Lay of The Land

Paul Roetzer is the founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute—a media, event, and online education company that he started back in 2016 to make AI accessible, approachable, and actionable for marketers and business leaders. Through the institute, he created MAICON—the leading annual Marketing AI confer

Geoff Bruder, co-founder of GhostWorks Engineering and Sonic Fire Tech—a company redefining fire suppression—is fighting fires with acoustic wave technology. Geoff's journey is rooted in his work at NASA Glenn Research Center here in Cleveland, where he focused as a Research Engineer on projects like the Advanced Stirl

Jared Semik, founder of Eternium Aerospace, a long-range, zero-emissions aircraft development company, is focused on sustainable transatlantic flight. A multi-service military aviation veteran with three global deployments, Jared began his career in the Marine Corps in 1999. He is an aerospace research and development

Robert Marks founded Fidelity Voice and Data in 1999 with just a $600 investment, which he grew into a business generating over $30 million in revenue, making it one of the largest telecommunications and cloud services competitors throughout the Midwest. The company focused on providing high-speed Internet access to va

Andy Tran has lived more lives than just about anyone I know. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has started multiple businesses across industries, including tech, ammunition manufacturing, defense contracting, and tequila, among many others. Andy is a true modern Renaissance man whose path defies convention and serves as

John Knific is a serial entrepreneur and investor who has built three venture-backed software companies here in Cleveland. His latest venture, Squad, is a peer discovery platform designed to gamify ratings and rankings for Gen Z, starting on college campuses, delivering valuable preference data to marketers. Before Squ