{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Lay of The Land","title":"#250 Chris Heivly - 250 Episodes Later — Reflections on Entrepreneurship, Community, Storytelling ","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4209,"description":"This is the 250th episode of Lay of The Land, and to mark it, I wanted to do something a little different.Most episodes of this podcast are centered on founder stories — what drives someone to take the very difficult leap of trying to build a company, what problem they feel compelled enough to devote their life to solving, and what they learn along the way. But for this milestone episode, I wanted to step back and talk about the thing that ties these stories together… the community itself. And there was no one I’d rather have for that conversation than Chris Heivly.Chris is a serial entrepreneur, early-stage investor, startup community builder, and the founder of Build The Fort. He’s also was a co-founder of MapQuest, a bestselling author, a longtime writer and speaker on entrepreneurship and ecosystem development, and someone whose thinking had a real influence on the direction of Lay of The Land when I was starting it back in 2018…  Chris came to Cleveland in 2018 and shared his assessment of our startup community through Techstars and at the City Club, and a lot of what he said stayed with me and this podcast became my own attempt to act on it.Over the last 250 episodes, Lay of The Land has grown into something much bigger than I originally imagined — not just a repository of entrepreneurial stories, but a kind of connective tissue for entrepreneurship in Cleveland: dozens of events, thousands of introductions, new friendships, mentorship relationships, hires, investments, co-founders, and I’m sure many second- and third-order effects I’ll never fully know about. So for this episode, it felt worth reflecting more directly on this whole journey and linger on how entrepreneurial communities actually form, what makes them stronger, what gets in their way, and what that has looked like here in Cleveland.In our conversation, Chris and I talk about what he saw when he first came to Cleveland, why density and storytelling mattered so much in his original assessment,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/83f-43Wz3A8u4303ZUZ8sIr3iY-45NuHaXW4rZCGBA0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzE2MTMwLzE2Mjg3/MTAwMjUtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}