#191: Lance Hill (Within3) — Raising >$100 Million to Breakdown Healthcare Communication Barriers

Lance Hill [00:00:00]:
If we can get a therapy in the hands of patient who needs it a year faster because we've eliminated some of those false starts and help people to be more effective and efficient. And then when a therapy, it does come on the market, help do a better job at making sure physicians are aware of it and know where it fits with their clinical practice, we've done something important.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:23]:
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 Lance Hill, CEO of Within 3, one of the most capitalized startups in Cleveland with over $100,000,000 raised to date. Lance started the company back in 2000 7 as a peer to peer engagement platform for physicians and health care practitioners, but soon identified the need for something more. A way to break down health care communication barriers and a goal to help life sciences, pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies get more from every engagement so they can move with a greater velocity to deliver life changing therapies to patients worldwide. Today, Within 3 boasts the world's top 20 pharmaceutical organizations and leading medical device companies as clients.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:29]:
Over 70,000 patients and health care providers engaged in over 65 percent of the global top 50 drugs covered on within 3's platform. This is an awesome conversation. We cover Lance's transition to entrepreneurship, successfully navigating pivots, technology's impact on business, lessons learned on leadership, culture, and startups, and ultimately building one of the largest and most successful companies in Cleveland's entrepreneurial ecosystem. So please enjoy my conversation with Lance Hill after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the region. As we've heard time and time again from entrepreneurs here on Lay of the Land, many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University, success in this ever changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the Bowler College of Business. With 4 different MBA programs of study spanning professional, online, hybrid, and 1 year flexible, the Bowler College of Business provides flexible timelines in various class structures for each MBA track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous. All to offer the most effective options for you, including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:04]:
The career impact of a bowler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University's Buller MBA programs, please go to business dotjcu.edu. The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a college of business can have. So like I always do for these conversations, thinking about the the best place to start them. And in reflection, you know, within 3 is really a remarkable Cleveland entrepreneurial story. One that's, in my mind, kind of quietly unfolded since 2007. But, you know, since you've raised, you know, over a $100,000,000 in capital, you count all of the top global pharmaceutical companies as clients, and yet many in the Greater Cleveland area may not be familiar with Within 3. And I personally actually wasn't aware so much of the work that you've done until far too recently.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:06]:
And to me, it's it's almost like one of Cleveland's best kept secrets in the entrepreneurial world. So, again, I'm very grateful you're willing to come on and share your story here today with a lot more folks who I believe would love to understand and know your story and more about the the work you're doing. So thank you, Lance, for, for joining us today on the podcast.

Lance Hill [00:04:26]:
Absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:28]:
So let's start with, you know, who who you are as a person and what kind of drew you to this entrepreneurial world and, you know, some of your motivations, inspirations, and, you know, just kind of what set you off on on this path.

Lance Hill [00:04:43]:
Sure. Yeah. My my journey wasn't linear. So, you know, when I was a kid, I I wanted to be a computer programmer. I want I thought I was gonna make a career coding video games. I thought that would be a a fun life to have out of 12 or whatever. And so I went to school for computer engineering and, you know, right away, started working, doing consulting, kinda got recruited out of college right into consulting for, like, Fortune 500 companies who were doing early days of Internet things, ecommerce, and online banking, and and, you know, Internet security and and cybersecurity and things like that. Yeah.

Lance Hill [00:05:16]:
And, you know, whereas before I was at that point in my life, I was very technical and I was kind of in love with architecture and beautiful code and and elegant ways to do things. I kinda fell in love instead with the business side of it. I I really enjoyed seeing how technology was changing how businesses run-in practice. And having a, you know, a consulting gig like that where you're every, you know, 6 months switching companies with a different project, switching even to a different industry. I got I got to see really early vastly different kind of management styles of of how large companies do things. Yeah. And that was really, really intriguing. And so, you know, from there, I did that for a while, but I was traveling, you know, 6 days a week.

Lance Hill [00:05:58]:
I would get home Friday night or Saturday morning, go get my dry cleaning, and then get on the road Sunday night or Monday morning every single day. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:06]:
And I

Lance Hill [00:06:07]:
so I hit the point where I was like I I literally was thinking, I think I'm just gonna get a PO box for my mail. Then it'll I'll save money by just staying that extra day in a hotel then, like, flying back to Cleveland to get my dry cleaning. So I decided, you know, at some point, I met my, my then my now my now wife at that point. And if I was gonna have any sort of work life balance at all that that that's not gonna work for me. So I went to work here in Cleveland at National Citibank at the time and ran a big chunk of their IT department because my thing and they had been one of my clients when I was consulting thinking like, oh, I think I wanna be a CIO because I just love this idea of technology making a difference in business. And so when I jumped into the bank, what I realized pretty quickly, it was great from, like, a big company managerial experience point of view, but I realized that IT is on the cost side of the ledger for a bank. Not some it's not their core business, obviously, certainly not at that time. And so I realized that that's I don't really wanna be a support organization.

Lance Hill [00:07:03]:
I wanna be driving innovation and change. So I joined a publicly traded software company, ran one of their 4 global business units, and then from there, founded within 3. So my journey was kind of big company to smaller and kind of developer to to kind of outside innovator.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:20]:
What prompted you to take the entrepreneurial leap in that, you know, narrowing of focus, but perhaps, you know, broadening of ambition?

Lance Hill [00:07:28]:
It was kind of the culmination of that journey, but, certainly, what happened is so the company I joined was a company called WebMethods. It's a publicly traded software company, and we sold that business to Software AG, which is a German software enterprise software company in that 2,007, 8 time frame. Yep. And at that point, my decision was, career wise, either to continue on the software AG. And and as a global business, they had a big Pacific Rim business. And so their execs would very frequently go to Australia up to Korea, you know, for 4 full weeks every quarter, kinda routing through that. Headquarters is obviously in Germany. And so my choice was either could go do that and be kind of a global software, you know, exec or to start my own business, which is something that had been intriguing me.

Lance Hill [00:08:16]:
I had done a couple of early, you know, early starts of a little entrepreneurial along the way, but never something I kinda went full time with. And so for me, it was a perfect chance. You know, we had we had an exit, had an outcome. It wasn't, you know, retirement level outcome, but it was certainly enough to say, you can go try this. And if you don't do it now, you're probably never going to. And so kinda wrapped that all up and said, let's let's jump in and start something. And so that that was the idea of of trying to find what eventually became within 3.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:50]:
Yeah. I like I always like that that as the impetus for it, you know, that having mitigating the later in life regret of not having tried at the point where you had the opportunity to do so.

Lance Hill [00:09:02]:
Yeah. There's certain points in your life where you you can take a risk, and there's certain points that you can't. And I was at the age where, like, look. If we start having children and now I've gotta worry about, you know, just, like, a grown up adult things, it's gonna become harder. So it was like, now is the time to take the plunge. And so, you know, that worked out really well for me. So I definitely was not the person who was like, you know, I'm 22, and I'm gonna go, you know, create 9 stars in my career and and and be that person. I got I got started a little bit later than probably some other entrepreneurs in the area.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:35]:
So if you take us back to the early days of, you know, even prior to formally founding with within 3, how did you approach figuring out what to focus on, the the sets of questions that were interesting to you at the time, if you had a vision, you know, what it was at that point, just your process for navigating the idea maze, if you will, and and, ultimately, you know, coming to what would become within 3.

Lance Hill [00:10:02]:
Sure. Yeah. So I the technology that I was really, really interested in at that time was what was referred to then as web 2.0, which was based on social media technology, what we now know as kinda social media technology. And so, you know, at that time, the number one social website was Myspace. Facebook was second, and LinkedIn was this weird business thing off the side that, like, no one quite knew what it was exactly, but it was this weird business one. And the prevailing wisdom at the time was that either Myspace or LinkedIn or or Facebook was gonna win the consumer social media battle, one of those 2. And then after that, what would happen next would be vertical Facebook. So it'd be a separate company with Facebook for lawyers and a separate company with a Facebook for accountants and kinda any you know, separate for Facebook for people like to ski, whatever it was.

Lance Hill [00:10:56]:
The idea was that there's gonna be these vertical social networks that could customize their content for a vertical audience. And a lot of venture money went into different ways of of of doing that. And so I was very interested in that space, and I came across a couple of PhDs who were trying to figure out how to do that for for doctors. I mean, try to become a Facebook for doctors. And my myself and my two partners, Jim Bennett and Mark Morgenstern, basically came together, you know, bought out that IP, and started within 3 Inc in 2008. So, you know, and and the at the time, it was very much a race. There were 5 other companies besides us trying to become the Facebook for doctors at that time. I remember our first app that we wrote was for Blackberry because that that was the the the thing that doctors used.

Lance Hill [00:11:53]:
Yes. So it was it was it was way ahead of its time. That that's how we started in 2008 is we think we have a novel idea of how we can become this kind of Facebook for doctors and how we can outcompete these other 4 companies or 5 companies that, for the most part, were better funded than us. And we'll see what we can do. And that's kind of that was the original idea. It wasn't where we ended, but that's where we started.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:16]:
Right. And knowing it wasn't where you ended as you, you know, learned things along the the way of of building out towards that vision, was there a problem within that space you were seeking to solve, or was it this kind of holy grail idea of if you could build the the vertical social network for doctors, then you would unlock certain, you know, things that you could build that solve future problems for that group of people?

Lance Hill [00:12:44]:
Yeah. The problem we were trying to solve, and it's still a problem today in health care, certainly in in the US especially, is just the disparate care that people get depending on who their primary care physician is and what that primary care physician preferences are. So it was absolutely the case where for 90% of people and this was, again, you know, 15 years ago, so, you know, even less now than there is in terms of, like, you know, online self diagnosis on Google or whatever as your primary care physician. If I go into a physician and I have symptoms and that physician doesn't maybe perhaps know a specialist or have a network of people to ask about my symptoms, it might take me 3 or 4 or 5 people to get, correctly diagnosed. And and part of the problem was that structurally, institutionally, hospital systems, physicians in in the same in different hospital systems were not collaborating with each other. Why would they? The Cleveland Clinic didn't see real value in referring patients to or vice versa, you know, here in Cleveland. And the way that physicians were trained, it wasn't at that time a very collaborative medical school kind of team team based, you know, kind of approach to health care. And so you could see it where, you know, we both have the same symptoms.

Lance Hill [00:13:57]:
You and I go to 2 different physicians even in the same health care system and come out with 2 different diagnosis and and 2 different paths forward. And so what we were trying to do with this is if we could connect all those physicians and create a place that was kind of sitting above the institutional walls that they sit in, where they could share information with each other in a secure fashion, not anonymize private fashion, it's not gonna show up on Google. It's not gonna, you know, run a follow-up of their, you know, medical compliance concerns. That would really help health generally, and people can connect. And so the what we were trying to do is we were trying to partner at the time with, like, medical societies and things like that that had these networks already and create venues online that were interconnected. So kind of think of it like a LinkedIn, like, almost like a shopping mall where the center of the mall is LinkedIn, and then the outside of the mall are these different institutions that have their own areas for their membership. So you could be a physician. I'm a member of the American College of Gastroenterology.

Lance Hill [00:14:50]:
I work at Cleveland Clinic, and I do nonprofit work for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I would come into this virtual health care mall, if you will, and kinda have all that there. That that was what we were trying to build. And so our it was kind of a a quasi b to b and b to c sort of sort of business model. But, ultimately, that's what we're trying to solve is how can we help a physician make a better connection? We had some really great examples of that. You know? We're, like, during, you know, physician in a different country looking to refer someone, didn't have in that country, use our network to find someone, people asking questions all the time. And, again, this was the early days of smartphones and and things like that. So, you know, we we're feeling we're feeling really good at at first in that business model until the the economic reality hit of what it would make me succeed and the pivot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:15:44]:
So if if if the if that initial focus is is really kinda tethered to this idea of creating a, you know, a social network that would enable physicians, practitioners, you know, to have this kind of of communication with regards to, you know, medical information. What were the economic, you know, realities that that prevented you from, you know, pursuing that path in full? And, you know, as you thought more holistically about, you know, breaking down these barriers to communication within health care, how did you begin to reorient around, you know, where actually do the economics make sense, and what is the actual underlying business?

Lance Hill [00:16:19]:
Yeah. So there was, you know, in in pure social kinda networking terms, right, the idea was that if you can get to quote, unquote critical mass in terms of your your network size and activity, and you can get user generated content going at a pace of critical mass, then you have an asset. And then how to monetize that asset is all the ways that, you know, have since been discovered and understood around, you know, advertising and and data and things like that. But that was kind of the original thought. And like I said, there were a number of companies who were all trying to do this different ways. The company that's that's since done it, like, 3 generations later is Doximity, which is a I think they're publicly traded now. But, you know, they they kinda learned from the 2 generations, us, and there's a come another generation of companies that tried this. And then finally, I think Yeah.

Lance Hill [00:17:06]:
Mobile device caught up to what what this vision is. But so but, yeah, the idea was that that that was what you were trying to do. And but and, really, if someone's gonna have professional level conversation, any professional level content, and this is not something where, you know, physicians are just bored and feel like logging in to click around in in a in an online social network. So, you know, the economic challenge that we had was to get to build to that critical mass point. We would have needed to have a lot of content to kind of stir the pot, if you will. And then we would have needed to have a lot of recruiting to bring physicians into the platform, and we would have needed to fund the business while we were building towards that point. And so being in Cleveland, which is different than being in other places, you know, in the country, especially at that time, there was a there was a company in Boston who was trying the same model, and they went out and raised, like, $50,000,000 very quickly to basically drive their business, to be the first, to get to critical mass, and be the Facebook doctors. We were angel backed and bootstrapped.

Lance Hill [00:18:12]:
And so we were, you know, trying to street fight our way into this process and saying we're gonna be smarter technically. We're gonna lean in better and partner better with on the b to b side than this other company is doing. And that's how we're we're gonna we're gonna win. But, economically, if you step back in that scenario, it means we don't have content on our own yet. We don't have a big network of doctors, and we have no one paying our bills yet because we don't have those two things. Those are slight problems with the business plan.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:42]:
Right. It's been a catch 22.

Lance Hill [00:18:43]:
Yeah. It's a little bit of kinda like, yikes. Yeah. So and, you know, and and so we were moving through the business and like a lot of founders, right, convinced that, you know, we were 1 or 2 good phone calls away from from, you know, breaking it all open. But it became became apparent pretty quickly that we weren't gonna win that race. And it was unclear to us at the time if anyone could win the race just because, again, of of where people's preferences were with kinda mobile mobile device use for that type of work just wasn't where it is today. And so by 2012, we had kinda hit a point you know, we had we had gotten a number of customers and and and we were moving, but we had hit a point where it was really, really clear the path we were on is unsustainable, and we need to make a business shift. And that was a really, you know, a really hard time.

Lance Hill [00:19:34]:
We had to downsize a bit and really step back and and talk with our investors and think about you know, I don't think what we've all invested in is going to pan out for us, but we have learned a ton, and I see a different path for us that, you know, may not be a 2 year window to get there, but can be very valuable if if we go down the road. And that's that's the pivot that we made in 2012. We're really the modern within 3 and what, you know, what we do now really began in about the 2013 time frame.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:07]:
And what was that revelatory moment and vision? You know, what was the path you you foresaw, and, you know, how did how did you outline that that vision at that point, and how has it evolved since?

Lance Hill [00:20:20]:
Yeah. So we, you know, we stepping back, what we realized is what we had built in trying to solve, you know, Case Western Medical School was a client for a while. Like, we had all these, you know, Akron Children's Hospital was a client. So we had all these different kinda health care organizations that were experimenting and and and willing willing to work. And what what we really discovered is we had done a really, really good job at building this online communications kinda asynchronous online university style communication mechanism that didn't really exist very well in the market. You know, they couldn't use LinkedIn and things like that to do these sorts of things. We had done a very, very good job at building tools for organizations because part of our model was we were gonna get these organizations to kinda join our shopping mall. And so we had a whole set of tools to allow organizations to do things online to improve what they were doing.

Lance Hill [00:21:08]:
And we were we understood doctors very, very well in their preferences, and doctors was the focus at first. We've since expanded. We understood their preferences and their time constraints. We also understood the regulatory environment very well. And so what we realized is we had a set of tools that would be really, really strong if an organization was trying to do something online, and interact with physicians as an example for whatever their mission was. And we would be better served going turning into a b to b company and working with organizations who, in essence, purchase our technology to enable whatever their mission is, building an online network or an online collaboration environment or something like that versus trying to build one ourselves and try to pull them all in. And so we shifted from, like, a b to c, how can we get doctors to join to, hey. If we go talk to, you know, a pharmaceutical company who is trying to get doctors together to help them design the next clinical protocol for a molecule that they're working on, that pharmaceutical company

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:09]:
already

Lance Hill [00:22:09]:
has the doctors they wanna work with in mind. They've already got the content that they wanna work on, which is our next clinical trial protocol, and they've got funds. So that seemed to solve those three business challenges that that we had, but we had to build a b to b Salesforce to go talk to a pharmaceutical company and work through all of those processes. And then we had to build more into the platform to meet life science level regulatory pressures, auditability and traceability and a variety of other things that didn't exist either. So we looked at the different sorts of organizations that we have been partnering with in in the kind of that first phase, nonprofits, hospital systems, medical schools, you know, life science organizations, and said the biggest regulatory compliance barrier for interacting with patients in HCPs is actually on the life sciences side. They are not allowed by law to just go and start talking to patients whenever they want to, however they want to. They're not allowed by law to just go and start talking to doctors anyway about whatever they want to whenever they want to. They have they have really structural barriers in place for that communication, And we can and therefore, it was very expensive for them to talk to their customers, and we could create various things online for them to do that more effectively.

Lance Hill [00:23:25]:
And so within 3 shifted, and by 2014, 15, we're exclusively focused on life science organizations from a business development point of view, selling really in a b to b mode, you know, customer by customer, contract by contract, therapy by therapy, and then just started building from there. So I'm

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:44]:
always a bit fascinated by the the origin of the opportunities within the health care space because I found them to be pretty, actually, ubiquitous in terms of how similar they are with regards to the justification for the way things have been done is the way they've always been done. And, certainly been been my experience. But when you kind of looked under the hood of life science organizations with specifically regards to how and why they were doing things the way they were for communication. Did you find certain, you know, reasons why things were difficult, time consuming, redundant, manual, or, you know, were were there, like, good reasons for the problem existing? And I'm kinda getting at, you know, why was it the way that it was? And how did you find that, you know, pharmaceutical companies, life science companies evolved in their own journey to kind of address this problem? And how did they historically, you know, go about trying to to coordinate all these moving pieces in in in the way that they had?

Lance Hill [00:24:51]:
Yeah. I think there there was good reason. And it's really the regulatory environment that drug companies, specifically, much more even than medical device companies operate in. So governments don't want a scenario. I'll just use the US. The FDA does not want a scenario where a drug company, it sounds like they're paying or bribing physicians or offering benefits to patients to take their drugs, and maybe they don't need those drugs. And so because of that fear, and it may be well founded based on, you know, behavior years ago of some of the sales groups and and some of these some of these different companies. All kind of major companies have really strong regulations around governing what a drug company can do or can't do.

Lance Hill [00:25:33]:
So, like, in, for example, in the US, you turn on a football game, you see these, you know, happy shiny people on a commercial taking whatever drug, and then, like, the side effects. You know, this drug may make your hair fall out and make your skin turn red and all those crazy things. You can't do that in your call. You don't see any of that in European TV. It's not allowed. And so what was happening is one of the ways if a pharmaceutical company want to get advice from a doc from a set of doctors, for example, on should we, you know, develop this therapy or not and spend half a $1,000,000,000 on this next clinical study, they would wanna talk to, say, the top 10 heart surgeons to get their advice because maybe it's a cardiovascular drug or something. They had to be so they had to basically set up these structures where they could be like, we're gonna talk to these 10 people. Here's exactly what we're gonna talk to them about, and we're not gonna stray from that.

Lance Hill [00:26:21]:
And we're gonna pay them a fair market rate, which is which is decided and posted so that no one can say we just grab those 10 people and bribe them basically with some consulting, quote, unquote, to kinda back our products. And so what they would do in the past is they would say, okay. We're gonna take those 10 doctors, though, and we're gonna fly them and their wives to Hawaii. And we're gonna play around a golf or 2, and then we'll have, you know, have some nice dinners. And 2 or 3 hours in the morning, we'll we'll talk business, and then we'll we'll we'll go we'll all go home. And, you know, in that time frame, in kind of that early 2000, late nineties, that became disallowed as well. So because government's like, that's just another form of bribery. So, yes, we agreed you could talk to these 10 people, but you're going way overboard.

Lance Hill [00:27:06]:
And so now it's like, why would the doctors participate with a drug company when they're not getting the golf anymore and and their wives aren't getting, you know, the free trip to Hawaii? And so now suddenly online ways to do that were easier for the doctor. I can do this online after rounds on Tuesday, in the morning on Thursday. I don't have to carve out 4 hours of my schedule, let alone try to hop on a a on a on what, at the time, I guess, would have been like GoToMeeting or Webex or or or one of those older kind of technologies. So that that was a part of it. It's just the regulatory environment kept tightening, and the ways of doing things in the past were becoming more expensive and less effective. And so that was a big opportunity to say if there's a different way we can communicate. The other thing that is true in in drug companies is that the the compliance environment is weird. What I mean by that is, like, in my background, I mentioned I'd worked at National Citibank here in Cleveland for a while.

Lance Hill [00:27:56]:
You know, we had we had standards. Like, if you're gonna conduct a trade, here is what you do. Here's how the trade works. Here's the information you need to send. Here's how long you need to store the the history of it. It's like it was a standard. Thou shall do it this way, and all the banks do it this way, and that's how it works. You don't have that in life sciences.

Lance Hill [00:28:12]:
You have what they call guidance. So the the FDA will issue guidance saying you should only talk to doctors about what your drug is approved to do. So if you have a cancer medication and it turns out that that medication also cures diabetes, but you haven't gotten approval from the FDA that this drug can be used for diabetes, you cannot talk to doctors about your drug and diabetes. If you do, it's called off label prescription. You're you're basically saying your drug can do something it's not been approved for, and we will fine you a lot. And when I say a lot, if you look back at the last, like, 25 years, pharmaceutical companies have paid more in government fines than big oil has for oil spills. So they're they're they're fining companies 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars when they break some of these rules. But the government doesn't say here is exactly the the criteria under which we'll decide if you were talking about diabetes or not.

Lance Hill [00:29:06]:
They basically say, don't do it. And if we hear about it, we'll take a look and decide what we decide. And so all of these companies would create their own internal compliance organizations and try to come up with their own rules of, like Yeah. What they're allowed to do on their own because it's not really, like, a standard. There's just kinda, like, we wanna show evidence that we're trying to be good good people. And so all of that made them even more concerned about adopting tech. And so we came along and said, you know what? We have the safest, most effective, most guardrailed sort of approach to doing this stuff you were doing manually online. And you can do it better, faster, safer, and much less expensive than what you were doing.

Lance Hill [00:29:46]:
And that kinda took the world by storm in that industry.

Jeffrey Stern [00:29:53]:
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 they love. If you 2 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're 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. So how how do you describe and think about what Within 3 is today and the kind of you know, in a world where the vision for Within 3 is realized as you have, you know, thought about it, built the company towards that end, what changes within the the health care landscape?

Lance Hill [00:31:10]:
So we're we're now we are more of an analytics company, actually. So what happened is along that along that journey, we started adding all these customers and and, you know, like, I remember, like, during COVID, there was something like 80 COVID drug related projects happening on within 3, you know, during that time as every company was trying to figure out, you know, what they're doing there. And we were, you know, really a place where drug companies went to to engage with patients, payers, and physicians by that point on all sorts of topics. And what we could see in our own data was that drug companies, many times, not all the time, but many times were asking questions to the wrong people. Like, we we knew who these doctors were. You're asking this person these sets of questions. I know they're not an expert in that. These people over here are, but maybe that's who they've known for a long time.

Lance Hill [00:31:55]:
Or a global drug company does a program in February, and then the German division does the exact same thing 2 months later and had no idea that they already did that and already got all those answers, but they didn't share them together. And so it became really clear to us that the next phase of this was to do a better job helping these companies understand, a, talk to the right people, and b, do a better job at helping them understand what's being said and and and interpret that that data better. And because by that point, we were talking with about just more than doctors, we had, you know, tons of patient programs and payer programs and things like that in our platform. We're also seeing that companies were trying to use our platform almost like to do market research, but doing it a bit piecemeal and that we could move forward and aggregate much broader sets of data for them. So if they have a question about this clinical trial protocol, yes, they can talk to some doctors on our platform, but we can also give them 5 other views of data that help them make a better decision. So now what we do as a company is we still have our engagement business, and people around the world still talk about all sorts of things in our platform in relation to industry. But we're also bringing together now, you know, social listening and population health data and, you know, integrating, you know, field insights and medical medical information and pulling that all together for companies so they can make better investment decisions, frankly, on therapies better faster.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:24]:
So it I think it's fun to kinda ground it in in what that original vision was for the social network that would enable medical communication because it it sounds like, ultimately, you did actually achieve the critical mass you were hoping to at that point. But with, you know, the top pharmaceutical companies as clients with a vast majority of the top global drugs discussed on

Lance Hill [00:33:47]:
the

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:47]:
platform, and that creates a a gravity to it that, you know, just pulls people into the within 3 ecosystem or or platform. What do you think allowed you to achieve such a pronounced penetration within the market? You know, what what were kind of the differentiating factors that, allowed you to to kinda build this this network in time? And, you know, how how do you think about competition and and, you know, strategically, what is differentiated within 3?

Lance Hill [00:34:20]:
Yeah. 3 revolution. Days, we we were first to market with this sort of approach. No other company, you know, this this sort of, like, asynchronous online, like, online university style interactions, no other company had done that and was anywhere close to regulatory safe for life science companies to do it. So in the early in the 20, you know, 13, 14, 15 days, our problem was we've got a great mousetrap. These people don't know we have it and don't know they need it. And so then the focus was really on business development. With b to b, a lot of times, it's just how many ad bats are you getting with companies and customers? And that was a huge focus for us.

Lance Hill [00:34:54]:
And we decided to focus on the top 20 pharma companies first. So we kind of said we go after some of the small folks, and we might get quicker sales cycles. And and but the large folks have multiple sets of drugs that they can use us with. They are global. They have the the biggest compliance hurdle. So if we can solve those for them, we can solve them for anybody. And so we used to, you know, celebrate, like, oh, we got, you know, now we have 5 of the top 20. Yes.

Lance Hill [00:35:21]:
You know? Now we have 7. Yes. Yes. Yes. Now we have 9. Yes. Right? And then we finally got the 20, like, in 2017 or something. We're like, yes.

Lance Hill [00:35:30]:
And that was really our focus. It's just adding on, you know, the these large companies one after the other. And then because life science companies are global, so when you when you're paying 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to develop a therapy, you have to recoup that across the global health population if you can. It's typically not enough money just in one region. And so it also then meant that we we were in global markets. So we were working in Asia, and we were working in Europe, and and working with clients there. And all of that just kinda helps snowball it altogether.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:01]:
So if there was this pronounced shift in in strategy from the social network idea to this life sciences communication and kind of aggregation platform, It seems there was also another kind of fundamental shift in strategy, you know, where you had mentioned at onset, really kind of a bootstrapped, low capital approach to exploring the problem space, the market, the product. You know, in in 2020, within 3, you raised over $100,000,000 in growth financing. I'd love to understand, you know, the evolution of your thinking in, you know, capital and, how it's impacted your ability to to innovate and expand and, you know, why and when it made sense to you to kinda pour that that fuel on the fire.

Lance Hill [00:36:47]:
Sure. Yeah. So we were and I think this is perhaps true of a lot of Cleveland, Northeast Ohio sort of area companies, you know, is that the capital environment and availability of capital is not as apparent as it might be if you're on the coast. And it's harder to build networks to help you get to that capital here. You know, there there's if you're looking for seed funding, you know, your choice here is angel. If you want local funding, your choice here is an angel network, and and there's a couple you know, a handful of organizations that may provide seed funding that are here. And then after that, you're you're done. And and I think certainly at that time too without people weren't doing business virtually normally.

Lance Hill [00:37:26]:
And so if you were even gonna think about getting funding in Boston, you had to fly to Boston and and start knocking on doors, and that was that was And so what we did is we we basically did one of one of my, Michael Solomon, who's the chairman of our board, said what we're doing is dry farming. And so dry farming is this concept, right, where you you you you're farming, but you don't put a lot of water on the plants because you don't you're not using a lot of water at your capital. And so the plants take a longer time to grow, and they're really struggling. But when they finally get there, the fruit is delicious. So that was, like, that was the metaphor. So we were dry farming. And so we we were basically ranging raising angel money along the way just in time funding. So we weren't doing big rounds.

Lance Hill [00:38:04]:
We were doing a $300,000 here and a $300,000 there kind of through the early days as as we were moving forward. And, you know, I spent a lot of my time working, you know, with my partners on on securing that funding while trying to drive the business. And we had you know, we were fortunate enough to be able to do that, and we weren't a capital capital intensive business. So it wasn't like we had to go buy, you know, capital equipment and things like that. So we were just kind of writing software. We were selling virtually. We're servicing virtually. And so that kinda worked for us.

Lance Hill [00:38:34]:
And, you know, and being in Northeast Ohio, what what that made us do, I think, is try to build a solid business that wasn't losing gobs of cash because we didn't kinda have that sort of, like I know our EBITDA is negative 50%, but our growth is 70%, so give us a bunch of money. Like, that wasn't gonna happen for us. Right? So so Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:53]:
The literal growth at all costs mentality.

Lance Hill [00:38:55]:
Yeah. And so we, you know, so we have we were a lot of, you know, very serious northeast of high level angel investors invested within 3 over the years when we exited in in in 2020. So, yes, it was a growth capital, but it was basically a sale of the company. It was a majority recapitalization to a private equity company. There we had massive returns for those investors. So I think at at that point, we were the 3rd highest valued tech company ever to exit Cleveland, and I think after covering my meds and explorers. The way our cap table was, almost the entire cap table was Cleveland, Northeast Ohio area, angels, entrepreneurs, and and a couple of, like, seed and a stage funds. We've got really big returns at that.

Lance Hill [00:39:37]:
And I was I was really thrilled that all those people who stuck with me through the lean dry farming years, you know, got got a got a big exit. And that was part of the thinking in 2020. Part of it was growth and part of it was liquidity that we had been doing this for a while. And, you know, we we had some shareholders who had passed away and their their their children were now the shareholders, you know, and so, you know, with angels. So we had a big liquidity event, gave all of our shareholders the option of either cashing out or rolling forward or both. And then on the second hand, though, what we were seeing was this shift that it's not just about gathering what the doctors are saying. It's about what do you do with the information once you have it. And that requires things like AI, and it requires things like augmenting additional data into what you're doing to make the picture more more useful to a client.

Lance Hill [00:40:26]:
And that would require us to make some acquisitions and grow, and we needed a serious backer to do that. And that's that was another reason for in 2020, saying we need to grow up out of the kind of just in time capital too. If we wanna take a real big swing at bat, we need, more of a scale up sort of investor versus a start up sort of investor at our table.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:48]:
When you think about that big swing, what does success mean to you? You know, like, what what ultimately is is the impact that you hope to have with within 3 and looking back in in retrospect?

Lance Hill [00:41:02]:
You know, as as I've said now, you know, a longer time, you know, 10 plus years exclusively focused on the life sciences, you know, right now, it's about how can we get therapies into the hands of people better and faster. Drug development takes a long time. It's really expensive. The success rate is very low for molecules that are promising in the lab to what actually can get into a shot in your arm, you know, to help you with with something that you may have. And those same structural barriers to understanding your own market, understanding what patients want or think, what physicians want or think, or what payers will pay for and why still exist. And, obviously, in the US as well, we bear a huge percentage of the burden of that r and d, which you'll hear all the politicians talk about with the drug pricing conversation. And so, you know, what I want within 3 to be able to do is help make that whole process more efficient. You know, if we can get if we can get a therapy in the hands of patient needs a year faster because we've eliminated some of those false starts and help people to be more effective and efficient.

Lance Hill [00:42:03]:
And then when a therapy, it does come on the market, help do a better job at making sure physicians are aware of it and know, you know, where it fits with their clinical practice, we've done something important. And so that's that's how it's evolved. So it's less about, like, it was in the early days, are the physicians all talking to each other? And now it's kinda like physicians have the right therapies in their park in their pocket to help a patient when the patient walks in the door.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:29]:
What are you most excited about at this stage?

Lance Hill [00:42:34]:
You know, I'm ex I'm I'm always excited about innovating and doing new things. And so, you know, we have you know, we we lean way into AI and Gen AI and predictive AI. And so our solutions now are heavily AI based. We think there's a lot of more lot more things we can disrupt in terms of the status quo in life sciences by applying targeted AI in combination with the data that we have and the analytics that we have and the customer set that we have. And that's all really cool. And I I get I still my still passion from when I was young, which is I love seeing how technology changes businesses, It's still my core driver at the end of the day. And so that's happening now. And and I find that to be really cool and really fun.

Lance Hill [00:43:14]:
You know, I'm at a fortunate place in in my career where, you know, I'm not worried about putting a second mortgage on the house to make payroll that week, which is something that did happen to me, you know, in in those lean years. And so I can kind of enjoy the part I like without some of the existential crisis that entrepreneurs face at earlier stages. And that just that just excites me. And then, you know, at this point in my career too, I'm starting to spread my wings a little bit and and network a bit more and and give back a bit to, you know, folks who are on or within 3 ride just 10 years, you know, 10 years after I started it, but with their company. And how can I be helpful and and wherever I can?

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:54]:
What does within 3 mean? I I realized I should have asked this question earlier, but

Lance Hill [00:43:58]:
Yeah. So, actually, if you you're familiar with, like, everybody's connected to Kevin Bacon within 6 degrees of separation. Yes. Yes. Someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Kevin Bacon. Like, that meme was big when, you know, in that time. And in health care, physicians are actually within 3, not 6. So because of med school and where they're training and hospital systems and nonprofits that they that they that they work in in in continuing education, a doctor in China and Dauklin, Iowa are probably within 3 degrees.

Lance Hill [00:44:26]:
So within three name came from that. The idea that we understand it's actually 2.7 to be exact. 2.7 in medical We round up.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:34]:
Yeah. It's a Yeah.

Lance Hill [00:44:35]:
I round up to 3. So because within 3 within 2.7 doesn't sound as cool. So we went with within 3. And so within 3 is a place where you can come and connect and see how that that works. That was the original idea. But we've had a bunch of people with that name. It's been funny over the years. I mean, I was in one meeting with with a client and, you know, we're introducing ourselves and they say, oh, you play chess.

Lance Hill [00:44:56]:
I'm like, that's grand random. I don't why? What are you talking about? And he said, well, within 3 moves, Checkmate. Right? That's where the the name of the company comes from. Right? You know, I had a I had a French French meeting where they thought they're thinking like, Like, what are you guys thinking about within 3? So it always makes for a good conversation when people ask that question, but that's where it came from. 2.7 degrees is how people are connected around the world on the physician side.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:20]:
Within 3. Love it. You mentioned at the the onset of your career this really broad set of exposure through consulting to different styles of leadership and management within an organization. I'm curious as you leverage that experience into the founding of Within 3, what you felt would have been your leadership style and how it's evolved over time from learnings along the way?

Lance Hill [00:45:48]:
When I started the company, I would say they didn't seem mean now and me then is I was very smart and not very wise, if that makes sense. So I was I was I thought I was pretty smart. I I was pretty confident in in what we're doing, and I thought it was inevitable that within 3 years, it'd be in the the cover of Wired Magazine, you know, holding a cigar and ringing the Nasdaq bell.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:11]:
Yeah. Within 3 years.

Lance Hill [00:46:12]:
Yeah. Within 3. It's like, oh, of course. Right? And I wasn't I think what I didn't know enough because I'd worked in kinda larger organizations where the structure was already there, and that's what I had kinda seen, was the human the human to human side of it, especially when you're an early stage company. It's about the people. It's about do you have the right people, and do you have enough time, which really means you have enough cash to have enough time to figure it out. That that is kind of the formula. If you're especially if you're a company where you you you have an interesting technology or an idea, but you haven't quite figured out exactly what the right market fit is yet, then that's what you use.

Lance Hill [00:46:46]:
It's different if you kinda like start your company. I need to build a hammer that has a square head. I know that's gonna work, and that's what I'm building, and that's what it's gonna be. But for a lot of startups, that's not the case. It's like I have this cool diagnostic. I have this cooler way to do something online, and I kinda sorta have, you know, figured out. I'm kinda talking to people and trying to hone my value prop. So that's the part I think I I didn't appreciate as much.

Lance Hill [00:47:10]:
And I think in the early days, I didn't handle the human side of it as well, you know, with with employees and things like that because I just didn't it didn't occur to me to really have, you know, what level of empathy I would need to really understand how to keep people and build things in the way that that we needed. So especially in Northeast Ohio, it's not like you have access to massive pools of talent that are all local. And especially because the world is globalized now, people stay for most roles, they stay at your company because they want to, not because they have to. I'm a good developer, it does not take me long to find a place to go be a good developer. And so you have to build, I believe. If attrition matters to you, and I think it does very heavily, you need to have an organization where people want to stay, not because, you know, you're doing foosball tables and crazy crazy things, but because you treat people like grown ups. You're transparent. You're honest.

Lance Hill [00:48:04]:
And people believe in the mission, and you're and you're having some success. And and so I think I learned those things. My leadership style kinda grew, and and and now it's more about how am I enabling the people in the organization who are much better at what they do individually in in their, you know, sphere than I am to to do that as effectively as possible. How do I spend time? It's the same message, but how I might share an idea with a group of developers in my company is different than my people who serviced my Fortune 500 pharmaceutical clients is different than my marketing team. It's the same message. We're doing analytics AI x, y, and z, but how I would translate that is different. So that that was a learning. It's how to kinda speak those different languages in your own company so that everyone understands and is and feels connected and feels part of it versus not.

Lance Hill [00:48:52]:
So I'm so in in a weird way, I'm almost like the opposite of the Elon Musk style leadership, which is, you know, work 90 hours a week and I'll fire you and I don't care sort of thing, at least what you read. I don't wanna get on Elon Musk bad side, but I've sort of read and more about how do you create a sustainable environment where great people will wanna give you their all and wanna keep doing it over time. There's no line item for for cost of attrition on on a p and l, but there should be. Because I think when you look at how much it costs to train someone, recruit someone, how much time that takes, train them, bring them on board, then when they start not working out, you're spending time trying to work through all of that, then you realize that's not gonna be successful. So then you let them go. Probably other people in your company are picking up their slack, so they're miserable. And then you start the whole process again. And so if you're in a company like ours, where you're trying to kind of maintain long term relationships with large organizations, that's that's a death spiral.

Lance Hill [00:49:50]:
And so I came to appreciate the skills I would need as a leader to have an environment where if someone wasn't performing, that's different. But I didn't wanna lose people I didn't wanna lose, and I wanted to create an environment where even if I wasn't the highest paying company out there for them, that I was still the place they wanted to stay.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:09]:
That's powerful. What what do you feel have been the most painful mistakes that that you have made along the way that really, you know, stick with you to this day?

Lance Hill [00:50:19]:
So the the the first one I will say is what I would call the the mistake of the false positive. And this is something that b to b companies, early stage startups get a lot. Our first big drug company bought, like, like, a big project from us. Like, we were like, yes. We figured it out. And if we can get 10 more guys to do what this company just did, we'll be a great company. We were celebrating. Like, we've we've figured it out.

Lance Hill [00:50:48]:
And it turns out at the time, that company was in a position where they had felt like they had been innovating for the last 10 years, and they moved a bunch of money to this innovations group so they could fund pilots and projects. But the rest of the industry didn't work that way. And the rest of the industry, all the money was still at at the the drug level who wasn't really interested in spending huge amounts of money on on new experiments with this new online technology stuff. And so so we kinda said, oh my goodness. We've we've figured it out. Home run. We've won. We're building plans showing, you know, the the needle going up into the right.

Lance Hill [00:51:20]:
And it turned out that we were wrong, and we had a lot more work to do to actually figure out what is the right pricing and packaging, what is the right set of products that will work for many customers versus this exception that we found that wasn't really, you know, indicative of how the rest of the market was gonna work. And that was something that I think was a was a big lesson learned because that's when you start really missing your projections and your milestones. Like, this is not going like I thought it was. How can this be when we've already proven that this is how it's supposed to go? That was a big one. So that was a

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:54]:
big leading Yeah. Leading indicator.

Lance Hill [00:51:56]:
And a lot of times what happens with startups in the b to b side is you get your 1st big company, the first to whale, they might they might call it. Right? And they want you to go do a bunch of stuff, and you're like, well, they're, you know, they're they're paying most of the bills right now. I'll do whatever they ask. And it turns out what they're asking you to do is not sellable anyplace else. And so you're actually putting your whole company on pause while you're servicing your first big whale. And while you're on pause, the market's moving on without you. So that's that's a big that concentration risk is is can really be a problem if you're not careful for a tech company in a startup stage.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:31]:
Yeah. I've thought a lot about that one. I've always kind of framed it as building to the the line of generally extensible from a product standpoint. There's, like, on a spectrum of custom services for clients to, you know, a resellable product. You know, you wanna you wanna meet the needs, but it's got you know, it's gotta be workable for the the broader market.

Lance Hill [00:52:52]:
Yeah. If your business can't scale, then your business can't grow. But what happens sometimes is because you're so desperate for money in the early stage, you'll take the one big contract, and you're desperate for the validation and the logo. Yes. You can use to raise some capital with that you sometimes find yourself in these arrangements that start off wonderful and then become unhealthy. And so, you know, our our relationship did not become unhealthy with that contract, so that didn't happen to us. But what did happen to us was our understanding of how we thought the market was gonna work was incorrectly shaped by that experience, and we kinda had to reset our go to market model accordingly as we realized this is end of 1, not an end of 50.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:31]:
I think you've touched on this piece of it a bit, you know, throughout the different life cycle stages of within 3 so far, but I'm curious how you think about Cleveland in this whole journey.

Lance Hill [00:53:41]:
I first of all, I love living in Cleveland. I I, you know, I I love being here. I moved here as an adult, but during that PO box phase of my life, from college, I was like, I'll I'll go room have his roommate from college. I'll go live with him in Cleveland and, see him, like, you know, 8 hours a week. So that was that was that kinda moved into Cleveland. The thing I like about thing I've always liked about this area is I do feel like, you know, I'm I'm a little more of an introvert by background or or whatever headset. And so the idea of, like, just raising money on a napkin and and being loud about it and and and trying to kinda out present the next person trying to raise money on a napkin, that never appealed to me. You know, you have to do that sometimes, but it's not what I enjoy doing.

Lance Hill [00:54:25]:
I really enjoy building things. And I feel like North Face Ohio is people who are more let's build good solid companies and businesses headset versus let's just raise a $100,000,000 if we can and to see what happens and and and, you know, let her rip. And so I like that to me, that fits my sensibilities pretty well. I also feel like because I think people in Northeast Ohio are pretty grounded and and just not distracted with a bunch of other stuff, if that makes sense, that may happen on the coast, that that can be really helpful in building kind of a good cohesive feeling inside your company. And so, obviously, in the early days, we're all Cleveland based. Now we're global. We try to keep that same culture extended globally. But that's one of the things I like I like about about the area.

Lance Hill [00:55:09]:
You know, the downside for me is none of our customers are ever in Cleveland. So you mentioned beginning, like, within 3 is a secret, and why isn't it not everyone know that, like, there's this tech company that that, you know, raised 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars? Because none of our none of our customers are here. And so in my day to day travels, I don't interact with Cleveland people from within three point of view. You know? And that's and I've been maniacally focused on my business, so I've not really spent as much time as I ought to navigating. Whereas at this point in my career, you know, I'm I'm I'm shifting my headset a little bit and say, you know what? There's room for both.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:43]:
We'll work to to bookend it here, but I'll ask, as we've made our way through this conversation and and reflecting on your journey thus far, if there is something unsaid, you know, that that you had wished I had asked about, something that came to mind that, you know, you wanted to relay, but maybe didn't fit perfectly within a topic or set of questions we were we were alluding to.

Lance Hill [00:56:04]:
I can't I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I think, you know, the one of the things that I believe to be true, and I think, especially maybe in a Northeast Ohio area type of company is this notion that I had early days, which is like, I'm gonna do a start up in 3 years from now. You know, I'll be ringing the bell in the Nasdaq, and it's gonna be straight up into the right and that easy. It isn't how business happens for 99% of of entrepreneurs. That's just not how it goes. So that's what you read about when when people are celebrating this company or that company that was a unicorn, but that's just not the reality for 99% of the time. It it is a street fight. It is reflection.

Lance Hill [00:56:41]:
It is it is punches to the gut and do and spiking the ball for touchdowns and everything in the middle. And, you know, I feel like the mental and emotional endurance that I've built up over the years, you know, doing this is something I'm proud of. And I I personally respect when I meet an entrepreneur, even if they're just starting, I have immediately such respect for someone who is saying, I'm gonna take my future in my own hands versus someone who, you know, I joined a Fortune 500 firm and rose to the top and now I'm wealthy. But it's like, yeah. But you like, the person who built the $5,000,000 business, for me at least, I'm like, yeah. You know? That's awesome. You you took some clay and you made something. And so I think that's that's the passion.

Lance Hill [00:57:25]:
If I was gonna talk to any entrepreneurs in in the area, like, don't don't lose that fire. It can be done. It could be really, really rewarding. It will not be as easy as you think. It won't go as fast as you think, but it'll be over in the blink of an eye, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:40]:
It it certainly makes sense to me. It's been the, you know, the most humbling and fulfilling thing that I've I've gotten to to work on at the same time.

Lance Hill [00:57:49]:
Yeah. There are moments where you feel like I am the worst entrepreneur ever to walk the planet and moments where you feel like, oh my gosh, I'm brilliant and everything in between.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:58]:
Yes. Yes. I I've heard it described as, you know, euphoric highs and demoralizing lows and the roller coaster up and down between those 2.

Lance Hill [00:58:09]:
Absolutely.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:11]:
Cool. Well, I'll hit you then with our our traditional closing question, which is for your favorite hidden gem in Cleveland for something that, you know, other folks may not know about, but perhaps they should.

Lance Hill [00:58:23]:
I if I had to pick a hidden gem in Cleveland, just from my experience, I would I would say that there are sets of people in Cleveland who are very successful and very experienced and back from come from the my Angel Network days, who are probably a degree or 2 degrees away from you, and you just don't know because Cleveland is not the place where a lot of that is exposed. So I think there's a lot of hidden gems in that. There's untapped pools of knowledge, advice, and capital that is is there that is outside of the way where it's kinda pooled and, you know, some of the the the more the structures, you know, and some of the venture, type funds and things like that. So I think that's that's a really, really cool thing is to communicate, connect with those folks.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:09]:
I agree. It's it's very much in in the spirit of this podcast itself. You know, the the receptiveness people are also to just anyone who's curious and, you know Yeah. Makes the effort to to reach out.

Lance Hill [00:59:21]:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's it's fun. I I've I've just been blessed. I met so many people along the way through this journey. Some of which had nothing to do with tech. Didn't make their money in tech.

Lance Hill [00:59:30]:
Didn't know anything about tech, but knew about human beings and and how to, you know, how to do business. And and and I've I've learned so much, over the years.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:40]:
Well, Lance, I just wanna thank you for taking the time, coming on, sharing your story, you know, to the degree we can, have a few more folks aware of the pretty incredible work that that you've done over the last many years with with your team and and with within 3. I'm excited to to share share the story.

Lance Hill [00:59:58]:
Well, great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:00]:
Absolutely. If folks had anything they wanted to follow-up about, learn more about the company, or otherwise, where would, where would you direct them?

Lance Hill [01:00:09]:
LinkedIn. Lance Hill on LinkedIn, would be where I'd direct them. Perfect.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:14]:
Well, thank you again, Lance.

Lance Hill [01:00:15]:
Great. Thanks.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:18]:
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@layoftheland.fm, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or @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.