[In Honor Of] Bob Sopko

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Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:00:00]:
These folks are already giving back, and anytime you give them a call saying, hey. Could you talk to this student or this alum? They need a little bit of guidance. So we're starting to build that ecosystem of self support and start that flywheel running. And so as you do that, you start getting additional people to support.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:20]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the LaValle and podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am Jeffrey Stern, your resident car tographer here, and today our mapping exercise exercise has landed us at Case Western Reserve University where we will be speaking with Bob Sopko. So Bob is a true wealth of information about Cleveland startup scene and is a genuine champion of it as well. We'll cover the the full breadth of his background in our conversation, but I'll call out that his experience may make him one of the best guides to have on to understand the full range and depth of entrepreneurial activity happening around Cleveland. Bob is an entrepreneur in residence at Youngstown Business Incubator and is the head of Case Western's LaunchNet, which is a joint project between the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, Blackstone, and Case Western to train the next generation of entrepreneurs who have since gone on to build a range of companies here in Cleveland raising 1,000,000 of dollars in the process.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:25]:
I learned a great deal from Bob in our conversation and I hope you all enjoy it. So when I moved to Cleveland and started attending startup oriented activities around the city, I'm pretty sure that I saw you at every single event. And so of all the people that I've been able to talk to on the show so far, my sense is that you may be the best person to kinda survey the Cleveland startup space, which is why I've I'm excited to have those conversations. So thank you for coming on.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:02:00]:
That's that's great. And, yeah, I get out a lot. My kids are older. When I was, like, in my twenties, I was home a lot or working, but, but now that's kinda kinda my thing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:16]:
So before we just dive into, you know, what what is actually going on in the space and and the work that you're doing, I'd love if you could share a bit more about your own professional background leading up to all the work that you're doing as director of LaunchNET at Case Western and really what got you interested in the entrepreneurial space in the first place?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:02:35]:
Sure. Sure. I mean, I'll go way back in terms of, as a young person, I was, you know, cutting grass and also went around to the neighborhood. Back in the day, you could like collect newspapers and load them in a truck and then get money for recycling them. And I took one of my, my customer's garage. It was an older gentleman who didn't have a car. And I said, hey, can I use your garage to load these newspapers? Because my garage is full. And my dad and I didn't have a chance to drag them out yet.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:03:04]:
And then his son found out, and his son was really not happy. And he said, you know, this could be a fire here. I said, well, we're cautious here. My dad's a fireman. Not that not that it matters. But anyways, I did that back in the day and kinda got in trouble and but I did ask permission. So that was the start of it. And then my professional career, I started working in a drugstore to pay for part of college, And I worked through my college years in the drugstore part time and then going to school part time and then full time.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:03:34]:
And then, when it came time for me to graduate, I asked one of the VPs who came in to visit if, they were interviewing in the office for anything. He said no. 10 minutes later, he came back and said, you know what? Why don't you come up and interview? And then I was there, that drugstore chain for a total of 18 and a half years through a leveraged buyout, a bankruptcy, and then an IPO. So like we did the alphabet soup of financial craziness. Not something I would choose to do, but boy, even though we were a large multi $1,000,000,000 company, we really, really, really had to act small and aggressive. And then from there, I went to a Bain Capital funded startup. I wanted to work on something called the internet back in the day. I had a nice

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:17]:
I have heard of it.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:04:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I had a nice severance package. We did a public offering. I had stock options, so I had a little bit of time. I didn't have the f u money, but I had enough to take a little bit of time, and they were paying me for multiple months after that, as part of the separation. And so we built a bunch of, high-tech career fairs, Some in Silicon Valley, which was really cool. Seattle, Texas, and we had our S1 document ready to go public when people were just absolutely stupid during the dotcom.bomb era.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:04:54]:
And we actually had, I think, 14 acquisitions ready to go with the proceeds from the public offering. And then the dot bomb hit and everything kind of went down. So we ended up selling to the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. Then I went over to Overdrive for a short period of time. My buddy who was running finance at the previous company was over there helping with finance. And, I was doing some sales with them. Steve Potash, Lori, the group, just wonderful, wonderful people. But they they were having their struggles.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:05:26]:
And, I also had a situation where my oldest was ready to go to college, and I found out that Case was hiring. And, one of the benefits is free tuition. And it's like, well, that's a pretty good benefit. And so, I ended up getting a job there working in IT for a very, very, very, innovative guy named Lev Gonick. He also did one community in town here and he's now the CIO over at Arizona State University and a friend. So, it was really fun working with him, Get there and I was doing something called strategic technology partnerships. While I was working with a lot of the technical folks, I was also putting some disciplines in and some other elements for bringing strategic partnerships into the university. And one of them that we did, we were one of the first 10 that used Google as our back end for Gmail and also for, the Google Suite.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:06:23]:
And actually, Paul Bujheit is a case grad, number 23 at Google. He helped coin the phrase, don't be evil, and he is the person who wrote Gmail. So, that was really cool. And from there, we continued doing that and I was helping a couple students with their business ideas along the way. A couple of those were, Alex, Ari, and Oleg that ended up doing something called Onasis, which is online pizza ordering, and they ended up having a nice exit a few years after a friend of mine, Lee Zappas, actually reached out to me when I left the startup, the Bain Capital Funded startup, and, I got to know him. And anyways, when these guys were looking for funding, reached out to Lee and Lee put in a half a $1,000,000 and they grew the business and, had a nice exit to LivingSocial. From there, I, again, wanted to go and and do some other things and Chase had this opportunity and did that strategic technology partnerships. So what we did, along the way is, my friend who kind of had a sidestep there before I went over the case is a friend of mine, who who Ray, who was at 1jobs.com with me.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:07:34]:
He had an idea for a new TLD, top level domain, like dotcom, like dotedus called dotjobs. From my my time at the drugstore chain, I ended up engaging with Tom Embresha. He runs something called 2nd generation. I went with because I had known him. Ray was looking for some financing and we went into Tom and he very, very quickly understood that this was a licensing opportunity. He didn't understand ICANN and those structures, so we put it under the auspices of the FCC, because he knew the radio space and you had to be licensed to have a radio stations. And we said that, well, this is the ICANN is like the FCC, and they basically license you the top level domain and then you become like the FCC and then you decide who can buy it. And so he very, very quickly, we met with him on a Thursday or Friday, and by Monday, he talked to his family and said, you know, he's in.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:08:27]:
And then Ray went and worked with them leaving Overdrive and I helped out over the years and still kind of helped them out today. And it's an international top level domain and since then, they've now worked on dot realtor with the National Association of Realtors and dot real estate. So that's all born in Cleveland. So that's a really cool thing to have here. Getting back to CASE, so I was at CASE in IT. There was a gentleman from Jumpstart who said that, you know, would I help out beyond working at Case in the IT community at Jumpstart and Youngstown Business Incubator? And I said, well, let me just kinda, you know, check back at Case, make sure this is cool with them. Quickly, they said, yeah, this would this would be, you know, a nice way to help the community and and help our students also to by to getting them integrated into the community, internships, that type of activity. So I've been doing that for about 8 years now.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:09:21]:
And in the meantime, Blackstone out in New York had decided to start funding entrepreneur activities at universities, we had answered an RFP along with Kent State, Lorain County Community College, and Baldwin Wallace. And so we have something called LaunchNet, and we continue to run those, and and I basically applied for the position and and ran it. And since then, we've just added, John Carroll about a year ago. So that brings us up kinda to today, and what else can I answer for you now?

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:52]:
Yeah. So you you have not you have not been busy at all over the past few years. No. Thank you for for sharing all of that. That's incredibly interesting. I'd love to kinda talk a bit more about LaunchNET, you know, at at the onset from Blackstone's funding of it, you know, funding of entrepreneurial activity, what does that actually mean? Like, what what are some of the projects, goals, initiatives that are that are happening at LaunchNET?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:10:19]:
During the time Blackstone funded us, we were also funded by Case Western and also substantially funded by the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, which does a lot for the ecosystem in this area. And so within Blackstone, they were definitely looking for, you know, how much financing did you raise? How many jobs did you create? And they were looking at those type of metrics, which is fine. The Burton d Morgan Foundation was interested in that somewhat, but they were more interested in how are you impacting individual students or alum to have a entrepreneurial mindset. You know, if they try something and it doesn't work out, what on the other side of that have they learned? You know, can they go and work with another organization to help them out? Or can they go work for Goodyear, maybe in their innovation sector to help move them along? Because you have to be innovative. And what we're living through today is, if you're not innovative, you're gone. It's over. So that's what we did and over time, Blackstone from the beginning said they're gonna reduce their funding, which was fine, and they've reduced it to a point where we're saying, you know what, for that amount of money, and we feel collectively with all these, other universities, we can do this on our own and and each of the universities put in a little bit more money and and, the Burton d Morgan picked up the rest of the money that Blackstone was funding and said, you know, let's let's be independent of this because there's a little bit of overhead there that we don't need to deal with, and we could be more agile of working together, you know, on our own.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:11:54]:
So that kind of brought us up to, you know, what we're doing today.

Jeffrey Stern [00:11:58]:
Right. And so you you had mentioned just kind of in your own professional past working with students on their own startup endeavors and initiatives Through LaunchNET, though, you know, what are the kind of outcomes that you've experienced in that 20 years from now that you hope you can see and and the kind of impact that that LaunchNet can have?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:12:21]:
Even before LaunchNet, I was very, very fortunate as part of Jumpstart. It was kinda like the training wheels to do what LaunchNet was doing. I was fortunate. I met Gordon Daley, Case Grad, when he was still at Rockwell, And him and others were working on a technology to stream video. That became BoxCast. And from there, you know, helping him align with that, I had some friends, Toby and Melanie Maloney, who helped some students from Duke back in the day do something called Mental Floss Magazine, and they had an exit and they were looking for other things to do. And I highly suggested that they talk to Gordon from a standpoint of just both sets are good people, and Gordon has got some good ideas going forward. And, you know, just recently, Gordon, he had raised substantial 1,000,000 of dollars before and he just raised an additional 20,000,000.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:13:15]:
And also the markets he serves, churches and also, NCAA, when you could do NCAA sports, it's very important. He's got a very simple and elegant solution that he worked very, very hard at along with his team to make simple and elegant. And he also had, you know, help from VFA, Venture For America Group. You know, before even 20 years, I think that was an absolutely stunning outcome. And one great thing about Gordon, along with other ones like John Niffick, who did something called Citizen Groove, which became Decision Desk and now he's working on something called, Weiser. These folks are already giving back, and anytime you give them a call saying, hey, could you talk to this student or this alum? They need a little bit of guidance. So we're starting to build that ecosystem of self support and start that flywheel running. And so as you do that, you start getting additional people to support.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:14:12]:
When the first, student I worked with every key that did a Kickstarter, we didn't know what the heck we were doing. Then, you know, since then, we have had other people who did Kickstarters. And who did they talk to? Chris from Everykey. So again, starting to, you know, basically replicate the knowledge base outside of just myself and other entities at Case or other entities at Jumpstart and Youngstown Business Incubator so that it becomes part of the DNA, you know, across, you know, Northeast Ohio, across Ohio. So that's kind of part of, you know, what we'd like to see 20 years from now, but, you know, we're already getting some, you know, good gains, you know, from that.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:51]:
Yeah. No. I think that's really interesting. The the whole idea of the flywheel and the support system that's kind of baked into that. I'd be really interested in your perspective on more and more at a macro level speaking to kind of the flywheel idea. In your mind, what is the role of a university in a city startup ecosystem? And And I have a few other questions we can dive into after that, but I think we can just start there.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:15:15]:
Absolutely. So it depends on the university and their appetite to be involved in the ecosystem for entrepreneurship. Some of them, because of just their charter and, you know, let's say, you know, Cleveland Institute of Art, a little bit of that. Cleveland Institute of Music, not a lot. They're training, you know, professional musicians. And other liberal arts schools, you know, maybe not as strong. But CASE has made a a determination that, you know, we want to be a provider of resources for not just our students and our alumni, but the overall ecosystem. So one of the biggest things I can do is provide talent.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:15:56]:
Talent for students to have the opportunity to experiment and try and, I guess you could call it fail, but let's call it learn at a young age when the stakes maybe aren't as high because they don't have a mortgage to pay, they don't have kids to support, and they can, you know, maybe make some mistakes early on. The other thing is, you know, providing internships for possibly startups or other nimble companies out there. During COVID, we were super fortunate. My colleague, Michael Goldberg, who runs the the Veale Center For Entrepreneurship, he funded multiple internships at a $500 stipend and we had over a 150 projects from various local and actually some national companies that had some alum attached to them, and over 200 students applied for these. We matched well over a 100, and he kept finding more money and and supporting this so that these students could basically get embedded into the remote entrepreneurship program, REP, so that they can help these companies that they're needing this help during these COVID times when they're struggling with, you know, reduced income streams, you know, having trouble finding somebody capable to maybe do some market analysis for them, to do some coding for them, or some doing some other materials that, you know, that was part of our give back to the community, but also part of our, you know, responsibility to these students who trusted us to have an engaging experience for them at the university and trying our best to be creative and create something there. So that was really kinda like one that just recently happened. The other thing is, ThinkBox. 35, $40,000,000 to home, depending on how you count it.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:17:48]:
50,000 square foot innovation space open to the public. When we tell people that, it's just, it's crazy. And now I think 62% of our students mention Thinkbox is one of the reasons they came the case, raising from 34 a couple years ago. And so, you know, having that type of space that you can come in and 3 d print, no charge, except for material, laser cut. You could come up on the 6th or 7th floor and have a co working space, no charge to you, high speed internet, a place that you could learn from others, that you could basically, you know, kind of work out of, you know, occasionally. That's another element that, you know, we wanna be there to supply that. And also, you know, potentially bump into other people. You know, one of the stories I'll say, and it didn't necessarily happen, but, you know, you've got theoretical physicists there who who, you know, maybe have some idea of, mapping out or making a 3 d model of some type of a graph but don't know how to 3 d print.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:18:48]:
But we could have a kid from middle school who knows how to 3 d print because he's making fidget widget spinners that could teach a theoretical physicist how to 3 d print. We did have that kid making fidgets, widgets, you know, spinners and selling them. We encourage it. We want that to happen. The 2 of them never met, but theoretically, they could. Or that nurse that has been, you know, in the, field for, let's say 15, 20 years and maybe has some idea for some implement that can make her patient care better or, you know, less burdensome? You know, how can we integrate her and welcome her in or him in so that we can work with maybe a Cleveland Institute of Art student to help design industrial design student design something and having an engineering student help them, you know, make something and start to prototype and enter a competition and and and bring something to market.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:39]:
Yeah. One of the threads I'll I'll pull on there is the is the talent one, you know, both in terms of graduates working on their own specific startups or entrepreneurial efforts. You also have this issue of retaining talent, to to work in the other startups that people are are starting or other, you know, scale ups that are, you know, the box casts of Cleveland that now have this capital and are looking to grow and deploy it. So one of the, I think, real challenges that Cleveland faces is one of the brain drain where you have, you know, someone who born and raised here in Cleveland, a tense case, graduates. And then all of a sudden, they're thinking about where they're gonna start their professional journey and are being recruited heavily, you know, by the firms out in New York and in San Francisco. So I'm, you know, curious how you think about the brain drain problem, the the post graduation student retention problem, and and what are some things that we can do better here in Cleveland to to to address that?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:20:46]:
Okay. The brain drain, it's talked about, I think, too much, and it's unfortunate. A lot of communities have that. And, you know, I don't wanna be the next Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley is an anomaly. It's just an anomaly worldwide. It's, you know, you look at a chart and they just stick up really weirdly. Compare ourselves to Kansas City, compare ourselves to, you know, other places, Cincinnati. Columbus is doing, I'd say, a little bit better than us.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:21:14]:
Pittsburgh with CMUs and Google and others are are doing a little bit better than us. But we can we've got some really strong elements here. And I'm gonna flip it around the other way too. My son-in-law came comes from Chautauqua, New York. And in Chautauqua, New York, 64 kids graduated from high school. Anybody who went to college, 0, 0 stuck around. That's a problem. That's a drain.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:21:41]:
And when he looks at Cleveland, he goes, I see nothing but opportunity here. His brother then followed him. And now his mom and his stepfather are gonna be coming to Cleveland because they see, you know, the Cleveland Clinic. They see, you know, other elements here. My son-in-law worked for Smucker's, TTI, which is Hoover and Durt Devoe, and also now he's at Goodyear. And you just don't have that in these other places. So I've seen him come in from here. And also people who have grown up maybe Western PA, Western New York, and maybe don't want to travel to a Chicago or New York City or all the way to the West Coast.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:22:19]:
This is prime opportunity. Or they've traveled there, and 10 years later, they are saying, you know what? I really, really wanna buy a house, but I cannot buy one in San Francisco. Or my parents are getting older or my grandparents are getting older and I really wanna be around family. So that, you know, that is, you know, one of the elements. The other one is, you know, like like we were talking before about this internship program, make sure that these, students know while they're in school that these box casts of the world, these, Weisers of the world, Overdrives of the world, you know, exist here. Have them try to, you know, get a position there. You know, places that you are with actual and, explorers, which became IBM Watson Health. You know, phenomenal opportunities there.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:23:06]:
Or, you know, make your own job or or partner up with a student. Those are, you know, ways to, you know, retain people here. But if they don't wanna stay here and we actually interviewed a number of people from our hacker society, Why do we lose you to other places? And they said, and this is again, pre COVID and everything else and things were like booming along. Well, you know, we're young and we wanna really try out on the West Coast. And it's just like, and there's nothing here you can do to stop us. And I go, okay. So we will try the best we can, but while you're out there, can we at least engage with you, meet with you, talk with you so that we have a beachhead out there so that when other students may internship out there or go out there, and we we have quite a few alum out there, let's establish relationships with them. Let's work with plug and play, which is in 30 some cities now across the world, 2 in Beijing.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:24:04]:
And plug and play Cleveland is their vertical for healthcare. So, you know, how do we then not fight it, but, you know, as, Tim Ryan and and, Scott Shane has worked, valley to valley, Mahoning Valley to Silicon Valley, having the congressmen working together and continue to, you know, maybe go out there and get some financing, but bring some operations back here to build it. You've got a very short runway in these expensive places. You can go 4 times further here than you can go out there, and you can be maybe a little bit more relaxed on it. There's a lot of walking dead in these other ones that you're 4 months away from shutting the door. And you it'd be much nicer to have like a year and a half runway instead of 4 months.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:53]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I'm gonna take us on a little bit of a detour. You mentioned Youngstown Business Incubator at the beginning of our conversation, brought up congressman Ryan. So, you know, about 2 years ago, I actually had the the pleasure of making the drive over to Youngstown to spend a few days for that valley to valley. So we were there. We were there as with Jim Costler and Barb Ewing and the rest of the YBI team, as well as folks like Congressman Ryan and and other entrepreneurs and and VCs in the area. And we were there to talk about how to, you know, attract and incentivize larger technology companies even to potentially relocate to Youngstown.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:30]:
But we also got to see the showcase of really amazing companies, that people are building their, you know, heavy focus on advanced manufacturing and industrial 3 d printing, but really spanning the whole spectrum, VR, video games, consumer products. And so I, you know, I would just wanna ask you as an entrepreneur in residence there. What what's going on?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:25:51]:
Well, you had mentioned something, but the additive manufacturing is just phenomenal. You know, we lead, you know, that is the the hub for the entire country. We just had some people come from who grew up in the area coming back to Cleveland to do an, like an industrial strength printer that could be out in the field because we know how to build stuff here. We know how to build stuff very, very well. And we'll go toe to toe with anywhere else in the country, if not the world, because we can build things. We know how to make things very, very well here. So that's one of the elements coming out of YBI. Moving that forward, bright dotorg also, the energy sector near Young Sun is also pushing.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:26:35]:
And as you know, it was a Lordstown Motors. Yeah. We had we had a problem with GM, but now Lordstown Motors, a publicly traded company. Again, that is They already have an order for over a 100,000 of these pickup trucks, and that was on in front of the White House, a couple weeks ago. And also the LG battery factory will be growing up there. But other things at at Youngstown is just in the IT sector. There's a group that is helping students manage their debt, their college debt, through a very unique methodologies through an affiliate model. And they were out on the West Coast, but they're opening a facility here to help them move along.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:27:16]:
There's another one called Fritz Frames and they're getting traction. Fritz Frames allows you to go online and not only like, Parker Warbley, you know, order your glasses, but design your glasses and then have them 3 d print in the color you'd like for specifically you. And they're starting to get some traction. So the founder is on the West Coast. The operations elements are in Youngstown. So working very closely with them and kind of moving it to the next level and they're gaining some traction out there. So, you know, part of it is additive manufacturing,

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:01]:
been here in in the startup space, I think if I didn't have that opportunity to go to Youngstown, I probably would not have been aware of any of the stuff going on there. And so from your perspective, how do we better incorporate, commingle the startup ecosystems of Cleveland and adjacent places like Youngstown where there really is a lot of complimentary stuff going on? But, you know, also places like Akron, and, you know, how do we create a more unified body here?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:28:32]:
Well, one of the ways we did it was through generator, Jenner and the number 8 tour, which does an accelerator. They did one in Youngstown and then they also have been doing them in Cleveland. So Scott Shane had worked to bring, you know, some of these outside resources to bear here. And one thing, every 2 months, we have a meeting that we bring in people from Youngstown, from Akron, from Magnet, from Lorain County Community College, and we we we share it's called an ESP meeting that we kinda share, you know, what we're doing, where where we could use help, what interesting entrepreneurs are moving forward, and, you know, how to align that together. In addition to that, at least from Akron to Cleveland, there's something called, National Science Foundation, ICOR. And ICOR is like Steve Blank's business model canvas for market validation. So a number of us from CASE as students and entrepreneurs and also as mentors, being, staff or professors, have volunteered to help guide these folks down in Akron. And, you know, we would have a fair number of CAES students involved, but now we're we're doing it in conjunction with them that some of the sessions will be at Case, some of the sessions will be at Akron.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:29:51]:
So to kinda like bridge that gap more, we're we're continuing to do that. And also the people from, you know, Youngstown are more embedded in the community more. Heather, who also does what I do more full time than what I do as an entrepreneur in residence, makes her way around this area. She goes down to Bounce, for regular meetings. And so she literally is in Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, potentially, you know, the same week to kind of bring and tie everything together and pull all those resources so that, you know, everybody knows what the other is doing and and see how we can collectively work together.

Jeffrey Stern [00:30:31]:
Yeah. That's awesome. I think it would be very cool the more we can kinda bring bring all that stuff together. Just make people aware of of what's going on adjacent to us.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:30:41]:
Yeah. And just, you know, to give you an example, there was, it's called be neverending.com. Case grad worked at Case and he did a Kickstarter, raised $17,400 for being able to generate, characters. Well, he also competed in a competition in Youngstown and won it. And he was featured on Spectrum Cable Network, you know, as being a winner there. But again, he's he lives in the Cleveland area, engaged with Case, but went out to Youngstown to compete, because he had heard of, what was going on out there and, ended up, you know, winning it. And we've had other ones, Augment Therapy. She was also a winner out in the Youngstown area taking advantage of, you know, some of their resources of, you know, what can be had out there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:32]:
So with a lot of these efforts that that students are working on to to start something, whether through LaunchNet or or Elsewise, Something that I've always just been curious about and I just honestly don't have a great understanding of is the other part of startups and universities, which is maybe more the corporate engagement and tech commercialization aspect of, you know, actual research that's being done at Caesars or wherever and, you know, that being spun out and and maybe run with by students or is licensed and sold elsewhere. But but I'd love if you could speak a bit to how universities Caisse specifically is, you know, monetizing on startups.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:32:12]:
Absolutely. So, people initially were very concerned. It's like, oh, if I make something in Thinkbox, does the university own part of it? No. You know, if it's your idea, you own it, you have it, that's not a problem. The issue becomes if it's, you know, coming out of a lab that, you know, a professor is teaching and it it's maybe funded by a corporation or something like that, yeah, there are some rights to that that the university has because they're paying for it. And also maybe a corporation has that. Within LaunchNET, we generally only deal with student and alumni ideas that are a 100% owned by them. We will occasionally, because of some of our connections and expertise, tap into some of the other ones because of we're kinda like hanging out in the same place or we've gone to Ichor together with them.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:33:04]:
And I'll give you two examples. One is, road prints, printz.com, which he was a case professor in robotics, and it's to basically have a robot on the back of a truck to print road markings. So it's a case owned technology, but they licensed it to him. And so he's going to market with that, and the case technology transfer office negotiated that with him to give him incentive to do that and to move forward with that. Another one is folio and they also went through Icore. Folio Photonics is another one, which is a high density material to fit minimally a 100 times more on a a DVD of data, then that can currently be done. Again, a a case technology born in a lab, and then the professor now owns a portion of it. And they hired a boomerang who grew up in the Cleveland area, was out with Intel, I believe, for almost 2 decades.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:34:06]:
And now is back in Cleveland. His in laws are very involved with, I believe Aladdin's and Yours Truly restaurants. And now they're building that technology in Cleveland. They've got a team here and they're continuing to move forward. But Case definitely, you know, has partial ownership of that, but they're also smart that they want to incentivize the management group saying, you know, you make this work, and it will be advantageous for you. And then also incentivize the employees of that and the hires, the interns from CAES or the interns from other universities or the new hires of CASE grads or Cleveland State grads or, you know, possibly, you know, polymer grads out of University of Akron to say, okay, we wanna incentivize you and give you some equity to bring this out going forward. See, we we kiss a lot of frogs with what we're doing with the student ideas. And, you know, very few are gonna become a prince.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:35:01]:
But there's a lot of them. The ones that cases, they're a little bit more mature and have have kinda been tested a little bit more prudently before they kinda move it to the next level. And a fair number of those are also deep, deep science with, you know, something in the medical area that just needs a lot of work, a lot of money behind it, and a lot of testing before you can go to the next level.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:29]:
Do you feel that entrepreneurship can be taught?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:35:33]:
Yes. I I feel some of the fundamentals, but I think it can be better lived than taught and apprenticed. You can be taught in the classroom how to ski, but until you go down a slope, you can look at a book to play the piano. Right? But until you get in front of the keyboard so I think it will help you with the fundamentals, understanding, you know, market dynamics, understanding that you really should understand, you know, is there a market for this? How do I put it together? How do I structure this? LLC, c corp, b corp, so on and so forth. So those components can be taught, but then you have to get out there and do it. I'm also gonna model this a little bit off of, Y Combinator, which is the most dollar wise successful accelerator in the world, that they did something called startupschool.org. I've gone through it three times. And what do they emphasize? Very early.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:36:30]:
Market validation. Who's on your team? How can you get forward? I don't care if it's not perfect. Try it. So, I've seen it happen and I've seen it happen on a regular basis. I've seen, one of the professors from Case very nervous about getting out of the lab and talking to potential customers. Extremely nervous. Very smart person, but out of their element. But then over time, they started to understand it more.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:36:56]:
And then they started to enjoy it saying, I'm learning because I did it. But the the initial part was very difficult. And unless you taught this person how to do it, they wouldn't have done it. I want I wanna say something about startup school because I I'm I'm I'm I'm a huge fan of it. And to give you a a an idea of the the reach and also the density of some of the entrepreneurship in Cleveland. In fall of 2019, I was in it for the 3rd time, and I was doing an analysis in I was promoting the heck out of it as Jumpstart was and others to get people involved. We had quite a few students involved with it. But within a 50 kilometer reach of Cleveland, we had 60 companies.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:37:41]:
60 companies. Not just Case People, not just Akron, you know, but but 60 companies, people who had ideas and it's like, shit, we didn't even know they existed, some of them. The other ones, they were they were kinda people that we knew of. You know, one of them was like, road prints and they went through it again because they wanted to learn and they applied for YC. And so we actually had a mixer at Thinkbox and 24 of them showed up, which was a heck of a percentage. And then there was that helping of each other, you know, what are you working on? How can we help you? Again, building out that ecosystem and, you know, a lot of people needed help. They had good technical ideas. It's like, how do I market this? So the marketing person was actually quite busy.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:38:21]:
The other person who was actually quite busy is, you know, I have this idea. I need somebody to code this thing. And that's, you know, always, you know, a difficult thing no matter where you're at, to get, you know, some some some good, developers to work on something. But I just wanted to share that. I was shocked when I rolled up the numbers and I said, okay, we got 20, we got, know, we got 30, we got 4. It's like, oh my gosh, we got 60. And that was just an amazing number that we had.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:46]:
Yeah. That is pretty extraordinary. What Paul Graham's done with Y Combinator is is pretty cool. And

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:38:51]:
Yes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:52]:
Even just, his, like, observations on Pittsburgh and and Carnegie Mellon and and probably the equivalent role that case plays here in Cleveland as kind of an anchor institution attracting the talent. You know, people hear about Thanksbox and it's how you kinda build the flywheel. So

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:39:10]:
Absolutely. And, yeah, I've I've read, his his article and, you know, having the, the foodie and and that that density, having a place to hang out is very, very, very important in, those accidental collisions. I know that the Cleveland Foundation is trying to build out, you know, another entity in in the area. And then Bernie Marino and Joe Penny are looking at the downtown area with, with, Gilbert's group, City Block. Because there's something to be said about that type of collective discussions. I was very, very fortunate. I traveled in China, and the one place during the day was a coworking space. At night, it was a bar with the musicians in it.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:39:57]:
That is cool. And that is what you want. And that's what you need to have. And it's shown time and time again. Research Triangle, which is a great place, very, smart people down there. One of the problems they had is that they were very spread out and distanced from each other. They needed some place where people could collaborate and collect together. And when you have that, really cool things can, you know, start to happen.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:40:24]:
And as Paul had mentioned in that too, is that, you know, sometimes universities have to just get the hell out of the way too. Right? Lay out the buffet, but don't tell people how to eat. And you need to mix the Cleveland Institute of Art creatives with the physicists, with the mathematicians, and you need to bring these folks together because very, very cool things can happen then.

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:49]:
Yeah. So we I mean, we've covered, a lot of ground here in terms of, you know, projects that you've seen and, been involved with and and help support, you know, from your seat at at KACE, what are the things that are happening right now that you are most excited

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:41:07]:
about? One thing is we just finished our 8th year at CES. We have the largest footprint of any university there. In the past, MIT has been there. In the past, Notre Dame out of Indiana has been there. Michigan. South Korea has 2 displays, 1 with 8 and 1 with 9 booths, and we had like 14 booths. So, yeah. Collectively, they beat us, but individually they didn't.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:41:33]:
So, not that I'm competitive. So that was really great. We've raised over, I believe our number is about $340,000 from that we can clearly identify from being there. And that was because we ran into some, scouts for VC firms. The other thing is it helps you stand out and do some market validation in front of people who are not who who are gonna tell you your baby is freaking ugly. And, also could potentially be a partner or a customer. And there's a camaraderie there also because you have a booth next to somebody else who put it all on the line and scraped together the money and is sleeping in a hostel somewhere and is trying to make something happen so you can hang out with that person and learn from that person. And it also gets us to showcase things like HoloLens, HoloAnatomy.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:42:25]:
The first third party app for HoloLens was made at Case Western, Hollow Anatomy. We crushed it out there. People were standing in line to see that. Kinda gets us a little bit on the map on an international scope. A 170,000 people attended, 43 100 exhibitors, and we became a known entity, you know, by by doing that. And we just finished that, and we're starting to, you know, gain some elements from that. We ran into the FAA out there and they're looking to do, more in the drone space because there are a lot of laws and rules that had just literally changed this week. And they want more collegiate partners and they loved seeing us there.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:43:00]:
So that's one of the elements we're working on now. One of the things we showed there was, a Case student who's now working on his master's along with a Case alum from a couple years ago, they had an idea to 3 d print a violin. And why? Because violins, small violins are hard to come by, they're expensive, and they are fragile. Handing a violin to an 11 year old or an 8 year old can be dangerous And, you know, it could be heartbreaking for a family if they spend a fair amount of money and then a kid breaks it. That's just bad. That's just bad. So, you know, if we can 3 d print these, and and he's he's on like version, I think, 34 that he's been working on to get it acoustically solid, durable, yet something that somebody can can use. So, you know, that's that's one that we, showed, you know, just literally this last week at CES.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:43:58]:
Another one, which was very cool, and he's been at CES multiple times with us, is a student who it's called Reflexion, f r e f lexion.co. Some some students who went to high school together, one went to Penn State, one went to Cornell, your alma mater, and one went to Case. And what they're doing is neural exercises. It's kinda like whack a mole, but with LEDs. And he just signed. It's like, are you kidding me? They just signed Evan Holofield. I said, Evan Holofield? And they go, yes. Son of Avander Holofield, who is a boxer.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:44:37]:
And so he's looking to use this for speed testing. So that is just really cool and they've worked very hard and what they announced at CES was they just got into Dick's Sporting Goods. So that people who wanna, basically, you know, increase their neural fitness can order from Dick's. Those are, you know, just a couple samplings of, you know, what we're doing. You know, road prints, which I mentioned before, they're starting to get some traction out there. I can't think of any other ones off the top of my head.

Jeffrey Stern [00:45:07]:
That's alright. I think we've, covered quite a lot here.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:45:11]:
And one thing just to kinda also give you, you know, an idea of if you wanna get into the financial metrics of it, we've raised about $34,000,000 for these startups over the last, like, 5 or 6 years, which is a lot, but isn't a lot. That doesn't include the 20,000,000 or any money BoxCast has raised. It doesn't include the, I don't know if it's 14,000,000 or 18,000,000 that Remesh has raised. And actually with Remesh, when we opened ThinkBox, we were like their first test bed of, you know, eat your own dog food, right, element. And so, you know, it felt good to do that and it worked very well. But, you know, we we had to, you know, give that attempt out there. And that was Aaron, who was a case PhD student, and also Andrew, who was a PhD student at Kent State. So, again, we wanted to bridge those gaps and work together.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:46:03]:
There was a a LaunchNet at Kent State and there was also a LaunchNet at Case. They knew each other before us, so we we tried to help facilitate it even more after that. And also, you know, reaching down to Columbus. So we had, something called Path Dash Robotics. 2 brothers who grew up in the area who were using a methodology to take in a visual input for a robot to do something smart. They would they wanna do something that has market potential and they chose welding. And so they built this company and they very quickly received well, not quickly. It was a couple years.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:46:39]:
But once I decided to go for more funding, they received some funding and, Drive Capital out of Columbus ended up raising over 10,000,000 for them and then convincing them, even though they didn't want to, to move to Columbus. And they also spoke at the, coast to coast element up at, in Youngstown. They also spoke about, you know, their recruiting, and they they had like a 150 applicants for some of the engineers that they were looking to recruit. And it was, you know, very good for them. Another thing is, tying Columbus into Cleveland, there's Ohio Innovation Fund that invests in Ohio companies. They invested in a couple of Cleveland companies, so they're up here once or twice a month. And, they now have, somebody, Faith Voinovich, who's working with them. She was a Ohio University grad.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:47:26]:
She was she's the granddaughter of the former mayor of Cleveland, George Voynovich, and the governor of the state, George Voynovich. And she's, you know, very integrated in the area. Her her grandmother, I I believe still lives up here, and her aunts and uncles live up here. So, again, going, you know, not just to Akron, but, you know, how can we reach to Columbus and then let's go down to Cincinnati and look at Refinery where Todd, who works with us at Diehl Foundation, is working with Refinery down there. And then Tim, who is also the managing partner on there, is coming up here on a regular basis, grew up in the area, and also is they're an investor in Foley Photonics, which I mentioned before. So it's not just the local area, but, you know, how we can do the state. And we just recently did something called Global Entrepreneurship Week, and we went from not just doing it in Cleveland, it's done all over the world, but we incorporated the whole state of Ohio and pulled those parties together to see, you know, how we can collectively as a state or region, you know, support each other.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:26]:
Wow. So much going on.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:48:28]:
Yes. Yes. And I'm gonna add one more. There's something called Global Entrepreneurship Network with Jeff Hoffman is like on their board. He's a driving force for that. He lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. He comes from Chicago. He was very instrumental in the start of Priceline.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:48:45]:
He's working very closely with Pitbull, whatever his real name is, out of Miami, the the musician, trying to help the Hispanic, community in a big way. Just a friend. He's been very involved with mentoring our students, our alumni, on a regular basis. At the opening of Thinkbox, he came around and there's something called GSV, globalsiliconvalleydot com. It also runs something called gsbbootcamp.com, which is gonna be the 2nd time next week. It's starting again. It's a 7 week program. Jeff will be speaking at it, and we're gonna have, you know, a number of case and, you know, local folks.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:49:23]:
I've been communicating out to our network to say, you know, can we get involved with this? And so, you know, not only in our own backyard, but, you know, let's look to the coast. Let's reach out to people. Let's reach out to people in China. Let's reach out to people in Europe. You know, how can we work together? We have a gentleman, Renjun Bao, who moved to Cleveland for his master's and PhD from Cleveland State. He wrote for the largest Chinese newspaper, sporting paper about the NBA. He lives in Cleveland. The Cleveland Cavaliers work very closely with them.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:49:56]:
He now works for Tencent, the, you know, one of the biggest media companies in the world, but he lives in Cleveland and he works on the NBA agreement out of Cleveland. So again, we've got that that reach from not just here in this area, but, you know, how can we also optimize those, relationships, you know, to help them and also to help us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:16]:
Sure. Sure. I feel like you've probably answered this question I'm about to ask maybe a 100 times over in this conversation, but, the the question that I'm uniformly asking everyone as we try and paint a picture of of Cleveland and people's favorite things here is, you know, what is your favorite hidden gem?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:50:32]:
Well, they're not hidden in terms of Lake Erie, the parks, the zoo. We've gotten a really awesome zoo, just super well run. It's really interesting. Nothing against New York, but I I hadn't spent time there. And when I always thought of, you know, like a theater district, I always pictured ours. Right? Where the theater's next to each other. It's really cool. You can walk from one to the other.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:50:54]:
There's restaurants there. And I go to New York City, it's like, they're spread out all over the place. It's like, oh my gosh. It's not that density. That is so cool that we've got that density and that was also on the Avengers. That was part of the the scene. I don't know if you remember that or not, but, you know, right along there, the scene. So that's cool.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:51:12]:
And, you know, the Russo brothers, they're again, not a hidden gem, You know, and they they come back on a regular basis and and doing cool things here. The Midwestern, you know, we're here to help you. One of the things, you know, how can we also work together is I was on a panel with the Bernie Morgan Foundation, Deb Hoover, with Ichor, Akron, and with BioOhio. And I showed a boat, like a black and white picture of a boat. Pretty big boat that would maybe fit 10 people, and there was like 5 people in it. It was taking on water. It was like an old picture, and people are bailing. And so I use that as an example saying, you know what? We better all work together or we're sunk.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:51:54]:
And one of the elements is some of these other communities aren't forced to do it because they didn't go through hard times. So the adversity forced us to work together. And so let's take advantage of that. It taught us how to work together. And so, you know, continue to do that. And people in the audience literally were saying, I'm at this university. We are 15 minutes from this other university, and we don't talk to each other. We hate each other because we hate each other on the field, the athletic field.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:52:25]:
We don't work with each other or we don't work with that community organization. That doesn't happen here very often. And the thing is, if it does, then that entity or that person is usually kind of on the out. So, you know, that's one of the beauties here that, you know, we loan each other, you know, a lawnmower, right? And we help each other. And the thing that we also do is that we're also very negative to each other and we're not prideful enough sometimes of what we can do here and what we can accomplish, but we're really saying, oh, why would it used to be, you know, people would move to Cleveland. It's like, why would you move to Cleveland? Instead of what instead of, you know, being welcoming, saying, glad to have you here. Come on down. You know, more more people are moving here.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:53:11]:
So, you know, it's not rose colored glasses and everything. There's a lot of things that have to be done, but there's other elements that we are just extremely powerful. We don't have a Theranos here. That's not gonna happen. You know, that was just an insanity. We know how to do medical and you're gonna have to work your tail off and prove yourself so much harder here so that, you know, if you get some easy money, you're really well prepared to optimize it. Right? And we've had, you know, great successes here. Overdrive, phenomenal success.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:53:42]:
They sold for $420,000,000 to rank it to a Japanese company. Steve, Steve, he was an overnight success of 20 years, right, or 18 years. Really, really, really worked hard. And and Charlie, you're working with, you know, great people, that they're doing. You know, they had one exit. Now they're working on something else. Bernie, the Imbrasias, Zappas. These people wanna help out.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:54:03]:
The other thing is, and we don't hear a lot about it, is we don't hear about all these industrial parks and all these other things that you would be shocked at that 8 person machine shop that is making something that is vital to an MRI machine or to a battleship or to, you know, a jet fighter that is made with such high precision that you can bet your life on it, and you are betting your life on it. Swagelok is here. They don't want a lot of, notoriety. Jurgens is here. You know, turnbuckles and things that are holding bridges together. Things that cannot fail are made here. And there's a ton of it here and, you know, you don't hear about it because people are going to work, they're getting it done, they're going home, they're going to play golf and they're having fun, right? Going to the Indians games, going to the Browns games. But there's a lot of that here that are just hidden.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:54:59]:
And it's highly respected out there in other entities. I know like when Cleveland Whiskey was thinking of doing other names, they analyzed it and a lot of people across the country across the world said Cleveland, gritty. They make things of quality, high quality. We respect them. And they said, we're keeping a name.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:19]:
I'm glad they did. Yep. So there's a million things to follow-up with you about here, and I'm sure that many people might have questions or or follow ups. What is the best way for people to contact you?

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:55:34]:
Absolutely. So my name, b o b.s0 k0case.edu.

Jeffrey Stern [00:55:43]:
Perfect. Thank you, Bob, for for coming on today. I I really appreciate it. I definitely have learned, a ton from our conversation, and it's very exciting to to learn about everything that's going on.

Bob Sopko (LaunchNet - Case Western Reserve University) [00:55:54]:
Absolutely. Thanks, Jeff. Really appreciate what you're doing, and, let's, keep doing this together.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:00]:
That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show, so shoot us an email at lay of the land at upside.fm or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland, at thetagan, or at sternjeffe, j e f e. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please email us or find us on Twitter and let us know. And if you love our show, please leave a review on iTunes. That goes a long way in helping us spread the word and continue to help bring high quality guests to the show. Taycan Horden and Jeffrey Stern developed the Lay of the Land podcast in collaboration with the UP Company LLC.

Jeffrey Stern [00:56:36]:
At the time of this recording, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the companies which appear on this show unless otherwise indicated. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Founders Get Funds and its affiliates, or actual and its affiliates, or any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. We have not considered your specific financial situation, nor provided any investment advice on this show. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.