had the real pleasure of speaking with David Levine who has made a career of invention land serial entrepreneurship. In 2005, David cofounded wireless environment to revolutionize the lighting industry with a belief that off grid wireless Led lighting would be the future of lighting. And over the next 13 years David proved out that exact thesis as he led the organization as CEO to over 30 million in sales on just 1.1 million in equity raised and ultimately to acquisition by Ring in 2017, land subsequently to Amazon in 2018. And there are some truly incredible stories that David shares about this entire experience building, growing and exiting wireless environment post acquisition. With the time now to reflect and to focus on what challenge to tackle next and to think through what he ultimately wants to provide to the world. David shifted his focus to natural habitat restoration and his longtime fascination with bees, whose populations are waning and whose endangerment is highly consequential to our food supply and planet at large. In the spirit of this problem, David joined forces with his cofounder Wyatt Shell to start My Home Park in 2021 to revolutionize how people view their yards and empower them to use their yards to restore the environment. My Home Park is a platform that creates curated gardens delivered right to customers doorsteps. Taking the guesswork the effort land the frustration out of landscaping with native plants. For those who want to do something beneficial for the environment, planting native plant gardens is the highest order impact you can have on the environment per dollar spent knowing that in just 100 sqft, native plants feed up to 2000 pollinators per day, conserve 2300 gallons of water per year and provide 16 times greater soil stabilization. And my home park facilitates this entire process. David is an inspiring entrepreneur and this conversation is packed full of wisdom. So with that, please enjoy my conversation with David Levine after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90 as we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what the love. If you two are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you are interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to IA layoftheland FM. The link will also be in our show. Notes I was thinking about where the best place to start would be and knowing that my home park is the third venture that you have embarked on. I personally am fascinated by serial entrepreneurship and the mindset of those who've opted to re embark on the most difficult journey to build something formidable and valuable from scratch. And so I'd love to understand where your entrepreneurial drive stems from. Was it something innately that you always had this enterprising spirit or is it something you developed over time? How is it that you came to want to do this?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:04:57]:

I think my enterprising spirit definitely came from my dad. He was a person who was marginally hireable, I say so that's what makes him a good entrepreneur. He was a pharmacist with an entrepreneur's mind and he had something really bad happen to him. And when I say really bad, business wise, really bad. When he was, I'd say he was in his mid thirty s and he had become a partner with his father in a drugstore in Massapequa Park, New York, which is on Long Island. And my grandfather retired, his dad retired. So he brought on a new partner, someone he knew and they didn't get along. So they went to a lawyer's office and they flipped a coin to see who got to buy who out of the store. And the store was named after the family, levine's Park Pharmacy in Massachusetts Park. And he lost. So he got some money out of it, but he then had to find a job and he started working as a pharmacist at a supermarket when the supermarkets first had drugstores in them and he was miserable. The couldn't work for anybody. And on the weekends we would travel all over the Northeast looking for a store to buy. The crazy story is that he was going to stay behind during spring break. And my family, my mom took the three kids to Disney World. This is 1978 say so he was driving us to the airport. He told his employer he was going with us, but he was going to stay behind and look for a store on the way to the airport. We got a flat tire on the way to JFK airport. So scrambled, held a cab, got to the airport at the very last minute, and because we were late, we got all split up. And my mom was sitting next to someone on the plane and they started talking. He's like, oh, my Uncle Lou has two drug stores in western Massachusetts. He's selling. And we landed. My mom called my dad and he wound up buying the store. And it was a small store in a small New England town, but it was the center of the town. There were no chains there. And it was great for me, starting when I was eleven years old, just doing every job in that store, understanding the importance of customer service, understanding the need for innovation. While I was there, he had the town's first video rental store, for instance. He was always thinking like that. And then he started putting video rental stores in different forts throughout the Marine. He I watched his mind and you know, that's what I think is exciting about business, is coming up with these ideas. And then the next most influential thing that happened to me, Jeffrey, was at college. I started a magazine with a friend who's still one of my best friends to this day. And that process of hiring people, selling ads, doing layout, all the content, the business side, managing a team, inspiring a team, that was the next most influential part of my entrepreneurial journey.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:15]:

So I'll say the focus of which problems you've chosen to spend time working on solving is quite large. It covers a lot of different things. Is that just a consequence of you being curious in a lot of like when we're talking about the breadth of problems from magazines to lighting to lawns and the environment, which we'll get to, is there a thread that ties these together? How is it that you've become interested in the problems that you're trying to solve?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:08:49]:

It's a good question that I haven't thought about, but finding white space has become like something I'm just innately capable of doing. And depending on how agitated I am by the problem, depends on how much energy I have to solve it. So right now, and we'll get into it, we're trying to save bees and other pollinators. That is a big driving force. I don't want my kids to run out of food, but the lighting was because my grandmother had tripped on the way to the bathroom because she didn't want to turn on a light and disturb her sleep. That was pretty agitating to me. And before that, power tools. That was more of an opportunity that I found interesting in my first foray into starting my own company.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:40]:

So did you have a vision immediately stem from that incident with the trip and fall as it related to wireless environment and Mr. Beams or how is it that you approach this identification of white space land, creating an idea and a vision for the future land a corresponding business?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:10:02]:

Yeah, that was interesting because you had Nightlights, right? Why do you need a product when you have Nightlights? The issue with Nightlights were twofold. One, they're on all night or they're not, right? You either leave them on and they disturb your sleep or you don't. And number two is you can't put them anywhere. You don't have an know, that my partner, Mike Wrecker, and I just started thinking about that. Well, what if you could just slap it anywhere and it only turned on when it detected motion? That to us, seemed like a big enough idea. And then when we started extrapolating, you know, closets, that was another big issue for us. We both had closets with no lights. You would live in an old house, and I'm sure to wire a closet in your house would be a disaster. So we came up with a $20 closet light that works like what you have in a hotel. When you open the door, the light goes on, and then when you close it, it eventually goes off. That one felt like, okay, there's both safety issues, there's utility issues, and it felt like a really good space at the time.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:14]:

Did you have a sense at the point where you began to actually build the product of what it would know? Fast forwarding to an acquisition to Ring and subsequently to Amazon. Was that part of the vision at all, or was it really just one step in front of the other?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:11:33]:

It was somewhat desperation. My first venture had failed, and I needed to do something else. And I realized I was not going to be a good fit for someone else's company. But I didn't think big enough at that time. I was more in survival mode. I just want to create some products that people responded well to and that had an impact on them. It wasn't until later, until I started adding some bigger thinkers. Part of it was Jumpstart, part of it was some of my board members that they started saying, start with the exit in mind and then work your way backwards. And mostly from some conversations with people at Jumpstart. And Jumpstart was one of our investors. It was well, if you looked at yourself as a technology play instead of a hardware lay jeffrey, what does that look like? What does a hardware lay was that we heard that from them right after they rejected us. Jumpstart rejected us for the first time, and Mike and I went over to the do you have you ever been there? It's on case western. It used to be great little spot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:46]:

I haven't been like it's an old stable.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:12:49]:

I think that was a bar at the time. And we're sitting outside having a beer, kind know, feeling sorry for ourselves. And Mike looked up at this old, very old brick barn and said, what if you needed to put a light on a building like this and you needed to control it, but it's just too expensive to wire, what would you do? And that just was like this moment where we started thinking about, okay, if Led lights get more and more efficient and more applications can be run off of battery power and wireless communication gets better, how many applications could a wireless light cover? And that moment was essential for us in thinking bigger and eventually building a whole patent portfolio, building a fence around this idea of wireless lighting. And that's what got Jamie Simonoff, the founder of Ring, so interested in us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:13:50]:

So one of the things that I've been very interested to get your perspective on, particularly, I think, in the context of the somewhat inflated market and valuations that we've seen over the last few years, land companies. I think prioritizing growth at all expense relative to viable business economics was that you were able to grow this business from zero to 30 plus million dollars in revenue off of a considerable amount of equity, but orders of magnitude smaller than I think what we're seeing today in a bootstrapped capacity, right?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:14:32]:

Yeah. 1.1 million is the amount of equity we raised. We did have some loans as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:38]:

What is your philosophy around bootstrapping and the importance of it and the strategies that allowed for you to be successful in growing the business?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:14:51]:

Bootstrapping was essential for two reasons. One, it allowed us to maintain control land decision making. And Mike and I, when we started the company, we made a pact, like, no matter what we do, you and I have to maintain the decision making so many times. And I worked for two big companies. First Dow Chemical for four years, and then Black and Decker DeWalt for four years. Loved it. Great experience. But I always felt like I could make better decisions than the people who are making decisions. So that was like, our mantra is just, whatever it is, we have to maintain decision making control. And the other side is, we realized early on that if you have money, you're going to waste it. That there was no better way to grow a company in our situation than to set a milestone, raise enough money to hit that milestone, put our heads down, reach the milestone, pick our heads up, say, oh, we now have a product to sell. Let's raise a little bit more money at a slightly higher valuation, then go out, start selling the product, get some sales result, pick our heads up again. Okay, we think we can do this again. We were raising chunks of about $300,000 at a time. It kept us super focused. We did not waste money. We did not even consider anything that wouldn't pay off directly. Now, again, smaller vision than most people compare us to Ring. And when Jamie Simonov started Ring believe he raised off the bat about $300 million and built this company very rapidly. I couldn't believe when I saw their numbers, how many $250 video doorbells they were selling, especially since a regular doorbell costs about 899 at Home Depot. But people were paying it. But they grew super fast. That was their goal. But the put himself in some risky situations. There were a lot of mistakes. The company wasn't profitable. So we were just a different mean. It's like the West Coast style versus what I see is more of a Midwest style. But we did not waste money. Wasting money also is a waste of time. When you have the money, you're going to go in the wrong direction many times. So it was essential for us, and we still operate that way. We sweat right now over $300 expenses that we're considering. So I just feel like for me, I'd rather do it a little slower land maintain control and maintain our focus than go off with some big number. I would be scared if I all of a sudden saw like a million dollars in my bank account. I think I'd go crazy. Jeffrey I'd be dangerous.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:01]:

Well, there's something that resonates, which is that constraint is somewhat requisite to the innovative process. Right. Without constraints, it's hard to know how to focus.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:18:14]:

No, I agree. And I've been able to witness a lot of startups and there are areas I see where I'm just like, are you kidding me? Like customizing a software package? Right. Like spending $200,000 to customize a software package so it works better for you. These are some of the signs when I see, I'm thinking, okay, I'm not betting on this company. It should be innovation and maybe patenting. But patenting is a terrible situation for most companies and it was for us until we figured it out in sales and not business development. I can't stand that term, business development. It's sales. It's going out and selling. Right. That's where the money should be spent. Innovation and the product, the product market fit. And then going out and selling it, but not marketing it. That's right. There's a big difference.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:12]:

Yeah. It's a euphemism business development.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:19:15]:

Agreed.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:16]:

Well, kind of keeping us progressing through the evolution of wireless environment. Land mr beams, you find a home with Ring and subsequently a home with Amazon. Can you just kind of walk us through both those acquisition processes and what that was like?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:19:36]:

As I mentioned, so wireless environment was a twelve year overnight success. We had steady growth from zero to, as you said, over $30 million in the wireless lights under the Mr beams brand. Along the way, we built up a really interesting patent portfolio. And after twelve years, Mike and I were looking at each other and saying, okay, it's probably time to start thinking about an exit. Weren't sure how to do it. We had kind of talked to M A people over the years and they give us an estimate of what they thought we might be worth and it never seemed like high enough to make us want to spend a lot of time there. So my brother in law, my wife's brother lives out in Malibu and he does CrossFit out there. And he calls me one day and says, one of my friends in CrossFit helped start Ring doorbell. Are you interested in talking to them? And we had been on Home Shopping Network right around the time it was know, I would go on there and sell some lights land Ring was on there and I couldn't believe how many they were selling. And I had been hearing stories about how sales were. So I said of we connected. They connected me to Jamie Simonov, who a lot of people know from Shark Tank. He was the founder of Ring, brilliant entrepreneur, really, really good product person, really big thinker. And we just talked on the phone and Spot Shaq is one of our guys. The Cavs were hosting the playoffs at that point. He flew in, we had a good meeting and it went pretty fast from there. And I had never done this before. So I hired a friend who was in my study group at business school, who's out in the Valley and does a lot of software deals. And I said to him, can you recommend someone who could help us represent us for this deal? And he said, I want to do it. I'm going to help you with this and we're going to get this done. He had helped Macromedia sell to Adobe. He had been on some big deals and he had sold a lot of smaller companies, so he had good experience. So at one point we laugh about this. He said to me, Ring gave us an offer. And I was like, this is a pretty good offer. He said to no, no, you can't just take this offer. You have to shop the deal around. And I said, Brian, if Jamie finds out that we're shopping this deal around, he's going to flip. He's a very emotional, very emotional guy. He's a very reactive guy. So he said, don't worry, they're not going to know. Here's how you do it. So he tells me, go on LinkedIn and look at all the competitors and try to get to the CEOs and tell them that you have an offer from a company and that you think that they'd be a good acquirer for. So these are companies like, let's see, NetLink and the home networking company. And there's a bunch of companies. I reached out to them and two of the responded to me and I think Comcast was one of the said, yeah, let's talk a little bit more. We had a couple of conversations. So this is all happening over the course of like Friday. One of them says to me, come out on Monday and let's talk. So one other piece of this is after Brian convinced me this was the right thing to do, I went home. Land told my wife and we had been in Nantucket visiting Jamie and his wife had a nice time, and I told her what we were doing and she said, you're crazy. If Jamie finds out, this is going to crater the deal. Land I said to her, I'm caught between what Brian saying and you're saying. So I get Brian on the phone and in this conversation it got a little heated. And he said to my wife, Lisa, how many 200 million dollar deals have you closed? And it was like, I was like, whoa, this is getting pretty serious. So we went ahead and I set up this meeting for the Monday with this company on the West Coast. And Saturday night, Lisa and I are at a nice Indians game. It's a warm night, they're playing the Yankees. I'm enjoying myself. And the phone rings. It's Jamie. And Jamie. I said, hey, Jamie. I ran up so I could hear him. I ran up from the stand and he is screaming at me. How dare you use me as a stalking horse. What are you doing? What do you think you're doing? This deal is off. Yelled at me for about five minutes, told me the deal was off and that was it. So you can imagine me going back to my seat with my wife Lisa, and explain to her what just happened. And she had told me, like, we shouldn't be doing this anyhow. The next day, Jamie called me back and raised the offer and said, let's just get this. You know, deals have a way of blowing up multiple times. This one absolutely did. I'm still kind of amazed that it worked out that way and Brian was right. But it really still feels like it could have blown up easily. It could have blown up easily. So we got the deal used. Someone recommended we use Jones Day, which was like an amazing experience for me. Those guys are just pros at getting this deal done, and we got the deal done. November 1, 2017. Two days later, Ring, who had bought this alarm business that was working with ADT, two days later, Ring was told by a federal court to remove its alarm product from the shelves because they had violated the intellectual property or property, let's just say, and assets of ADT by buying this company that ADT had funded. And Jamie called me that day. So this was two days after, it was like 36 hours after our deal closed. And he said to me, he told me what happened. He said, don't worry about it, we got it. But if this had happened before we closed your deal, we wouldn't have closed your deal, we wouldn't have been able to do it. So the timing was really quite the so Jamie came back in January, and we went to another Cavs game with his family. And we're waiting in line at whatever the B spot is where the Cavs play. And the said to me, we're getting bought by Amazon. We're just waiting in line. He just casually said, we're getting bought by Amazon. It just was incredulous. And I guess the most interesting thing for me was we had a small team where about 23 people at wireless running this $30 million business. Most everyone had grown up in Ohio, never left the state of Ohio. It wasn't like a well traveled and experienced team. So I had to first break the news to them right around November 1. We're getting bought by ring santa Monica, California. And what that could mean. Then three months later, breaking the news, by the way, we're now working for Amazon, Seattle, Washington. It was interesting. I think they were better prepared the second time because of that. But that was quite to go from 23 people to one of the biggest, fastest growing companies in that shorter period of time. Everyone's head was spinning.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:27]:

Wow, what a story. It I want to understand, from a place where you are now running the smart lighting business for one of the largest companies in the world, what becomes the mental calculus for deciding to get back into the arena? Right? Because that's ultimately what you've decided to do and what you're now working on. At my home park. What was the process of finding that white space and honing in on a new problem from there?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:27:59]:

The first thing yeah, what's the right timing to leave? And I had two thoughts or two factors for this. Jeffrey. So number one was we had a three year earnout. I had to stay three years in order for our friends and family investors to get paid out. You know, I knew I had to get kind of comfortable in the situation because three years at the time seemed very long, and it actually was very long working for a big company all of a sudden. And the second thing was I want to make sure all our employees are taken care of. That, I knew, would take some time. Just figuring out the system, getting integrated into Ring first and then Amazon, and then making sure everyone had opportunities that were beyond our little office here in Mayfield Village, Ohio. So both of those kept me busy, and they were rewarding in the sense that I felt like I was doing something for somebody. On a side note, of the 23 24 people we had, 19 are still there. So this is five and a half years later, are still there working for Amazon, moving up Amazon levels. You l four, l five, l six. They've moved up Summer l seven, s and making so much more. My friend who I had coffee with this week was a communications major out of Ohio State and didn't really know what she wanted to do. We hired her because she was a bank teller at one point and she had know, obviously counting money. So we put her in charge of shipping, and now she's making crazy salary. She told me I was just like, you're probably making more than most of the people graduated from Ohio State Business School now, and that is really rewarding. So that was one of the reasons why I was able to stay, but I kind of had to so we could all get paid out. And I started thinking about, okay, what's the next widget? I kept coming up with new widgets at this point. I had a history with lighting, battery powered products, electronics, communication, wireless communication, smart home. There's a lot, right? There's a lot of more agitations to solve. It hit me like this bee thing is starting to get out of control. The bee population is dying. People aren't really sure why. There aren't a lot of people putting entrepreneurial solutions towards it. And I had this vision of building a better bee house. Right? You have birdhouses. And then I saw that bees can live in houses too. And I started thinking about could I make really inexpensive bee houses that people could put up? And then the solitary bees lay their cocoons in these little tubes in the houses, and then you can harvest them. Land move the cocoons around and things like that. So I started pursuing that. And luckily, a friend from way back had coffee with him and he's like, oh, by the way, my daughter is dating a bee expert. He's getting his PhD in wild bees. Are you interested in talking to him? And my daughter too, because she works with honeybees. And I said, absolutely. We had a call, and they're the two of the nicest people I know. And they delicately told me that this beehouse idea was terrible, a disaster waiting to happen for a lot of reasons. But the person who is now my partner, his name is Wyatt Shell, he said to me, I've had this idea about how to motivate people to save bees by planting native plants and gamifying it. So can we work on that idea together? And I said, absolutely. Land just started this super invigorating educational process on what are native plants, how can you actually turn this into a scalable business and what are the needs out there that allow me to have this potential opportunity? So we started digging into that. Wyatt was part time. I was full time. And then Wyatt left his job in academia. And I was a little worried, like, can he be a good entrepreneur? And he's turned out to be an unbelievable entrepreneur. So that's where we are. We now have a third employee who recently graduated from Stanford with an MBA. And she's doing our marketing. I won't call it business development. She's doing great too. So it's the three of us right now trying to get traction.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:01]:

I think it's a fascinating problem. I think it would be really cool to we hear about the bees, right, and the problem, but I don't know that myself or a lot of people fully grasp the implications of what is this problem, what are the effects it has on us, what's the history of it? And when you layer on top of that yards, gardens, lawn, care, native plants, what is the confluence of those two areas? Land, how people's relationships to their yards, the combination of all these things that's allowed for you to embark on this, my home park journey.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:33:40]:

Native plants, just for the definition, are plants that were here 10,000 years ago or more. They've evolved here. And as such, the native bees, beneficial insects, butterflies, and when we say pollinators, all evolve with these plants. So they use these plants for food to reproduce on. And in turn, when they are diving into the flowers of these plants, they are now pollinating other plants. And it's how about 33% of our food is maintained, our food sources through pollination from insects. So there's two types if we focus on bees, there's really two types of bees. There's solitary bees, also known as wild bees, and then there's the domesticated invasive bees, which are honeybees. And the honeybees get all the attention. When people think of bees, they think of these bees that live in hives and live in colonies and have a whole society together. But the most effective bees actually come from the solitary bees and they're the ones that live in tubes. Now, these tubes can be holes in old trees, they could be in the ground. But the types of bees are known as mason bees or leaf cutter bees. What's so interesting about them is they gather pollen, they go into a hole and they scrape the pollen off their abdomen. They lay an egg on it and then they wall it off and they keep doing that. So you might have six chambers in this. It's amazing. They have like the females are in the back and the males are in the front. So the males can hatch first and the they go get stronger by getting some food and then the females hatch and they mate and the males are basically done with at that point and they just repeat. These bees are really effective because the have to gather a lot of pollen to scrape and lay the egg on because when the egg becomes a larvae and then hatches, it eats that pollen cake and then has enough strength to go on. So because they're gathering so much and they have these special abdomens that are like velcro, they are better pollinators, like a drunken fraternity boy. They dive into a flower, roll around and then dive into the next one. They're just great pollinators. Those bees can live in the hollow tubes of the stems of native plants, but mostly they go around and they just evolve with these native plants. And the more native plants you have, the better they do, the more pollinating they do. As we've developed all this land, now all of a sudden these native plants like golden rod and joe piweed and wild indigo and columbine and geranium, they're harder to find. So that's part of what's going on with the bee population. There's less of their natural habitat, less food, less places for them to reproduce. Then there's also the pesticides that people are using in their lawns that carry over. And there's something called neonicotinoids, which are chemicals used in the AG business. And then finally there's monocultural farming, which means you could have a gigantic farm. In the old days, it was all different types of food products, all different types of crops and the insects the pollinators could pick and choose. But now you have acres and acres of something like corn that doesn't need to be pollinated. And it's like a desert for the pollinators. Same thing with your lawn is a desert for the pollinators. There's no food unless you let the clover grow in, as some people do. But like a perfectly maintained lawn, like you see in Shaker Heights when you drive through, it's a desert. There's no food. There's a lot of chemicals being used and it has hurt the bee population.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:49]:

So of all the ways you could attempt to positively impact the bee population, obviously through this discovery process learned that maybe bee houses are not the best option. And I'd love to understand why that's the case. But why is planting native plants the top impact, highest leverage way that you can materially affect the situation here?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:38:14]:

Yeah, and that has to do with the name My Home Park. We are trying to get everyone to take control of the piece of the earth that they own, which is their yard, and say, okay, you can use your yard to help the pollinator population. Are we going to be able to stop our neighbors from using different chemicals and pesticides? Probably not. Are we going to be able to stop monoculture AG? Probably not. Neonicotinoids? Probably not. But we do control our yard. And therefore, what is the best way to use that little slice of the earth that we own? It is to plant native plants. And I've been looking at this problem from a more logical manner. For $100, let's say, what's the best thing that I can do for the environment? And I was working with Led. Lights. Those things are amazing, right? They use about one 10th of the electricity that traditional Incandescent lighting does. So that would be the first thing I would do, is I would change out as many lights from Incandescent or even fluorescent to Led. After that, I can compost. That's very helpful. But most people are just recycling, which is me coming from Dow Chemical I know that it is a scam perpetrated on the American public recycling. It's not really doing anything to the point that I even encourage my kids now not to recycle anything but glass and aluminum, but planting native plants for $100, you can plant, let's say, 25 native plants, and that will actually have a big impact on the environment. And if everyone did that, it would have a huge impact on the environment. Land these plants are going to grow and develop and become more and more valuable over time. So it just made sense, this idea of native plants. And by the way, they're very pretty. Some people think they're kind of messy, but that's where our designs come in, where we're going to design it for you so it looks like it belongs there. If you have a small space, we're going to keep them low. If you have a fence, we'll let them grow a little higher. But they actually are beautiful.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:37]:

So what is my home? Park how would you describe the company and the goal and the vision?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:40:45]:

We're trying to get people to buy landscaping online, and by landscaping, it's really just it's plants. We are not selling any kind of hardscaping or even right now. We're not selling trees or shrubs. We're selling perennials, native perennials, and we want to make it like any other home product you would buy. Let's use a sofa as an example. Jeffrey so you go online and you say, okay, I need something that's six to 8ft wide. And I like these fabrics. Land I like these colors. And you filter down. You have all these sofas you can buy. We're trying to make buying plants for your front yard the same way. Instead of thinking, like, I have to design this whole plan, this whole cohesive plan, we're saying, no, look at your front yard, like your living room, and drop a sofa in and see how it looks and live with it for a while. And then add a couple of chairs over here and a table. We're looking at modular landscaping where we're designing these products. Just like you design a sofa the way people are doing it right now, it would be the equivalent, if you're buying a sofa, saying, okay, I'm going to go this store and buy the fabric. I'm going to go this store and buy the spring. I'm going to go this store and buy the cushion, and then I'm going to go somewhere else and buy the wood. It when you go to a nursery, you're lost, right? I don't know how things fit together. And someone's asking me to buy all these different components. We're saying, here's a cohesive garden that's going to look like this. We're going to give you a planting map. We're going to ship these plants to you because we're shipping little plugs that are safe to ship, and you're going to drop it in. We're going to give you maintenance tips. We're here if you have any questions, but we are beautifying your yard. And the back door for us is like, okay, now we've got native plants in someone's yard and whether they care or not, it's going to help the pollinators, the bees, the butterflies, the birds, the beneficial insects. So we're pre designing all these native gardens. You tell us your size and your colors, and do you have a lot of sun or all shade? And we're going to give you a choice. We'll ship it right to your door.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:00]:

One of the things that I think really resonated there is to agree to. Which, as a I don't even know if I can call myself an amateur gardener, as someone who's just really unfamiliar with it, how overwhelming it can feel when you go to the stores where you would go to attempt to purchase all the things that you need to piece together to lay the right foundation to care for your yard. Could you delve into the ways that you're trying to because you're simultaneously trying to educate and sell? Yes, I imagine, and how you go about that. And typically, are people, as prospective customers coming to you already inclined to purchase something like this? Or is it more about trying to convince people of the efficacy and the value that this brings to the table?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:43:51]:

I think my goal, our goal, would be to sell to someone like you, Jeffrey. Right. You're a homeowner, your first home, I would imagine. And you have enough knowledge about landscaping to do the very basic stuff. Maybe growing up, you may have cut the grass, but most likely your family had someone come in.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:14]:

I'll tell you, growing up in New York, when I moved here, I called it grass trimming. I didn't even know the was mowing the lawn.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:44:21]:

So it was very new for like, if we can convince you to do this and we've really made it, we've got to the mainstream, and that's where we want to get to. But to answer the first part of that question, yeah, we're really appealing to people who know a little bit about native plants and want to make decisions and allocate resources, partially for the beauty of it and partially for the impact it has on the pollinator population. There's a term called crossing the chasm when it comes to new products land, you have your early adopters, and most products never cross that chasm to appeal to the mass market. So how are we going to do that? You need an anchor point, something that one application that gets people really interested in your product that is fairly simple. And people in this industry are growers and AG people and they're overthinking it. And I always find opportunity when you're in an industry where there are a lot of experts. So I went through this process of learning about native plants and it really agitated me. It was so hard because how do you find out about native plants? Well, you can go to the nursery and they'll show you little pots and say, oh yeah, do this and do this and do that. Well, then you have to wait a year to see how it grows in and it almost always will not be coordinated for you. So the to help yourself out, you could learn about these native plants. How high will it get, what conditions, what kind of soil will it thrive in? And all you have out there are these PDF charts that you have to cross reference. And I was keeping track of my hours just to design a little plot of land here at my house. And I had like 52 hours invested in just picking out. It was like 60. No one is going to do that. Right. So that was my when I went into this. And Wyatt has all this knowledge about native plants. It's very intuitive for him. And I had to keep saying to him, like, we're appealing to me, we're not appealing to you in this. Right. We're going to cut my 52 hours to nothing and how are we going to do that? And it's really like, how much do you need to know about these plants to really enjoy it? I think it was from Tommy Boy where his dad would say, like, look, I could stick my head up the butt of a cow or I could take the butcher's word for it. Right. I mean, we just want to be the butcher who tells you which is the best cut of meat and you don't need to know what that thing ate and where it came from and how it was transported and how it was slaughtered or anything like that. Right. So how do we cut it down? And what's the common feature that everyone wants? Everyone wants pretty flowers. So if you go on our website, we're showing you pretty gardens and that's all you need to know. If you want to dig deeper, you can keep going deeper. All the detail you want about these plants, about these combinations are there. But the fact is native plants work well in communities and we figured out what those communities are and we go for as well as the two of us are able to create good looking gardens. We try to match the colors and get a theme and we've done all that homework for you and it just makes it easier for the average person to say yes to the product.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:16]:

Yeah, that also resonates a lot, I think, particularly from even a product management perspective. The job is always to accomplish a task for someone and not for that person to become an expert in whatever it is that you've built. And so when a tool is introduced into a workflow, there are only so many walls, typically, that people are willing to put up with before they submit. It isn't improving their productivity, and they bail on the whole exercise. Most people don't really care about the technology, which I say in air quotes, but does it help you solve the problem?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:48:52]:

And we have nice conversations with people about specific plants, but the best conversations are the ones who people who just heard about native plants but have no idea where to start. And we're developing some good relationships, but we need to reach people who don't even know about native plants and maybe know about the damage that lawns do on the environment. But we want to be to that mass level. And I'm seeing signs we're getting there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:34]:

When you think about empowering people to use their yards to effectively restore the environment, you mentioned crossing the chasm. How do you do this at scale, both in reach and in impact? How are you thinking about how to grow this business to the level that you intend to, and what does it look like if you achieve that scale?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:49:58]:

Yeah, like the event we were at last night, right, with all these other tech entrepreneurs. Two people asked me, like, how are you attracting customers? And my answer is always, I have no idea. We are throwing content out there. We're spending a $1,000 on a good week on Google Ads, but we're getting many more people who are finding us organically. And the first thing is content. Content has the best value. If you can make things simple for people and make them interesting and fun, it gains momentum over doing it. But we're still reaching so few. Can we how can we get this out? And I feel like our best asset are the early adopters, Jeffrey, who are super motivated by it. Okay, so what's truly our advantage? Buying Google Ads or Facebook Ads or even next door reddit is ultimately a losing game. Right. The economics are going to shift. If you're getting more value out of it, then your competitors are going to get there, and then also the supplier will charge more. So we know that's not a way to go, and you don't want to be dependent on that. That's not a good way to have a business. On the flip side, our customers who are really into restoring the environment, land, the habitats for pollinators, are motivated to get their neighbor to do the same. Right. If you bought a car that you like, let's say you bought the new Ford Bronco and you liked it, right? You were driving around with the top down, you'll tell people you really like it, but you're not going to be motivated to get your neighbor to buy it. You don't care. You don't get anything out of it. But if your neighbor puts in a native garden, then, okay, all of a sudden you're building a little pathway for pollinators that can draw more to you and extend the habitat. So I think as I look at this business, how can you scale. If we can make it interesting for those people to help spread the word, then I feel like we're onto something. So that, to me, is the opportunity. It is using your customer base to tell your story and make it fun and or rewarding for them. What do you think of that?

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:28]:

I like it. I like it a lot. I'm sold. I'm ready to do this. One of the other things I had always thought, especially not having a lawn in my life growing up, was that mowing a lawn to me always felt like potentially the biggest waste of human energy, of anything that we do as people. That we spend this time constantly going through the motions of doing that for no particularly good reason just seemed fishy off the bat. This is exciting. I think you've sold me as a prospective customer, so I need to do.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:53:05]:

More podcasts, is what you're saying. So one by one, I could get podcast host exactly.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:13]:

I'll ask one more question here and then we can kind of turn more to some higher level reflections and discussions. But all things considered, for what you're doing at Mi Home Park, what does success mean? How do you know you'll have been successful?

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:53:33]:

Great question. It's different than before my last venture. My last venture, I needed to prove to myself, to everyone around me, that I could be a successful entrepreneur. And we'd go out to dinner and someone would say to my wife, do you realize what he's done? He's built a company from zero to 10 million, 1520, whatever it was at the time, on a tiny bit of capital and equity. And my wife would always say, yeah, it's great, but I know that part of what she was thinking is like, when are we going to see some money off of this? When are we going to see an exit off of this? And for so long I felt like I was moderately successful, but had never without the exit. And there are plenty of people who are running ongoing businesses that are super successful. They're employing people, they're growing leaders, they're having an impact, they're making good products. So that is a great part of success. Also our culture. And for someone's security, the exit is also really important. So luckily for this one, I don't feel like I have to prove that it's not in it for the financial gain. The impact is how many square yards can we convert to native plants that were not native plants before, and how big an impact can that have? So that'll be the measurement. And at the same time, the people who are the younger people who are with me, I want them to learn the entrepreneurial process, do it, then go off and do it on their own. Also, I want to educate people. It's fun to talk about and it really is interesting and I feel like I can explain it to people in a few sentences, whereas no one was able to do that for me at the time. So I want to be able to educate people also on the importance of native plants. Land it would be nice to profit will actually allow us to scale more. So I always have this conversation with our growers. I say to them, because they're not business people, right? They just grow beautiful plants and they gather seeds and they want them to be very pure and local. Ecotype I say to the, look, I don't need to make money off of this right now. I just need to prove out our concept. Eventually I'll come to you and say, like, we got to tighten this up because we need to make money. But for now, we want to prove the concept. And I think we are right now. We haven't talked about our success, but we're basically running at three x, where we thought our sales were this year so far, and people are finding us, and their average sale is over $200. And people are buying $200 of native plants from a company they never heard of, when they've never bought plants online before, and they've probably never worked with native plants. We're seeing a lot of good signs for this. So the question is, we're going to have to balance investors. The investors know this is a mission based company, so they're not going to be driving for profits as much, but they're still going to want to see profits. So the question is, how do we operate this business in an intelligent manner that allows us to have free cash flow so we can expand into other states? So the success is, how many native plants can we get in the ground that wouldn't have been put in the ground before?

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:09]:

Were there any particularly painful mistakes that you experienced at wireless environment that the second time around you are explicitly trying to avoid? With my home park, I'll tell you.

David Levine (My Home Park) [00:57:27]:

A better example is the company I had before, which was called Tulivation, and we started that in 2000. And the brief story is I met my wife in Baltimore. She was from here, and her uncle was asking me, hey, I need a head of sales and marketing for my internet term life insurance company. And this was late 99. We had just gotten married, loved Baltimore, lived like on the harbor. We'd wake up land, we'd see these big ships coming in, and it was really nice. We had a really nice time there. And I said, I don't want to live in Cleveland like you. I'm an east coast person. And I wasn't interested, but they kept working me, working me, working me. And I finally moved here and pretty much that company know, do the.com bubble. It imploded like the first week I was there. So I had to find a new job. I was introduced to John Nottingham and John Spurk of Nottingham Spurk. And they liked my background. They had just launched the spin brush toothbrush, so they said, can we do a similar thing with power tools? Because I'd come from Black and Decker DeWalt and I thought this was the greatest idea. Land we did it, and it was a really good idea they had. So along the way, we built this business. Land we had a deal with True Value where they said, okay, if you fund this, we're going to rebate. It's a Christmas thing, everyone can buy it and then they can send in for rebate and get it for free. They said, Your rebate figure about 20% rebate rate. So we increased our price 20% to cover it, and we wound up having like a 72% rebate rate. So it pretty much put the company under because we had to cover that rebate. And it made me think, like, who you choose as your customers is really important for a small business. You want a customer that needs you, not that uses you as a promotional tool and doesn't care about you at all. Because we were selling to Walgreens, we had a similar relationship with them. Everyone was using us. They didn't care about us. So when we started Mr beams, I said, I'm not going after these big retailers. I'm going after catalogs and little Etailers that we'd actually be important to. Land would think we can be a big business. So we did that. We launched in 2008 our first product and built that up. And in 2011, Amazon came knocking. They weren't really into lighting and they said, you want to start selling through us? Land said, we'll give it a shot. And it just turned out to be an amazing partnership with Amazon because we were a really high feature and value type of product that people wouldn't know about except for through Amazon. And we were their poster child for a while. And it just showed me who you choose as your customer and how much balance you have in that relationship is really important for now. Are we using that for my home park? We're going after individuals, so it's not really relevant. But on the backside with the growers, yeah. Are we significant to a grower? If we're not, we're going to get pushed around, we're going to get the last of the inventory, and we're going to be the first one who is told, sorry, we're out. You can't buy this from us. So there's Michael Porter's five forces which always know of all the forces on your business, who's got the power, who's got the leverage? And that is a hugely important issue. Anywhere you don't have leverage, there's a good chance it's going to be used against you. So I'm much more aware of that now.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:16]:

Well, one of the things that we were talking about yesterday that I think we can unpack a bit more here is and I'll frame it slightly differently than we were talking about it, because I think it's interesting when we're talking about mediocrity, which we'll put out there for a moment to think about it also in contrast to excellence. Right. And how it is that you're thinking about cultivating a higher bar for ambition and quality in the context of where we are here in Northeast Ohio in what know you could describe as a latent complacency or tolerance for mediocrity in some regards.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:02:00]:

So I'm not letting you off easy on this, by the way, Jeffrey, I'm going to ask you your observations know, being an outsider also, but yeah, I think when I first moved here, I was surprised at some of the work that was considered acceptable. And I'd say in like a few categories of service providers, it was advertising agencies, it was public relations, accounting, legal, you know, land I mentioned we work with Jones Day. Amazing. There's some amazing legal minds in this town, and then there's also some very average in all these categories of service providers. And when I would stand up and say, that's not good, get it's usually like, well, no one's ever said that to us. It's something like that, or what do you mean? It's a lot of surprise. And I realized over time there's a culture here of acceptance of mediocrity. And there's partially the reason people move here is because things are a little bit easier. They're not as competitive. They're a little more laid back. And I've grown to enjoy that. I also have grown to enjoy the people I feel like of anywhere I've lived in the country. Like, the people here are the best mix of sophistication laid back kindness, sincerity. This is like the epicenter where the Venn diagram where all those things meet here. So I so appreciate that. But what drives me crazy is that there is an acceptance of average, of average service, of average performance. And I think we need to start using that term much more often. And that term, as I was thinking about this, that term is that's not good enough? And I tell people there are three groups of life that you interact with that you don't want to make excuses for. Number one, your kids. You don't want to just say, well, yeah, but he or she right, but he or she didn't get a lot of sleep last night, or things like that. You start making excuses for your kids, and they start living up to those excuses. Employees, same way, right? Like, if it's something that you would have done, but I can't expect them to do it. They've got this going on in their life, or they're not an owner. And then the third thing are your dogs. Like, you make excuses for your dogs and then they're running all over you. But I think we have a tendency.

Jeffrey Stern [01:04:47]:

I see that one a lot.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:04:49]:

We have a tendency to make excuses, and instead of. Saying, that's not good enough. And I feel it here. I've been living here since 2000, so 23 years. And when people said, you like it here, I say, I'm starting to get used to it. And the I really like it here, but I can't get used to the acceptance of just average, average the food of some of these restaurants around here that people consider really good and frequent all the time. I mean, I just can't believe that this is there's a group of people here who are just too insulated. They're not traveling to Seattle, they're not going to Austin, they're not going down to Miami frequently enough, and they're not experiencing what's going on. Boston a city I've spent a lot of time in, basically built a city bigger than Cleveland in the last ten years in the Seaport area. I don't know if you've been there, but it's amazing. And there's all kinds of business going on and the amount of businesses that come out of those universities. And then you look at a university like Case Stern and it's like there's so many smart people there and there's so much good going on. Why are we not getting companies land innovators out of that? I don't quite understand it. I just know that there's a cloud of this here and it drives me crazy, and I throw it at you. Jeffrey, what do you notice?

Jeffrey Stern [01:06:25]:

There's a Paul Graham article that I've revisited recently. I think it's called The Anatomy of Determination, but he talks about ambition a lot in this. And essentially what I took away from it is that it's kind of that old aphorism know, you are a combination of those you surround yourself with. And then I think pulling on what you talked about with kind of the installation. I also feel pretty strongly that travel is somewhat the enemy of bias and prejudice that you might have because it expands perspective and shows you what else is out there. And to me, I think coming from a city like New York, where to a degree, average in Mediocrity, as you've described it, is kind of squashed because think about restaurants. Only the best restaurants are going to survive because the rest just don't make it over time. And I think fortunately, you can elevate ambition and there's a lot you can do to increase it. But my sense is, like, people just haven't seen enough ambition here. And coming from a place where it's really celebrated as kind of a core cultural tenant, I think that might be part of the challenge. But I do know is that when you take people who and I think it's kind of part and parcel to entrepreneurship, but when you take people who are ambitious land trying to build things and put them together, it does bring out that in themselves and everyone around them.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:08:04]:

Yeah. Look, I listened to a number of your podcasts before we decided to do this and there's some great stories on the Metro Parks, like what an ambitious entrepreneurial organization that is and how amazing and that's world class. Those are the things that I get really inspired by land would love to exchange ideas with.

Jeffrey Stern [01:08:32]:

Well, that's good to hear.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:08:33]:

Yeah. When I came here, I was surprised at how many people worked in a family business or were using the connections of their forefathers, let's say, or is that the right term? The people who preceded them. And they came back here to use those connections and use that work that someone else did. Whereas in other cities, I just think there's people who are trying to make it on the own. In fact, you just can't come back and count on that. So it's partially self selecting. People who want to be comfortable wind up here. And that makes for a really nice we are now I think we're a fourth tier city. I don't think we're even a third tier. Know, when I look at cities, I think there's no city like New York or La. Right? And then you have your Austin's, Miami's, Chicago's, or second tier. And then your third tier. Know. Not Cleveland anymore. Maybe Columbus has moved up to third tier, and now we're in this fourth tier and we have to accept that. Why are we here and how are we going to get things rolling again? And are people really just okay with where we are right now? I don't know. I get disappointed in that. And then I spend more time with people and I'm like, well, they're such great people here, but can you have both? I think you can. I don't think that one excludes the other. I think we can have a nice place to live, but with more ambition and people saying that's not good enough, more often making people fulfill their promise instead of making excuses for people.

Jeffrey Stern [01:10:26]:

Yeah, I think there's a lot to that, and I think in a lot of ways, that, from my perspective, is kind of the purpose of the podcast. Right? It was to try and celebrate the people and encourage the people who are trying to raise the bar. Because that was to me, one of the starkest differences between if you're out in San Francisco, it's just celebrated when you try and whether or not you're succeeding. Are you trying to raise the bar? That's the whole ethos of it. And that is celebrated. And I think we have to do more of that celebration.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:11:05]:

Yeah, that's a really good point. They say they celebrate failure, which is always an odd concept to me, but here it's held against you, the failure. I think it's neutral, maybe out there, but as far as raising the bar, that's a really good point. Even if you fail, but you made an incremental improvement in something it's looked at differently there and here. I don't know that anyone would ever give people credit for that and I don't know that that's the mindset here as much. So it's a good point. I don't know. I'd love to have a bigger conversation about this and what the Roots went. Again, this event we went to last night, which was a mixer for tech entrepreneurs, I was hoping to meet some young people that were of a whole different mindset than I'm used to. And I bumped into you and Patrick right away and I'm like, oh great, the young people and doing stuff and kind of ended there. I didn't really see anyone of the other people look like me. So I don't know. I don't know what is going to do it. I have this fantasy that Ohio City, where you are land in that whole West Side area, there's this group of creators and innovators that I just don't see because I don't get out much anymore. I hope that's the case, but are.

Jeffrey Stern [01:12:33]:

You coming across those they're I think they're there. I think you have to actively seek them out. But I do think that there are a lot of people building really cool stuff here. And I do feel and again, this was the whole impetus for the podcast is that most people are not aware of the people who are building things, whether that's not even entrepreneurship. It could be art, could be whatever it is, but who are trying to create. I think it's there.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:13:06]:

Well, thanks for pulling all these people together because it's a whole library now of ideas and inspiration and it's great to learn from someone else's success and especially from their failures because you're less likely to repeat it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:13:23]:

Well, thank you. Well, we can bookend our conversation here. I have one more question and then our traditional closing question, which is pretty easy, but I'll put out there if there's anything not obvious that we haven't talked about that you think is important across any of your endeavors or learnings that you would like to highlight.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:13:48]:

Yeah, I think having your own board, both business and personal, has been essential for my success. And even though I had a good background, I went to Harvard Business School and a lot of times you come out, you think you know everything, but quite the opposite. I've taken on and I've learned that I don't need to know everything. I need to know the people who know specific things and are really good at knowing things. And surrounding myself with those people has been essential for my success. Personally, advice with kids, relationships, land, business also. So when I see a young entrepreneur business person and they're trying hard to make it look like they know more than they do or know everything, I always want to remind people, like, just know the person who you can go to to get that answer is really important. And then these groups, like I'm in a Visage group that has some incredibly successful people, in fact, out of 18 when I joined, I'd say I was like the least intelligent, least successful person. Everyone should be part of a group like that, and it will change your life. And the thing that my visage leader has taught me is the quality of your life improves with the quality of your questions, and it's proven to be really true. I think it's just a very simple idea. Ask better questions, and it just opens you up for a broader experience, land, bigger thinking, bigger opportunities.

Jeffrey Stern [01:15:36]:

Well, we'll close it out here with our traditional closing question, which is tied to Cleveland and is for a hidden gem, for something that other folks may not know about, perhaps they should.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:15:47]:

I knew you were going to ask this.

Jeffrey Stern [01:15:50]:

It's the only surefire question.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:15:52]:

Yeah, hidden gem. I think so many people lay the metro parks. We live in Chagrin Falls. We use the metro parks, like nonstop, and there's different parts of it. I'll tell you what the hidden gem is, is fly fishing for steelhead. And the Chagrin river, it is like it's world class and it's so accessible and it's so beautiful land. It connects you with nature in such a way. But these fish are phenomenal. They're monsters. They take a lot of experience, skill, it takes a lot of time, but it's so rewarding. And the fact that from my house, I can actually walk to the river, be in the river, fish for lunch hour and then come out and I rarely catch anything, I have to admit to you. But I don't care. It is just so resetting and inspiring. And you're out there. I could go like some days 3 hours and not see a person and just walk up the river. It's spectacular.

Jeffrey Stern [01:16:57]:

That's spectacular. Well, David, this is an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:17:06]:

Yeah. Thank you, Jeffrey. I really enjoyed talking to you and exploring some of these issues. You pulled out a lot of things that I haven't always or know verbalized, but I hope it can help some people, and if not, I'll play it for my kids and get them to criticize me about it so it'll have some impact one way or another for me. But thank you so much.

Jeffrey Stern [01:17:34]:

That's good to hear. If people had anything they wanted to follow up with you, about to criticize you or celebrate this, what would be the best way for them to do so?

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:17:46]:

Yeah, david at my home park.

Jeffrey Stern [01:17:49]:

Perfect. All right. Thank you, David.

David Levine (My Home Park) [01:17:51]:

Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Stern [01:17:53]:

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 Jeffrey at layoftheland FM or find us on twitter at @podlayoftheland or at @sternjefe. 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.