#201: Robert Marks (Projector) — Keepsake and Personal Streaming for Legacy

Robert Marks [00:00:00]:
Why can't she watch a slideshow of our kids or our honeymoon? I had 600 gigabytes of organized videos. If I died at any point, who's going to my computer and getting this stuff. It's gone forever. We don't watch TV now through video streaming services. 25,000,000 households in America with a TV. Over 80% stream. Over 40% of those households only stream now. Why can't there be a streaming app that looks and feels like any other video streaming service, but the content is better than anything out there because it's my family.

Robert Marks [00:00:38]:
It's our memories.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:42]:
Let's discover what 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 pleasure of speaking with Robert Marks. Robert founded Fidelity Voice and Data back in 1999 with just a $600 investment that he grew to an over $30,000,000 business and one of the largest telecommunications and cloud service competitors throughout the Midwest with a focus on providing high speed Internet access across various industries. After selling the company in 02/2008, the company was across various industries. After selling the company in 02/2015, Robert turned his attention to giving back to his local community through various philanthropic initiatives. In 02/2020, though, Robert's entrepreneurial spirit led him to set out to solve a deeply personal problem that he felt during the pandemic, centered around the difficulty of sharing personal media with family.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:47]:
Robert raised $1,200,000 and founded Projector as a keepsake company to build the personal streaming platform for legacy and memory preservation that he wished had existed. The company now has thousands of subscribers, and Robert is in the process of raising a larger venture round to bring Projector to scale. In our conversation, we unpack Robert's journey as an entrepreneur, transitioning from business to business to business to consumer, the nuance and interesting opportunities of the keepsake and legacy market, how AI has become technological leverage, which has lowered the barriers to build companies, the lessons he imparts as an educator of entrepreneurship, the importance of corporate culture, his love of Cleveland, and a whole lot more. So please enjoy my conversation with Robert Marx. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by ninety. 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 two are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation

Robert Marks [00:03:12]:
or

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:13]:
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 Ninety to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes. I'm always thinking about the best place to start these. And for us, I I kinda revisited our our first conversation. And in just learning about what you're doing, my family has a bit of a tradition where we've always made montages celebrating periods of time or momentous events in our lives collectively. And I will give you, it was not until we met that I had even given much thought to the market or product opportunity for those preservations of personal memories and just kind of thinking through this, this whole space. And it's been, fun to see what, what you are building, particularly as I think I could be as much a customer of it as many other founders that I've worked with.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:16]:
So it's, it's fun to actually think through the problem space, but just wanted to, to thank you for for coming on the show today and for for sharing

Robert Marks [00:04:25]:
a bit of your story, Robert. Fantastic. Really happy to be here.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:29]:
I wanna start with kind of the entrepreneurial journey. And I know, you know, prior to what you're working on with with projector here and and, you know, we'll spend as much time as we need to, to really unpack that. But I, I know you had started fidelity voice and, and data with, you know, just a few hundred dollars and, and grew it into tens of millions dollar business over the course of your time building it. And so I wanted to understand, you know, where that entrepreneurial inclination comes from and, you know, take us through kind of the formative experiences along the way as you as you built this this first company.

Robert Marks [00:05:02]:
Absolutely. So I grew up at an entrepreneurial home, meaning my father was a serial entrepreneur, started all kinds of companies from in the plastics business to large equipment machinery like furnaces and even in tech. He was always a very tech guy. And we didn't have a lot of rules growing up and I'm come from a very large family or six children, but there was always one rule, which is you were home by 06:00 for dinner. And my mom is the sweetest, nicest person in the world, but you never violate that rule because there'd be a wrath on you. And when my dad got home and he was always in a suit and tie, he'd come home, sit, and he would talk about his business. I made a choice not to talk about my kid's business. I don't, I think I was wrong by that, but I really got a good sense from him and what he went through.

Robert Marks [00:05:44]:
But ultimately when I graduated from college I had no desire to be an entrepreneur, wanted to work for somebody else. I wanted to do great things. Get a paycheck, not worry about payroll taxes, not worry about the checkbook, not worry about sales, go out there and just do my thing and accumulate wealth that way and grow through the corporate ladder. My entrepreneur journey. Sure. Like I had those influences from my father, but the reality was, I was very frustrated working in corporate America. I just didn't feel like the people I worked for had my back. It seemed that was, it was all about their dreams, not my dreams, not my coworkers dreams and certainly not the people below me.

Robert Marks [00:06:22]:
And I grew to a point where I had hundreds of people reporting me. I was growing through management pretty well. At a very young age in my twenties and into my early thirties. A lot of responsibility, big budgets. I was wearing a suit and tie because that's what we did back then. This is thirty plus years ago. But I, I love my coworkers. I love my peer group.

Robert Marks [00:06:41]:
I love the people that work for me and I was focused on their dreams, but I, I felt that I would get stabbed in the back before my boss would allow them to get in trouble or if they ever had to defend themselves or if they, they, you know, were dealing with issues. It was the blame game, not the support game. And that really drove me to be an entrepreneur. I learned a lot about tech and the telecommunication space from my prior career path to fidelity voice and data. And I felt I could do it better, felt I could build a culture. So I seeded that business with a whopping $600 At the time I have to tell you, I was married, and still married to that same person. And she wanted to be a stay at home mom, which is wonderful. We had a one and a half year old, any brand newborn.

Robert Marks [00:07:23]:
We had a mortgage and we had two car payments and I didn't have a lot of cash. And it was, it was crazy that she was even open for me to quit a really nice job and do this. But I seated it with $600 and do organic growth through good old fashioned bootstrapping. We just went out there and we built a really great company that we exited in 02/2015 at $30,000,000 which is incredible for a $600 seat. And, you know, it was a b to b business, and I felt I had a lot of control because I can go out there and and and make it rain by walking into businesses and, and providing a solution for them. That was better than what they can get from what were my large competitors at the time, which were companies like at and T MCI sprint, eventually Verizon and a million other telecom telecommunications companies that were exploding in the late nineties.

Jeffrey Stern [00:08:09]:
Where did you find the the confidence to take that entrepreneurial leap knowing that, you know, it wasn't something that maybe you aspire to to be growing up, even having learned a lot about entrepreneurship maybe from from your dad.

Robert Marks [00:08:21]:
Maybe if I would have really thought about just how hard it is and how risky it was and that the whole family could have been living in a basement eating cat food in three years, maybe I wouldn't have done it. It really came out of misery. I kid you not, Jeffrey, and maybe people out there can can relate to this. We don't think of ever turning our cell phones off, but thirty something years ago, you did at times turn your cell phone off, but you had to replace your batteries. Literally at 04:59PM. I would leave the office, turn my cell phone off. It could be 20 degrees and snowing. I'd blast the radio, open up all four windows and digress from the stress I was dealing with of the misery of working through in corporate America.

Robert Marks [00:08:59]:
And I think it was that misery that really motivated me to do it. And we had an incredibly good idea. At least we thought it was a good idea. And, nothing was going to stop us because life can't be that miserable. I, it would have been either a massive attack of ulcers or heart failure that would have taken me out of, I would have stayed in that environment. It was just not a good environment. When you start thinking about boy, I should just become a history teacher and a basketball coach and life would have been better. You know, it's not good.

Robert Marks [00:09:24]:
Although that would be a wonderful life. It was really that it was the motivation of misery and I've given many talks and speeches and entrepreneur clubs and even a very large groups. And it really was the misery of even a very large groups. And it really was the misery of what I felt was corporate America. And the way I described it earlier, that people don't have your back. They don't care about your dreams. I had dreams and I felt the best way to pursue them was leave that job and start my own business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:46]:
I guess just on that thread, what did you decide was important to you and the kind of culture to instill within the company that you were building and that, you know, you still value today?

Robert Marks [00:09:57]:
Well, here's, what's really cool when you start your own business and then you start hiring people, you get to set the culture. When I walked out of AT and T, a 35,000 employees, dollars 96,000,000,000 of revenue. That's a monster today. And that was a monster in the nineties. Now, the AT and T wasn't a cell phone company. Back then they were a very large telecommunications conglomerate and some of the largest companies in the world were our customers. I would, I couldn't affect that culture. Not a chance.

Robert Marks [00:10:27]:
Now I could in my office, my office on Valley View, I had about maybe seventy, eighty people at that time who reported to me. I absolutely can control the culture there and I could shield them from the misery. I always remember we had to go to a kickoff meeting down in Columbus where they brought thousands of employees from all over the state and I was dreading it because my staff, mostly my, my, my producers, my salespeople were all on a row in front of me. And every time a leader spoke, they would look at me with this dirty look like, is that real? Our commissions are changing. Is that real? This is what they think of us. That real, are they given a spree for out there trying to sell their products? And then I had to take them back to my office and fix the damage that the leadership was causing, because of the poor culture that they did. So with my business, it was really, many things. And I hope I'm allowed to use one swear word on here.

Robert Marks [00:11:15]:
But business is tough. Life is tough. So So we're gonna have issues with customers. We're gonna have issues where equipment's gonna fail. Technology is gonna fail. We're gonna have power outages. We're gonna have air conditioning failures. We're gonna have bad code in a in a router or switch that's gonna cause pain to thousands of customers who literally want to kill you because they can't make phone calls or can't get on the internet or can't communicate to their other locations to their wide area network.

Robert Marks [00:11:37]:
But what we can't have is the person sitting in a cubicle here, bringing their problems on Monday morning at 8AM and the 40 other people who work in that area don't want to come to work because of that one person. So I set that culture up that, you know what? We're here for you. I was always good about giving everybody a very specific job description and I stayed true to it. I didn't get mad at them that they did something wrong. That wasn't part of what they even know should know, or it was part of their job description. And my expectations are to get that job done. But when you treat them with respect and you make sure you keep the other people out of the office who don't do that, we had something. I used to do this on an interview.

Robert Marks [00:12:16]:
I was always the last interview for somebody. And my last question was, I want to let you know, we have a no asshole rule and I've had other people take this recently, but I started this in the nineties. We have a no asshole rule. And I explained what that meant, which is I have to come to work too at 8AM on Monday morning. And I don't want to dread coming to the office because I have to be with someone who's going to cause a lot of problems. We're going to have enough problems just with business and cashflow and everything else that can go wrong. And people loved it. Soon as I said those words, they wanted to work for us and we just treated people great.

Robert Marks [00:12:51]:
And while, while the business could be stressful, we were handling people's critical telecommunications needs. Our clients could only do business. We were performing, we were providing their phone service, their internet service, and again, their data communications. Eventually we were doing their cloud servers even before AWS was. So we were really mission critical and they were losing money. That's a lot of stress. We had, we kept it light. We kept it fun, but we also had expectations that your job description is this and you do this.

Robert Marks [00:13:17]:
We gave our employees annual reviews. They got a cost of living increase and they got performance, whether it's bonus or pay increase or both. We always showed a career path. We were always very clear to them twice a year and both January and July, January, I would do a kickoff. Here's how the company's doing. And here's our vision for the year in July. Here's how we're doing the first six months. And here's what we have to do to keep it going.

Robert Marks [00:13:41]:
They love that stuff. Stuff. They needed to know that their company was doing well and can help them achieve their goals. If I had employees who weren't participating in our retirement benefits plan, I'd get in their face and say, what are you doing? You're going to leave here in twenty five years and have nothing to show for it. If you're living day to day or living paycheck to paycheck, you've gotta start maximizing that four zero one ks and taking advantage of these other benefits that we offer. And they loved that. I think we had two people in the history of fidelity voice and data that we had to terminate because they didn't fit that culture, which is absolutely incredible for the amount of full time equivalents that we had. People loved our culture and it all came from when I used to be an employee working for somebody else.

Robert Marks [00:14:20]:
And I go on forever. And I don't want to blow VA two. I hope that helped Hope that gave you a good answer. Cause I love this stuff. And when I teach college courses, I often talk about the corporate culture just in that same way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have, I have a few follow ups, but I I'm curious with what you could label a successful outcome for Fidelity Voice and Data if in retrospect you viewed entrepreneurship as a remedy to that kind of misery that was the motivator at the beginning. Because I what's interesting to me is one of the patterns I will I will say that have emerged from these kinds of conversations is how difficult and challenging and had founders known what they know about what it entailed to build the business back then. They may not have done it because of all the, you know, the mental tax and and burden that it actually takes. But at the same time, there's this compulsory some some people is just within, they don't have a choice. They have to build the thing. So I'd just be curious of your

Robert Marks [00:15:20]:
thoughts on that. Well, I hope I get this right, but laying it back to my leadership style. There's been a lot of studies on this, that when people aren't happy in their jobs or they're miserable, they don't want to be there. You're going to pay them for forty hours, eight to five, Monday through Friday. And the studies have showed people who are not happy. People who are not properly motivated aren't treated well. Maybe you haven't gotten a review. Thank you.

Robert Marks [00:15:41]:
Or a pat on the back in four or five, six, seven years. You're lucky to get 80% or four days of work for the five days you're paying them. I'm telling you with our staff, we were getting six, seven days of of of performance out of five days because they were so happy. In fact, at one point, and I don't know how this equates to other businesses or other industries. And again, I'm going back now a decade or more. But at one point, we were driving about a million dollars of revenue annually per employee. So, you know, that's crazy. And I couldn't sustain that.

Robert Marks [00:16:17]:
Probably at some point I got down to about $6.700000 of revenue per employee because I had to give them more staff, but I'm also managing the checkbook. And if I needed an employee on February 1, great. We absolutely need an employee. I'll hire them October 1. That'll save us a lot of cash flow and a lot of issues. So I was getting incredible performance from my people. So corporate culture was a huge part of our success. And of course we had very good producers who knew how to get revenue.

Robert Marks [00:16:42]:
Sales and operations. Naturally it's it's dog and cats. It's fist versus fist salespeople. A lot of times the staff see them as the problem. They misrepresented the sale. They over promised they didn't do the paperwork, right? They screwed up the engineering of of the design of anything else. And I made it very clear to our staff. We all have jobs because of the salespeople.

Robert Marks [00:17:05]:
I promise you I'll work with them. They'll cross the t's and dot the i's better. But at the end of the day, none of us have a job. And so we did have that dog and cat fist and fist sales versus operations. We put the salespeople on a pedestal. And and and by the way, I had a stroke there ego too. They loved that our annual meetings, but I was praising them. And then we had eventually higher retention people, which to be our salespeople, and we put them on a pedestal and those people were, could be tough and cause internal friction in the staff.

Robert Marks [00:17:32]:
And we addressed it. We dealt with it and we gave everybody the right perspective and we were so good at communicating. And the communication was such a big key to our corporate culture. I hope I got the gist of what you were looking for. And if I did, please hit me again.

Jeffrey Stern [00:17:45]:
No. No. All good. I guess the the way I would follow-up to it is from the take us through the final chapters, of Fidelity voice and data and and how you began to manage that process and then to, you know, plant the foundation for what you would then proceed to work on.

Robert Marks [00:18:03]:
I have a new startup called Projector, and the means to an end there are very different than what Fidelity Voice and Data was. Fidelity voice and data is a company I started at 33 years old. It was a company that, it was a means to an end for me to support myself, support my family, educate my kids, give us a great life, give us retirement, all those important things. So many business people, I think, and I know this for a fact, because I talked to them or I've seen this, their business becomes their baby. It becomes their identity. It's how they're known in the community at their country club. If they, if they're sitting at a Cavs game, oh, there's so and so from that company or whatever, or how that goes. Never was that for me.

Robert Marks [00:18:43]:
It wasn't ego. It wasn't my baby. I had no problem letting it go at any point. It was truly a means to an end to support my family. So when opportunities came to have an exit, I didn't look at industry valuations and EBITDA and what their multiples are. Hey, you're getting five and a half times EBITDA. That's the industry standard in this sector. I took out the calculator and I figured out if I sell it this and I have to pay taxes and I have other people I have to take care of, I had 11 primary employees of mine that I called the made people, going all mafia style.

Robert Marks [00:19:17]:
They're they, they just, you know, they were just made people that I was never gonna not take care of. I took care of them and, and, and I didn't owe them a penny and I gave them a lot. But at the end of the day, when it took an all that, and maybe we had some equipment leases and maybe we had some vendor payments, What was Robert Mark's gonna net? And if it netted that there's my exit and an opportunity came in 2015 around May to make that happen. And I never thought twice about, you know, letting go of my baby or how will my family survive after that? I knew I would be fine. One of the most important things to me was that my employees all kept their job. And that was something that the purchasing company had initially agreed to. And then there were a couple of questions and I fought for them. And then I actually had some very high end technical people, engineers.

Robert Marks [00:20:03]:
These are people who I actually had to give them work contracts. They would usually sign a three year contract. We renew it because they were being recruited by companies all over who probably could pay them more. They were just happy in Cleveland and they were very happy with us. And and then they didn't wanna honor some of those contracts. And I fought for them. And literally, it was gonna maybe I was threatening, but I was saying, we're not gonna close this $30,000,000 deal unless you take care of this person. And I'm very proud of that.

Robert Marks [00:20:27]:
So that's how that happened. And once everything worked out and things were to our satisfaction, it was a means to an end and it took really good care of my family and put us in a really good situation. My current startup is very different. I'm actually solving a problem that I have Fidelity voice and data was a clear problem in the marketplace in the nineties, small, medium sized businesses, let's say from 10 employees to 500 employees had no reliable, affordable way to connect to the internet. Literally you'd walk to a law firm in Downtown Cleveland that maybe had 30 lawyers and 40 associates, and they had 10 dial up phone lines to connect to the internet. They were all using hotmail dot com emails. Their website was being hosted off-site by some goofy company that they were paying $500 a month for that was an awful website. As you can imagine, the websites were in the nineties.

Robert Marks [00:21:19]:
It was no way for their own business, but for them to get a connection to the Internet that was reliable and fast with Liberty cost as much as their office rent at their high rise in Downtown Cleveland. And I solved that problem projector. I had a personal problem. You mentioned earlier about sharing movies and, and reflection videos and stuff. I was trying to solve a problem that I couldn't believe no one else had solved. So this is more of a passion project, much more than it is a, a mission to support my family and my children and retirement. What was that problem that

Jeffrey Stern [00:21:53]:
you experienced?

Robert Marks [00:21:54]:
So I don't know if I have any hobbies, but one thing that I am really good about is my collection of my home movies from the time my wife and I got married. That's the first video our honeymoon was recorded. Everything about the kids' lives and all the normal things, some birth and birthdays celebrations, vacations, sporting events, all that good stuff. I also inherited when my father passed away a big box of his stuff, his stuff was in a box, film slides, videotapes, CDs, thumb drives, even a hard drive. He had their full of stuff. And I took all his stuff. I took all my stuff. It took me years and I organized it.

Robert Marks [00:22:30]:
And now there's modern technology. The apps do a lot of it for you. The Apple photos, Google photos, Amazon photos do that stuff. So I had all this stuff. And my frustration was it had all been digitized. There was no more VHS tapes and DVDs just one as a DVD player. Wasn't it a thumb drive? I mean, we don't watch a ballgame. We don't watch the news or a TV show by taking a thumb drive and plugging it into our big screen TV above the fireplace and trying to figure out where that USB port is.

Robert Marks [00:22:57]:
But that's how people watch home movies or they Chromecast airplay. They run a 25 foot HTMI cable from their laptop to their, you would never watch a great TV show or a ball game if that's how you watch it. But that's how you have to watch home movies, or you have to take out your phone and go, oh, let's find that day that, you know, dad bought that red, white, and blue van in 1976, or let's go watch, they, our son was born because it's his birthday today and find that photo and put it on Facebook. That's not how you have to watch anything but home movies. There's one technology Jeffrey that every single person on the planet for the most part has mastered whether you're four years old or 104 years old. And that is the good old remote. It's the one technology. My wife is an amazing at she's so good at it.

Robert Marks [00:23:43]:
She'll never program the buttons on her car and she'll never understand most things technology, but she's so good with this. Why can't she take the remote in the same way she wants to watch bridgerton or game of Thrones or HGTV or CNN? Why can't she watch a slideshow of our kids or our kids being born or our honeymoon? I had 600 gigabytes of organized videos. They were on my computer. They were backed up on drives. I had 80 gigabytes in my apple photos app. And if I died at any point, who's going to my computer, let alone figuring out my passcode to my computer, my passcode to Google drive my passcode to Dropbox and getting this stuff. It's gone forever. I thought, wait a minute.

Robert Marks [00:24:30]:
We don't watch TV now through video streaming services, 125,000,000 households in America with a TV. And in over 80% stream something, whether it's Netflix, Disney, max live TV on YouTube TV, DirecTV stream, all these things over 40% of those households only stream. Now I cut the cord, you know, of cable in our house in 2016. So we stream everything. Why can't there be a streaming app that looks and feels and operates like any other video streaming service like Netflix, but the content is better than anything out there because it's my family. It's our memories. So that was the idea and the genesis of projector, a build your own video streaming service. Now that's not easy.

Robert Marks [00:25:17]:
Took Disney four years and spent $3,000,000,000 to launch Disney plus. Because of when I built with projector, any family, not just in America, but the 1,700,000,000 households on the planet that have a TV can now go to my website in about a minute, create an account by another two minutes, upload two or three videos, maybe their wedding, maybe a birth of the first kid and maybe one vacation and they can operate it. And it looks and feels just like Netflix or Disney. Plus they organize it. They can make fun categories. They can decorate it. And I'm telling you all the same features of Netflix, whether it's the pause and fifteen seconds, skip back and forth or play next or resume watching, You can put a two hour tape of your dad's old VHS tape in there. And if you watch forty five minutes of it and you leave it and you come back a month later, you can resume and watch it.

Robert Marks [00:26:11]:
So that's what we built. It's a video streaming service. This wasn't possible when, when TV came into your house over the air, wasn't possible to have your own cable channel or satellite channel, but the Netflix technology of video streaming services, they pioneered it. They were really the first in February. Launch it. Everyone has come on after that. They're all in these streaming wars. I'm not in the streaming wars.

Robert Marks [00:26:33]:
I'm just using their technology so that my wife who literally literally said to me, when she got to our honeymoon, she looked at it was April of nineteen ninety six. The first thing she says, cause she hadn't seen it in twenty eight years is you recorded our honeymoon. Didn't even remember now my kids have seen it and projectors got really cool advanced sharing. My mom in Florida has seen it and my siblings have seen it. And so many other people have seen it. So that's really the concept and we launched it and families all over the world are going crazy. I get testimonials every day. They're crying, they're laughing.

Robert Marks [00:27:11]:
They have new family traditions. Your, your family makes your fun videos. Now they're, they're transit. Their traditions are sitting around at Christmas time and watching these videos when it's someone's birthday, they watch these videos. Some of the people say, you know, who worked from home or, or, or homemakers So when they're home alone, sometimes they'll just put an old movie on or a slideshow, and just watch stuff on the big screen TV because they didn't know how to play a slideshow on their TV before projector makes it as easy as playing a Netflix movie. So I know I talked a lot about projector, but I was solving my problem that no one was ever going to see this stuff. And there was going to be no success. Now it's in the cloud, it's on the streaming app and these, these, these movies will never leave it.

Robert Marks [00:27:51]:
And, we were going to hit a thousand subscribers by the end of this month.

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:56]:
Well, w with that, how did you come to understand that this was a problem more pervasive than one that just you yourself, you know, was experiencing and that other folks might appreciate the product that, that you were building.

Robert Marks [00:28:11]:
First of all, it's personal experience and research. The personal experience was that I actually been trying to solve this problem for a very long time. If you ever went to a hotel for the first time in the nineties, and the first time you saw they had that cool interface with the remote, where you could do videos on demand and they have all these interactive things, I thought, wow, I had that at home. I could put my home movies on it. So me and a friend was, it was open source software that ran on a Linux server. And we built a server in my basement. We downloaded that software that hotels were using the early versions. And some hotels have gotten really good with that stuff.

Robert Marks [00:28:48]:
And we actually launched in my house and I ran about three or four HDMI cables, long cables from my basement to like the family room and one other room. And I created that in my house and it kind of worked good, but it was clunky and disruptive. And TVs back then just weren't as good as they are today where you can toggle easily between HDMI ports or source ports. So, I think that's and that may have even been coax back then, not even HDMI. It was so long ago. So then apple came out with iTunes and I thought, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go buy one of those Mac minis that the least expensive apple computer you could buy. Doesn't even come with a monitor keyboard or mouse.

Robert Marks [00:29:26]:
I'll put that in the basement. We all remember iTunes. I'll put all my home movies in an iTunes library and simultaneously apple came out with the apple TV and I could put an apple TV in every room and we could watch our home movies. And that actually worked for about five years. Of course, every time apple did a software update operating system or iTunes update and screwed it up. And I had to fix it. A lot of other problems erupted and of course, apple abandoned iTunes. Then I thought, okay, YouTube's coming around.

Robert Marks [00:29:53]:
When YouTube first came out, you could upload like a hundred megabyte file and only ten minutes. So that didn't help me at all. Well, YouTube started changing and expanding and I built a YouTube channel. And that was probably the worst thing because while I love YouTube and I'm on YouTube every day, I do watch podcasts on YouTube. If I want to figure out how to fix something, in the house, I'm going to YouTube or program thing. I'm going to YouTube or use software. I'm going to YouTube, but YouTube is not for your home movies. It's social media.

Robert Marks [00:30:22]:
It's liking it's commenting. It doesn't organize things well, the way Netflix does. Netflix came out on YouTube and didn't launch their own streaming platform. I don't think there'd be Netflix today. And it's the same problem. They copyright restrict. So if my kids are at Disney and there's music in the background, YouTube won't take it. If you don't pay me, whatever the monthly fee is.

Robert Marks [00:30:42]:
I know at one point it was sixteen months with YouTube. Now my kids are, gonna watch movies on YouTube and they're gonna get a Viagra commercial, not acceptable. So YouTube didn't work. I then tried Vimeo so I can go on forever with all the solutions, but it hit me at the beginning of the pandemic. Netflix. I want my own Netflix. And for me to have my own Netflix would have been about a million dollar purchase versus a Mac mini for $400 and I'm not gonna do it. And I have to support it, that software forever.

Robert Marks [00:31:10]:
So I thought, well, I can create it and make it a subscription based service where anybody for a few bucks a month can have this same service as me. And they can upload as much as they want. They could stream as much as they want. Again, we're not Netflix. Netflix wants to know if this household's paying for it. Six other households can't steal that account and use it. And they did a good job of clamping down and they should. Projector's different.

Robert Marks [00:31:34]:
We don't care if you have 50 households and 10 TVs in every household. Go nuts because this is not content that we paid for. This is content that's yours to enjoy. So that's the concept I've never built software before, and I've never been in a consumer product before. So direct to consumer or B2C a complete different animal way open B2B again, B2B. I can make it rain. When I started fidelity, I had a yellow legal pad and a pen, and I wrote down every business and every contact I had. And I called them and I started selling today with LinkedIn.

Robert Marks [00:32:10]:
I would have sold 10 times as much LinkedIn is the greatest thing ever. And I, and I would have been significantly more successful in LinkedIn really drove the last five years of voice and data success on the sales side. It was such a powerful tool. Going after a consumer pro is very difficult and we could probably do an hour podcast just on that. But that part I was naive too. But I also mentioned to you that not only personal experience, which I described to pretty great detail, but the research I started reaching out to the industry. The industry is huge. There's keepsake businesses.

Robert Marks [00:32:40]:
There's people who manage people's photo and video collection and do what I did myself for those families. I'm talking thousands of businesses across the globe. There's monster businesses that do legacy media video transfers. They convert your slide. They convert your photos. They convert your videotapes. I was in Amsterdam. I went to one of these places, and it was like being probably what Ford motor company looked like when they, when they invented the assemble line.

Robert Marks [00:33:05]:
You can't believe how much volume of business they do. And a lot of you may have heard out there companies that advertise like legacy box. They're out there who do monster volume of video tape transfers. The keepsake business is insane. We talk to people like, Shutterfly who do 3,000,000,000 a year in sales, but there's all printing and photo album books and that kind of stuff. So we thought we're a keepsake. All these businesses are saying, Hey, Robert, someone may spend $5,000 converting a hundred videotapes. But then the first question they ask is how do they watch it? And I have no answer for them.

Robert Marks [00:33:39]:
So we've signed those companies up. Not only from my research, those companies now sell and bring our product to market. So while we're we're really new, we we only launched a few months ago. We're already a thousand subscribers. It's because of those relationships through my research that turned out to be my Salesforce.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:56]:
Oh, that's fascinating. I I like the framing of it as a as a keepsake and kind of a

Robert Marks [00:34:01]:
We are we a cloud backup? Technically, yeah. But think of us like a photo album book. A lot of people have those nifty little photo frames. I got my mom one, but she never looked at it, and eventually, it died at her house. But my mom is really good with a TV remote and she streams everything. She has a Roku device projectors on just about every TV streaming device out there, including Roku. And she could watch this stuff. And I think she's watching the home movies now more than she's watching regular TV.

Robert Marks [00:34:30]:
But it's not just for older people. Our generation's watching it, young kids, they go crazy watching themselves. And some families tell me, you don't watch it every day. We may not watch it every month, but having it available to us, particularly when friends and family are over or the holidays is just a game changer. And we're not charging hundreds of dollars a year. We're charging pennies a day.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:51]:
Right. Yeah. You're it's you're in the legacy business. In the

Robert Marks [00:34:54]:
legacy business. Absolutely.

Jeffrey Stern [00:34:56]:
Yes. You know, relative to what you could call, you know, the the modest and and humble beginnings of of $600 to jump start fidelity voice and data. With projector, you've taken a different approach. You've raised outside of capital. You've raised over a million dollars thus far. You're you're closing on a larger round, coming up. What is the vision that you've painted for directionally where this business can go and at a scale that that you would like to to achieve?

Robert Marks [00:35:25]:
So I believe with what I described earlier that these keepsake businesses are selling for us and bringing them to their clients. It's very clear that I think we'll do about 10,000 subscribers now in 2025, just through that channel, which is a nice amount of business. But again, it's a small ticket item consumer product. We eventually have to go direct to consumer and we've played a lot with this. I've actually invested over a hundred thousand dollars into learning that SEO in driving traffic and the right target. And I could successfully do it. The issue is if Robert Marx found this product, he would have invested the three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty hours to upload 600 videos and, and organize it and made it really cool and installed on the TV. But the average consumer doesn't have that time or that desire, but boy, would they love to have it? So what didn't exist when I thought of the idea a few years ago is AI technology and videos and photos.

Robert Marks [00:36:25]:
It is unbelievable. The advancements just in the last twenty four months, and I don't have to recreate the wheels. Other companies I've dealt to San Francisco twice. Now I've met them. We found our partners. Other companies have figured out how someone can upload, whether it's grabbing sixty, fifteen second clips from your, your kids, soccer game or taking. If your children are a little older, if they're in their mid late twenties and you have a two hour videotape of them, it could take that. It could find it on your computer.

Robert Marks [00:36:55]:
It could analyze it. It could figure out the faces, the event, object recognition, and it will build your projector for you. So our vision with this current round is to implement the current AI that's already been created. So when you sign up with us, which takes all about twenty five seconds, you're going to push a magic AI button, and you're going to give us access to your hard drive, your cloud drives, your social media. We'll find all your media and we'll build it for you. And boom, you go to your smart TV. You launch the projector app. You sign on like you did with Netflix or any other one, one time, and it's done for you.

Robert Marks [00:37:33]:
So that's what we're doing now. We're raising money to build that AI. Once that AI is built, which we think will take somewhere between nine months to build after we raise the money and about three months of testing, then we launch our direct to consumer. My goal there is 10,000 subscribers a month over time. So we're trying to build something pretty big here. You know, we have a lot of families out there, a 50,000,000 plus households we wanna attack.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:55]:
What what are you most excited about looking forward? You mentioned already in some of the the personal anecdotes, the stories, the feedback. What I would imagine that is pretty special customer feedback, you know, relative to a lot of businesses that you could be in. So I'm just curious what that what that's been like.

Robert Marks [00:38:10]:
No no one got excited that I put in an IP hosted phone system into their offices. I mean, maybe they did. They didn't share that. Okay? That's not something you get really excited about. But the feedback I get and you said it, it it's unbelievable. I mean, I get it from Estonia. I get it from Germany. I get it from Poland.

Robert Marks [00:38:26]:
I get it from Israel. I get it from South Africa. I get it all over Canada and The United States. It's so cool. So that is really exciting that this thing actually exists. We we've created a mobile app for projector because so many people have their content in their phone and we did an Android and iPhone and iOS. And the first time I saw my logo on the phone, I'm like, I did an app. And then I have my app on an apple TV and an Amazon Fire Stick and a Samsung TV and a Sony TV and a Roku and a Google TV.

Robert Marks [00:38:57]:
That is a little exciting. Now the testimonials are incredible. And obviously the fact that we signed up two fifty people in November, looks like we may hit that or higher in December. We're already working on our sales promotions. We've signed up over 120 of those keepsake businesses to sell. I think we'll have about 300 maybe by the end of the year who are selling us. These are camera stores in Salt Lake City. These are 10 person offices that manage photos for people.

Robert Marks [00:39:24]:
In New Jersey, these are large operations in Columbus, Ohio that literally touch a hundred customers a month doing old media transfers. It's just excited to see all this happening. What I maybe don't enjoy as much as that financial racing part, because at fidelity data, I remember I decided I was going to expand down to Akron and I was working with my brother. Who's a great salesperson. And we figured out we need eight customers to be able to break even to extend our data network, to provide a dedicated internet access to the Akron market. And with all our costs that we had with hardware and circuitry and me and my brother started co calling and going down there, and we got those eight customers, but we got them after we committed to Akron. So we had about fifty days before the network went live and we started getting costs to make that happen. And that's how we funded Akron.

Robert Marks [00:40:15]:
And then we funded all of the. Io, and we became huge in Columbus. We even became big in Chicago. That was really cool. Now it's I gotta explain to people why this product is great, and and and it's so risky. Tech is so risky, and who knows what's gonna happen. Can we make it perform right? Can we get people to sign on? Can we have good margin? There's so many ifs or buts every time I meet with a venture capital firm, because I'll meet with anybody and I've probably sat down with 25 of them. They always will say to me, well, what's gonna stop big tech from doing this.

Robert Marks [00:40:46]:
If you, if you succeed. Sure. Yeah. That's not what an entrepreneur thinks. So there'd be no more innovation in the planet. I'll work with them. And if they don't do it themselves, I'll sell it to their competitor. Or maybe I'll just go out of business who knows, but you can't explain to tell me that I should pursue this great idea that so many millions of people I believe want.

Robert Marks [00:41:05]:
I'm already seeing it start on a very small scale all over the world because maybe Netflix or Google will want to do it one day. You know, I thought of this idea almost four years ago. We've been trying at it and started building the network almost three years ago. Where would we be if I didn't do it? No one would be talking about this idea, build your own video streaming service. No one would have it, and it would be no close to be worth three, four years ago. So I just don't buy that argument. Now, if they want to not believe in the idea, if they don't want to believe in us, I get it. But entrepreneurial speaking, if this thing goes up in flames and I lose a lot of good friends and family's money, I'll be sick to my stomach, but we're too relentless to let that happen.

Robert Marks [00:41:41]:
Whether it was when we launched Akron Twenty Five Years ago or whether it was, making this happen, and and the world's so incredible. Because when I started Fidelity Voice and Data, I needed an office. I had to build cubicles. I had a and between computer systems and exchange server, a phone system, phone lines. I mean, you're talking a 6 figure investment. I already owned my laptop. I already owned my iPhone. I already was paying my, my, my Verizon phone service.

Robert Marks [00:42:07]:
It's a crazy world. I now have several other cofounders. One's in Tacoma, one's in Cleveland, one's in Chicago. About to bring down another one who's in Palo Alto. He's just with a company. I can't talk about him right now because, you know, he's he's in marketing with another company in Palo Alto that's really crushed it. And he's gonna be our our CMO all because of LinkedIn and all because of the online world and Zoom and everything else. It's a much better time.

Robert Marks [00:42:31]:
Never been a better time to start a company. I hope that people who are listening to this for entrepreneurial reasons understand that it has never been a better time to start a company.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:40]:
It is quite exciting how far the bar has fallen that, you know, that used to prevent people from even getting started. I think it unlocks quite a lot for those who might be inclined to want to build something. It's they're just like you said, hasn't hasn't really been a better time ever.

Robert Marks [00:42:56]:
It's it's unbelievable. It's truly unbelievable. I and I and I compare it to what we went through thirty years ago.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:02]:
You've drawn this kind of parallel comparison a few times between the experience of building Fidelity and the experience now of building projector. And I think a lot about the differences. I'm curious. What about the first experience in retrospect is something you've carried with you into projector that you have found to be very useful, very valuable or important?

Robert Marks [00:43:22]:
Leadership. I, I, I try to be humble. I was not a leader growing up. I probably didn't show any signs of being an actual leader to maybe college and it wasn't by choice. It just kind of happened. And then eventually I, through being a part of both corporate America, but also in my community, I'm very involved. I get involved in a lot of organizations, a lot of committees, a lot of things. It's just leadership, leadership, and being relentless will get you through.

Robert Marks [00:43:45]:
And you could sprinkle on a little bit of how you treat people and maybe can you get up and excite people in a story? I went to San Francisco to demo this product in October of twenty twenty three. My partner who's the engineering person who builds the software is in Chicago. I'm in Cleveland. I fly to San Francisco, Jeffrey. I'm in front of the senior engineer for Google photos. I'm in front of executives from Adobe executives from Fuji film who do $9,000,000,000 a year in this industry. I'm in front of two fifty tech industry people from the photo and video business at Fort Mason in San Francisco. And they give me four minutes to present this company.

Robert Marks [00:44:24]:
So everyone who's presenting their companies, everyone got four minutes. I think they bring in 30 and they, they have a contest and they vote. So it's a whole other conference, but they have these new startups to show everything. And everyone is doing one of two things, bringing a laptop and doing a presentation on these two big screens on either side or plugging their mobile phone, usually an iPhone and showing their cool app. I decide I'm going to bring a Roku TV streaming device because what I'm doing is so different than what they're trying to do, which is maybe AI enhancement of photos or, or they find an easier way to make a photo album book or something or or or or or other types of stuff, mostly AI stuff. And I go out there. Well, two days before I'm ready to speak in front of two fifty executives from Palo Alto and from Silicon Valley, I don't even have a working Roku app yet. I actually brought our apple TV device to thinking maybe I'll do that, but that really wasn't ready.

Robert Marks [00:45:19]:
And two nights before I'm going to go on is when we got the Roku working. So then I have to go in front of these people and I sit down with the audio video guys at this huge conference Hall. And I say, I got to plug this Roku in. I need internet access to it. And I need to somehow get this out to your big screens. They're looking at me like, dude, that's not what we do. You plug your laptop in a USB C port. That's it.

Robert Marks [00:45:41]:
We figured that out. Then we realized the Wi Fi wasn't gonna work well for a video streaming service, not just the projector wouldn't stream Netflix or Max wouldn't stream. So we figured that out by taking my iPhone, make it into a hotspot, finding a window nearby, and that's how we did it. And I got up there and I presented, I told a story. You asked about the differences. I've spoken in front of 2,200 people. I've I've, I've been an officiant in multiple weddings. It's just experience of talking to people.

Robert Marks [00:46:08]:
And once I got up there and I wasn't even a % sure the Roku was gonna work. For all I knew, I was gonna launch the projector app and it was gonna be a blue or black screen, but I went with it. I was ready to talk if it if it did fail. And I got up there and I got a standing ovation and it was amazing. They were blown away because everyone in that room wanted that product and they thought it was cool. The other thing that was cool is I'm 58 now. So I was 57 then. Everyone else was up there was a gen Z or young millennial.

Robert Marks [00:46:35]:
And why is this old guy up there? And I cave it with a lot of life and it's just life experiences. And that's where that leadership and everything comes from. I hope that wasn't too much words to tell you that, but I think that's making sense. And it's also fiscal management. Right now I ran into someone who raised $57,000,000 in San Francisco with a venture capital firm. They've got private jets. They are, they're taking everybody in the company. Hope they don't realize I'm saying this to, Costa Rica right now.

Robert Marks [00:47:04]:
They're all there right now. They're out of their minds. I won't let someone run a McDonald's French fry as an expense reimbursement in our our books. None of my partners have ever gotten a penny. We're all sweat equity in. That's how we had to live at Fidelity for a long time. You know, I didn't take a paycheck for the first two years and lived on what little savings I had and was really creative in lowering my monthly nut almost in half. And my wife and I just didn't go anywhere, do anything for those two years, but that's not how some people live.

Robert Marks [00:47:32]:
That's how I'm running projector. So I raised $1,200,000 to build projector and all these platforms. I'm telling you what big tech did it. They would have dropped 50 to a hundred mil. Even if someone else was starting this, they would look at this as a 5 to $10,000,000 3 year project. I did it for 1.2, and now I'm looking to raise another 2,000,000 to incorporate AI that they probably would have raised another 50, hundred million for. So I think I bring that kind of relentlessness, the leadership, and maybe some, you know, duct tape and scissors and creativity to make the dollar go a long way.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:04]:
What does success mean

Robert Marks [00:48:06]:
to you? Well, for personal life, I'm very proud that I've been able to support my family, that we have no debt, that we educated our kids, no debt. And my wife don't have to, and I don't have to worry about retirement. That's that's huge success. We're very happy. We've both given back a lot to the community. I feel really good about that. We didn't just come on this planet, consume and leave. I believe we've absolutely made other people's lives better.

Robert Marks [00:48:34]:
We didn't just help one person. We helped two or more, not going to go beyond how many more. And what that means to me is I did my part because I went above and beyond what should have been expected of somebody don't just come and take the benefits of what other people did, but make other people's lives better. There are other people who are benefiting from things that I have done, whether it's volunteer work, whether it's vision for change in a community or whether it's large cash donations. Now there's people that are benefiting today that will never know I existed and who cares. So I feel really good about that. That is success on the projector side. It's making this a sustainable thing that families can enjoy forever.

Robert Marks [00:49:10]:
So whether it has a huge cash out or it just survives and my investors and my partners are taken care of, and I never make a penny. I could say that with honesty, because it won't change my life pretty much at all. If I get a huge cash out, what else do I need? You know, so this will be about making this business sustainable, taking care of the partners, taking care of the investors. They definitely come first

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:32]:
for me. You mentioned the educational part of the work that you do, that you'll teach courses from time to time. I'm curious, you know, if you could give us the spark notes of professor marks. What, what is it that you are espousing as it relates to entrepreneurship?

Robert Marks [00:49:48]:
It's everything I wish I knew when I graduated from college in 1988. That's what I teach them. When they brought me in, I wanted to be I thought it'd be cool to be an adjunct professor. I'm sure my college and high school teachers would be like that guy's teaching children. That's not cool. I've never paid a debt. Didn't do any homework, but I've grown up teachers. I promise you and professors.

Robert Marks [00:50:04]:
So there's a lot of things I wish I knew when I worked at Ashland for a couple of years and John Carroll for a couple of years. And they usually would say, okay, great. You could teach this course or this course or this course. Here's the syllabus. Here's the text materials. Here's everything, you know, here's what you'll teach. Here's your exams, everything. And I would always look at them and say, that's wonderful, but then you don't need me.

Robert Marks [00:50:23]:
And I don't want to be mean here, but you hire a monkey to teach your material. I want to write the syllabus. I want to use provide the text materials, which is I self write everything. I create the text. I create the assignments workshops. I do a lot of presenting. I make these kids get in front of people and talk, and I don't just do it with the classroom. I invite people into the room all the time, particularly during big presentations, because that's a superpower.

Robert Marks [00:50:44]:
That is not a gift. Particularly during big presentations because that's a superpower. That is not a gift that I had many years ago. But now I can talk in front of a group. And even if I make myself nervous leading up to that, soon as it starts, I'm not nervous because I've done it a million times. One class I taught was entrepreneurship and family business. So many I I have a lot of history working with family businesses. Second generation, fine.

Robert Marks [00:51:06]:
Third generation, really ugly. Usually never gets past that. It even gets past the second generation. You have the mom and dad who have a business. They have three children. When all three children enter that business, now that business has to support four families. And those three children went over the same lifestyle as dad, but dad doesn't want to just give up his power. He doesn't want to give up his income.

Robert Marks [00:51:25]:
So you have to grow. How does succession work? Are you going to come out of college and work for your parents? And now you're 55 years old and your dad's 80 years old and you still have to answer the daddy at 55 years old. Is that what you want? And so, Ashton did a great job of assigning kids who were going into the family business into my class. Sometimes I can have 15 kids. Sometimes I can only have five kids, but they were all going into the family business. And the consistent thing is at some point they'd and they'd call me professor marks and I'd say, they say, professor marks, my dad hates you. Cause you're bringing up issues that we're thinking about now. One of the siblings is going to be in charge.

Robert Marks [00:52:02]:
Can't be all three. There has to be a definitive someone's going to be the CEO, the heir apparent. How is equity going to pass on? How is succession going to work in a million things like that? Another class that I did was field experience, really teaching about the ins and outs. So whether it's dealing with employee issues, whether it's dealing with financial issues, a lot of my kids, I kid you not were accounting majors. I would do a whole week on being able to read a profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, a cashflow statement. I taught it like they were five years old and they would all say the same thing. Okay. I'm an accounting major is the first time I understand what you're talking about.

Robert Marks [00:52:37]:
Thank you for that. And the importance of understanding product margin and gross margin and all these things. So, so many factors like that. Now we deal with in in this whole social justice world, how are you gonna deal with if you own a health club and the rule was you had to wear a college shirt and tuck it in and you know, cell phone usage. Well, now people can't survive in business without being on their cell phone. Young people don't buy into the rules of the older generations. The older generations frown on that or a million other rules and stuff like that. There's so many cultural issues.

Robert Marks [00:53:09]:
We dive into that. So I created a, there was 15 issues in my module, all that from financial to interviewing. We actually do a whole week on interviewing and I give them a little trick and I promise them if they follow my trick, they'll get hired. And I think most of the time you have success on that. So it's everything I wish I knew because when I came out of college, I was beyond clueless. So why should they come out clueless at 22 year olds? Maybe my information isn't valuable, but I think they found it valuable.

Jeffrey Stern [00:53:37]:
I feel like I would I would be remiss if I didn't ask knowing that projector came from a place of wanting to solve your own problem, how you feel your your problem has been addressed in the work that you've created and your own favorite memories to relive through the platform that that you have built.

Robert Marks [00:53:55]:
Well, there's no doubt for my family and we were the first customer. It's worked with work. My mom now has a projector account. That's incredible because I took all my old dad's stuff and made that really for her. And then what's cool for all you out there who are listening, if you're interested, you know, when you log onto a Vita streaming app, the first screen you get is okay. Do you want to watch dad's profile? Mom's profile office profile. Projector screen looks like that as well. The issue is it's not the profile, but whose videos.

Robert Marks [00:54:25]:
So when my mom logs on, she sees my picture. She sees her picture and she sees my brother's picture. And I see about six or people, other people's projector. So if I switch from my projector to my mom's projector, imagine your Netflix screen, just every category changes, every video changes to that person's. That's been wildly successful. We brought these memories to bear. So for my family, it's been successful, but there's a long way to go. Software development never ends.

Robert Marks [00:54:53]:
I want it to be so much better. And by the way, you know, some people say you built a great MVP, a minimal viable product. I think it's way beyond that, but I think we're maybe at 20%. I think it could be so much better. And of course, while I'm getting personal satisfaction and then we have, almost a thousand families across the world who are getting satisfaction, it won't be successful till we probably hit about a hundred thousand. That's really the number where I don't have to worry about this being a sustainable entity. And I also believe as a strong acquisition target out there, I think that once we have this AI built, because of all the other big players are watching us now. I've talked to some pretty impressive people in the C suite of some multi billion dollar businesses that are in some way, shape or form in streaming and or keepsake.

Robert Marks [00:55:36]:
And I think once that AI is done, someone's going to swoop us up. And all I care about is they they hopefully, they don't ruin the product and they keep it sustainable. But they're they definitely have a better chance, I think, of keeping it sustainable than Robert Marks from his basement in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:50]:
Well, with that, we'll, work to to bookend it here. You mentioned Chagrin Falls, and so kinda have to talk about the the Cleveland element of of your story. And as it relates to our our closing question, which is for a hidden gem in in Cleveland, what is the role of Cleveland in in all of this to you?

Robert Marks [00:56:09]:
Well, I mean, Cleveland has always been home. I was born here. My father was born here. My mom wasn't, but she moved at three years old. My grandparents eventually all lived here as well. My five brothers, so six children, five of us raised our families in Cleveland. I'm friends with people I was friends with, you know, in preschool and kindergarten until this day, because that's just how the community is. I love Cleveland sports.

Robert Marks [00:56:29]:
I love Cleveland traffic. I love Cleveland housing prices. I love it's home. And you you're, you're part of the environment you grew up in, whether it's your, your community, your parents, religion, whatever it is. I've always liked it here. I went away to college in Florida thinking I wanted to get away and warm weather. And what I realized is, oh, Cleveland's pretty darn good. So it's been great in that side.

Robert Marks [00:56:48]:
Cleveland has been extremely helpful in projector. I have a lot of people. Most of the money we raised came out of Cleveland for that first round. And now it's starting to change because there's people in San Francisco and New York and Boston who found out about us and they also want to partake. So Cleveland helps seed projector, for fidelity voice and data. It was all Cleveland. It was, it was everything. Primarily the customer base.

Robert Marks [00:57:08]:
They had over 3,000 businesses between, five and ten employees to 500 employees. They were all Cleveland based or eventually Akron, Columbus, Chicago, but it was all started in Cleveland. We love Cleveland. We're we're hoping some of our kids, we have four children end up here. So we stay in Cleveland because once grandchildren start happening, I'm sure my wife will want to be with the grandkids way more than she will for her love of Cleveland. But I've got involved in the ecosystem in Cleveland from many great organizations like jumpstart and other ones. And, and, and of course you guys with the Ohio fund and there's other organizations that have been helpful and taken us very seriously. We are a jumpstart company.

Robert Marks [00:57:43]:
We just got awarded into their trailblazer program. So that'll be great. And they'll start helping prepare us for those next funding rounds and also the go to market strategy. And that's all based out of Cleveland. So Cleveland's great. It's home.

Jeffrey Stern [00:57:55]:
It's home. Yeah. What would you say your hidden gems of Cleveland are?

Robert Marks [00:58:00]:
Well, I think people don't realize, people are good. The food scene is good. No traffic is good. And I know where where where it snows and it's cold. Okay. So get on a plane and go somewhere. We still have an airport and you may have to take two flights instead of one, but you can get places, but Cleveland is great. I'm really hoping that we start figuring out this waterfront situation and start taking advantage of it.

Robert Marks [00:58:22]:
If you go to Chicago or not, even go to Milwaukee, they know how to use their park systems and their lakefront systems and, and make it desirable. Edgewater is beautiful now compared to what it was thirty years ago. It's great to see all these neighborhoods being developed, whether it's downtown living at Tremont, Ohio City and Hinge Town and all downtown living in Tremont, Ohio City and Hinge Town and all that stuff. Lakewood has exploded. When I graduated from college, no one lived downtown and no one who was born on the East Side, went to the West Side, unless you went to the airport. Because by then 40 was open. Now people start downtown and then they eventually move over to, Ohio City, Tremont. And eventually they ended

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:55]:
up in

Robert Marks [00:58:55]:
the house of Lakewood. And it's so cool. So that's wonderful. You're seeing more and more entrepreneurship and you're seeing more and more tech come out of Cleveland. And it's wonderful to see. It's just a, it's just a great place. I don't know why you'd want to be anywhere else. I'd say get the experiences anywhere else.

Robert Marks [00:59:10]:
But now I have older friends whose kids are now in their thirties. Mine, they're in their mid to low twenties. They're having that first baby and guess what? They're coming back to Cleveland. Cause they've done the Atlanta thing, the San Francisco thing, the LA and the New York thing and the Chicago thing. And now it's time to come home because Cleveland is probably just the best place to raise a family there is. Hard to beat it on so many levels, including education. You're you're quite the

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:34]:
Cleveland advocate. I love it.

Robert Marks [00:59:36]:
Well, it's just I don't talk get every day, but you asked.

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:38]:
No. I know. I love it, though. It's it's just a re resounding, overwhelming positive feel for for this place.

Robert Marks [00:59:45]:
Well, I hope a chapter becomes a Cleveland success story one day too. That that'd be cool. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Robert, I just wanna thank

Jeffrey Stern [00:59:52]:
you for taking the time coming on the podcast, sharing a bit about your story and the work that you're doing and excited to, play around with projector myself.

Robert Marks [01:00:01]:
Awesome. If anyone wants to try projector, they can reach me @robertprojectorstream.com. And if you're a clevelander, I'll give you your first year free to play with it. You'll love it.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:10]:
Perfect. Well, thank you again. Awesome. Thank you, Jeffrey. 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 pod lay of the land or at sternfa, j e f e.

Jeffrey Stern [01:00:33]:
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. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with The Up Company, LLC. At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Jeffrey Stern [01:01:21]:
Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.