Jeffrey Stern
(Photo Credit: Jeff Stern)
Name: Jeffrey Stern
Current Job: Product Manager & Co-Founder at Axuall
Favorite restaurant in town? Tossup between Larder, Il Rione, and Zhug (and Mitchell’s if it counts as a restaurant)
Favorite thing about Cleveland? Summer, the people, and the Metroparks
Q: Jeff, you started your career as a VFA fellow. I've had a few VFA fellows that I've done interviews with at this point. How did you end up in the program and what was your experience like? Out of college, I found myself at a fork in the road. One path was the conventionally ambitious one - it is well lit and trodden and visible enough that five years down the road, you can have a good sense of what you’d be doing. The other path looked risky and required exploration - it was covered in foliage and shrouded in darkness by the denser forest around it.
I worried rushing to specialize in a known career track would force me to pursue a job for a future version of myself who I didn’t yet know in a world I didn’t yet understand. I worried by following the conventionally ambitious path I’d miss something awesome I’d have otherwise discovered. I wanted to explore and build something. So I chose the riskier path with the thesis that making high-risk career decisions out of college is the best way to experiment, invest in learning who you are, and be in an environment where you have accountability and ownership and receive feedback frequently and early. I was hoping that the best career decision I could make was to take on “career risk” before I had a career to risk.
The world of startups and building something from scratch is difficult to navigate if you haven’t done it before and don’t have the right tools though. Venture for America was my toolbelt, and cartographer through this untrodden path. VFA brought me from NYC to Cleveland where I joined Votem as the first employee. VFA ultimately introduced me to the rest of my founding team where I currently work too!
Q: After the program ended, you stayed in Cleveland and joined Axuall. We interviewed Lucky, the CTO of Axuall, a few months ago, but remind readers what Axuall is and why you joined? Axuall is solving the problem of healthcare credentialing. On average, it takes health systems more than 100 days to get healthcare practitioners credentialed. These delays limit patients’ access to care, frustrates the practitioners, and costs health systems millions in lost revenue.
The process of verifying credentials is highly manual, complex, disconnected, costly, and time-consuming yet absolutely essential - patient needs to know with certainty that their doctor is who they say they are, has the proper credentials (medical education, internships, residencies, fellowships, board certifications, state medical license, DEA certificates, malpractice insurance etc.) and isn’t sanctioned or barred from practicing. Axuall is building a national data network that enables practitioners to digitally manage and share their credentials with healthcare organizations, automating this credentialing process that currently takes months down to days.
After Votem effectively failed in February 2019 (part and parcel of the world of startups), (for anyone interested in what happened at Votem, I reflected on it here) I found myself again at that same fork in the road. Turns out you can always find your way back to the well-lit trodden path if you have a desire to do so. I didn’t have that desire though. I’ve enjoyed hacking my way through the forest. I realized that “failure” doesn’t really feel like failure (and isn’t perceived as failure) if you were working on something positive you cared about with wonderful people. And so with one “failed” startup experience behind me, I wanted to try again.
Fortunately, I did meet really wonderful people at Votem who I respected, admired and given the opportunity, would have loved to start a company with. A few months later, that exact opportunity came. Lucky Tavag, who led our engineering team at Votem, and Charlie Lougheed, who had recently sold Explorys to IBM to become Watson Health, had joined forces and were looking to round out the founding team for Axuall. I decided to join them because I genuinely felt like this was the best possible team we could’ve assembled, the problem we’re working to solve is real and impactful, and professionally, I wanted to work with and learn from both of them (we’re hiring too)!
Q: In your spare time, you joined Upside.fm to launch their Cleveland startup podcast. Tell us more about that. With the help of the upside.fm podcast network, we’re launching the “Lay of The Land” podcast here in Cleveland!
When I first moved to Cleveland, I found it very hard to learn about all the Cleveland business ecosystem has to offer - there are a ton of disparate moving pieces. Over the years though, I’ve gained a better understanding of what people are working on and, much like this newsletter and community you’ve built, I wanted to build a resource to provide people what I would have wanted when I moved to Cleveland, hence a “Lay of The Land”. We’re having conversations with all different kinds of entrepreneurs, investors, community builders, and professionals across Cleveland’s business and startup landscape.
If you’d like to tune in, please check out our page here and subscribe where you listen to podcasts!
Q: Many people don't know this, but you bought your house when you moved here. What motivated you to buy vs. rent and what is it like being a landlord? I grew up in NYC where the idea of home ownership is a foreign concept.
What I quickly realized living and renting in downtown Cleveland (I was in Statler Arms when I first moved here) was that houses around downtown (Ohio City, Midtown, Tremont) were relatively inexpensive for the rents they’re able to generate. With some research, I found the financial jargon for this phenomenon - the average property-value-to-rent ratio of houses around Cleveland is ~10 (for context, that ratio in NYC is often in the 40-50 range and in SF is >50).
So the financial implication of this was that I could go from paying someone else’s mortgage to building my own equity for less than I was paying in monthly rent. Knowing I was going to be here in Cleveland for at least a few years, the math just works surprisingly well.
Coming from NYC, living in a house has been great. I never lived in a house before; I grew up in an apartment. I never really understood the value of space, backyards, basements and home maintenance. I learned mowing a lawn is not called grass-trimming. I’ve learned the right tool is worth infinitely many wrong tools; invest in a good drill and toolkit.
It’s also made me more invested in Cleveland, literally. I’m more attuned to the community and people around me and the Cleveland pride that hits you like a brick wall when you move here may even be rubbing off on me.
Q: VFA has been a great program to get smart, young and ambitious people to Cleveland. What else can the startup community and local government do to get more people like that to move here? I think Cleveland needs to double down on the Metroparks. It really wasn’t until I was here for two years that I understood the awesomeness of them and how accessible they are. They are a treasure and need to be marketed as such!
My personal plea as a stubborn NYer who refuses to buy a car in a city would be to double down on downtown, overall walkability, and public transportation. To this day the most surprising thing I’ve learned about Cleveland -- with a population of ~380,000 -- is that the number of people living downtown is <20,000 yet the number of people who work downtown is north of 100,000. If you take a birds-eye-view of Downtown, Cleveland, the surface-level-parking-lot-to-total-land ratio is way too high!
Startups need to keep building and those with capital need to support and keep those startups here. Success begets opportunity which will beget more success. The flywheel here has started (and we're seeing what it could look like with more mass and velocity from our neighbors in Columbus), but it is not quite with the momentum it needs to overcome the inertia of itself yet.
I also think addressing the systemic problems that afflict those who already live here would go a long way. You have to get your own house in order first before you have guests - the adage to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others feels apt. Cleveland has so much to offer but can’t ignore the issues keeping people who already live here down - ie digital divide, infant mortality, highest poverty rates in the country, etc. Cleveland should own and explicitly address these problems while being authentic to its strengths.