Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Jeffrey Stern, Principal at the O.H.I.O. Fund.  He started his career as a software developer, then moved into investment banking, before becoming a fellow with Venture for America. Following VFA he was the co-founder of two SaaS companies spanning roles including operations and product management. He is also an accomplished podcast host with nearly 180 very popular episodes completed!  I am very excited to introduce Jeffrey Stern, Principal at the OHIO Fund.

Jeffrey shared many great insights including:

• Emphasized curiosity as a career driver.
• Shared reflections on overcoming societal expectations and defining personal success.
• Highlighted the importance of learning through high-responsibility roles and iterative feedback.

The Power of Curiosity: Jeffrey Stern’s Career Story

[00:00:05] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to Episode 34 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent podcast. I’m your host, Ron Laneve.

[00:00:12] Ron Laneve: Each week, we share the career stories of tech experts and marketing mavens, operational gurus, and sales leaders to illustrate how they have navigated the nonlinear career path.

[00:00:24] Ron Laneve: When it comes to creating a non traditional path, today’s guest is the epitome of that. He started his career as a software developer. Then moved into investment banking before becoming a fellow with Venture for America. Following VFA, he co-founded 2 SaaS startups, spanning roles from operations to product management.

[00:00:44] Ron Laneve: He’s also an accomplished podcast host with nearly 180 very successful episodes completed. He even has his own reunion party for his group. Very excited to introduce Jeffrey Stern Principal at the Ohio Fund. Jeffrey, thanks for being here.

[00:01:02] Jeffrey Stern: Thank you for having me on Ron. Really appreciate the opportunity.

[00:01:05] Ron Laneve: Likewise, it’s been a long time coming. I was thinking about it before this call. I feel a little bit like Luke Skywalker talking to Yoda when it comes to podcasting. So I appreciate your time. 

[00:01:16] Jeffrey Stern: Oh, absolutely. We’re just here to have a conversation. 

[00:01:18] Ron Laneve: That’s right. I gave a brief, really very brief high level intro of your background and it’s clearly a lot more detailed than that. 

[00:01:26] Ron Laneve: Can you walk us through, how your career has progressed? In such a short time, you’ve done a lot of things. 

[00:01:32] Ron Laneve: I know a lot about VFA. You’ve been a part of the founding team for two SaaS businesses and now at the Ohio Fund. Walk us through the things that happened and how and why, if you don’t mind.

[00:01:44] Jeffrey Stern: Absolutely. 

[00:01:45] Ron Laneve: I appreciate the way you framed it and set the stage. 

[00:01:47] Jeffrey Stern: As I was thinking about non linearity reflecting on my own journey, preparing for this conversation today. It was fascinating for me to think back on how logical in some ways it would be to connect the progression and the dots of my career in retrospect, and how difficult it would have been to predict what those dots were in advance.

[00:02:10] Jeffrey Stern: And what would be the decisions that bridge those paths. 

[00:02:12] Ron Laneve: So it’s been fun to just reflect on. So thank you for, prompting the opportunity to do some reflection. I could go back earlier than college, even to dig through some of the origins of my interests and curiosities that have guided me through the career.

[00:02:25] Ron Laneve: But 

[00:02:26] Jeffrey Stern: college was really the first time that I ever explicitly thought about I think the path of my career and how that path may diverge going forward. And really the endless set of possibilities that could result from different decisions. What came to mind is In thinking about this first fork in the road after college was channeling something that my old English teacher Mr. Fisher had expressed back to me in early high school and has stuck with me over the years. 

[00:02:54] Jeffrey Stern: Which was that the idea of success as we were introduced to it growing up was achieved by exceeding someone else’s expectations. We all got really good at what he called hoop jumping which is, enthusiastically competitively with acquiescence, jumping from hoop to hoop, which in the environment I grew up in was to get good grades, to demonstrate extensive extracurricular activities to get involved in certain community service, to attend a well regarded college, to build up your credentials, to ultimately work towards prestige professionally. 

[00:03:32] Jeffrey Stern: The challenge, which I feel very lucky to have reconciled with early in my life, Because I’ve come to understand it manifests much more commonly I think in the form of a midlife crisis. Is related to those set of expectations and fulfillment generally, and so I call it, my quarter life crisis. But it was coming to understand that those expectations are the expectations of others.

[00:03:58] Jeffrey Stern: That they’re not really your own expectations that you set for yourself. I had enough exposure playing for the validation of others and the external markings of success that I realized the path, and you mentioned the investment banking and traditional software development, that those were not going to be my path to fulfillment.

[00:04:23] Jeffrey Stern: But what I came to understand was that I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do. In lieu of knowing what I really wanted to do, the internal compass I use as a proxy to try and help me guide down this path was curiosity. Constantly trying to seek a true north of learning and optimizing for that as much as I possibly could at the highest velocity I possibly could.

[00:04:47] Jeffrey Stern: And came to believe that the best career decision I could make at that point in time was to take on career risk before I really had a career to risk. The best way that I had come to learn was to learn in practice. Was to take on ownership, was to be held accountable, was responsibility within an environment that gave you the highest frequency of feedback loops.

[00:05:10] Jeffrey Stern: My intuition was that building something, entrepreneurship, was the best way to do that. And that’s ultimately what drew me to Venture for America and away from kind of those well trodden professional career paths after college. As VFA was really purpose built for those who had come to that sort of realization who maybe were entrepreneurially inclined, but without the full set of experience at that stage in their career to start something.

[00:05:40] Ron Laneve: Did you find VFA on your own or did it find you? What was that connection? Just curious because I’ve worked in companies where we’ve recruited vFA fellows and have had, lots of success from it. So I have a knowledge of how VFA works pretty firsthand, but what was your intro to it?

[00:05:57] Jeffrey Stern: It was and maybe not surprisingly in the spirit of this podcast, was my mentor from my investment bank who was actually on the board of Venture for America and through talking with him and going through this quarter life crisis that we just explored was the one who suggested, perhaps you should actually, look at this direction. I hear what the problems that you’re encountering. This could be a great path forward for you. 

[00:06:21] Ron Laneve: So was VFA the introduction to, I think it was Votem was the first founding role you’ve had with a startup company from LinkedIn. Was that the path to that? 

[00:06:32] Jeffrey Stern: Yeah. Venture for America was both my path to Votem and to Cleveland overall, where I had really no ties prior familial year or otherwise. 

[00:06:43] Ron Laneve: How did you get into Axuall, how did you help co found that business?

[00:06:47] Jeffrey Stern: The short of it is that, Votem, like many startups didn’t ultimately make it. In the aftermath of winding down what I had spent the last three years working on prior, I did a bit of soul searching and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And it didn’t quite this time feel like a crisis in that I had come to understand that I loved the company building process.

[00:07:11] Jeffrey Stern: Through which my time at Votem, we had gone from zero to 70 people and a few different life cycle stages of the company from, really no product existing to, out there in the wild production environments, working with secretaries of state as our customers. In solving what to me were very important and fulfilling problems to work on. 

[00:07:33] Jeffrey Stern: Coming out of it I didn’t have an idea, though, of what I wanted to build. Other than that, I wanted to build something. And so what I did over the course of that summer, and this was in 2019 was I actually set out to meet as many local people, founders and CEOs in Cleveland as I possibly could.

[00:07:51] Jeffrey Stern: To get a sense for who they were as people, what motivated them, what inspired them to go and work on whatever set of problems they were trying to solve and some of the tactics of the company building process that they had gone through. Ultimately from there to explore the possibility of working with any of them in a more formal capacity.

[00:08:12] Jeffrey Stern: And that was really the origin of both the podcast that I ended up doing, and we could talk about that. But one of the founders that I had met through that exercise was Charlie Lougheed. Who had really become at that point A very successful entrepreneur who had just exited his last company, a company called Explorys here in Cleveland, which he had sold to IBM, became the Watson Health Platform, and found himself at a similar liminal state of exploration and trying to figure out what he wanted to work on next.

[00:08:43] Jeffrey Stern: Lucky (Tavag), who was my partner and head of engineering at Votem before the three of us had joined forces at that point in time over, over that summer when we were all trying to figure out what to do next. And ultimately Axuall came out of a series of conversations that were had with With the chief medical officers that Charlie had worked with prior at Explorys and asking them very simply, actually what problem they wanted us to solve.

[00:09:08] Jeffrey Stern: And a sufficient number of them mentioned credentialing and privileging, which we didn’t have a real grasp or understanding of what that actually meant, but that was the direction that Axuall set off and trying to build a company around. 

[00:09:20] Ron Laneve: You mentioned curiosity, which is, through my experience in having these conversations with entrepreneurs. Through, the, probably the tens of thousands of interviews I’ve done over my career with everybody from, new college grads to very experienced people. I’ll say 1 of the biggest differentiators is curiosity by far. When it leads to ultimate success and, willing willingness to take risks.

[00:09:47] Ron Laneve: Is that something that was just innate in you and who Jeffrey Stern is? Is that something you developed over time? Was it from your mentor, the English teacher? How is that something you either have or you don’t, can you develop it clearly? You’ve you had it, but you also worked on it, right?

[00:10:04] Ron Laneve: The way of the way the Lay of the Land came about with those interviews, just going out and interviewing CEOs was pure curiosity. Tell me a little bit about that. Can people develop that if they don’t have it? What’s your opinion? 

[00:10:16] Jeffrey Stern: I think like most traits or characteristics it’s probably weighted more heavily in some than in others.

[00:10:23] Jeffrey Stern: And my, my framing of it and can you cultivate it is absolutely like, I definitely think you can. I’m reminded of a story. It also brings me back to middle and high school. But there were two kids in my class in my math class specifically who were maybe five to seven years younger than the rest of the class because they were just excellent at math. What I remember taking with me from their presence in this class was that there are some times in life where no matter how hard you work on something that you are simply not going to be a fraction as effective as other people to whom it comes naturally. 

[00:11:03] Jeffrey Stern: That was like also quite a humbling and valuable reality that to understand that at a pretty young age, no matter how hard I worked at math, no matter how much I enjoyed it or how curious I was about it that would not be enough. But the good thing is you don’t actually have to be good at everything and you certainly cannot be actually. But to the degree that you can find the activities that look and feel like hard work to other people but come easy and feel natural and intuitive to you. I think those are the things that should try and double down on and ultimately become what other people perceive to be your super powers. 

[00:11:39] Jeffrey Stern: For some reason, I don’t even know how to articulate it, but I just have always been a very curious person. I love learning things. I love reading. Trying to understand how people think, what drives behavior. And have always been just fascinated by that. 

[00:11:54] Ron Laneve: No, fair enough. I appreciate that. Let’s fast forward to the Ohio Fund where I know you, you’ve just recently started there as a Principal. What is the Ohio fund? What’s the thesis behind it? And where do you guys plan on going? 

[00:12:09] Jeffrey Stern: Yeah, so we, fortunately just recently had our first close for $108 million to invest in and across the state of Ohio. The thesis as best as I can put it, is tethered to the idea that Ohio right now is quite positioned to ride the structural trends that are forming the waves, in the metaphor of waves of the day.

[00:12:38] Jeffrey Stern: So when you think about, this growing desire for domestic secure, robust supply chains. The infusion of software into hardware that climate change is driving the domestic manufacturing of a broad spectrum of clean economy goods. Think about EVs. That you have this kind of steadily growing demand for energy catalyzed by a bunch of things. But topically the kind of exponential growth of artificial intelligence right now and the cost declines of compute and the kind of mass manufacturing of data centers and chip manufacturing, which all require a bunch of energy.

[00:13:21] Jeffrey Stern: Layer on the economic incentives of some of the federal regulations. The IRA, the CHIPS Act, that all provide both carrots and sticks to, reshore and develop these manufacturing capabilities locally on top of, a recognition of the importance of climate resilient geographies and even natural resources like water, which we have quite an abundance here in Ohio.

[00:13:48] Jeffrey Stern: So if you believe that Ohio is well positioned to benefit from these structural trends. The Ohio Fund is set out to be a vehicle to ensure that we can actually fund and invest and support this set of opportunities that will allow Ohio to realize those benefits. It’s not a given that those will just happen.

[00:14:10] Jeffrey Stern: You actually need a catalytic force to activate. That whole set of opportunities and bring together the companies, institutions, the people all across the state of Ohio, who could actually make that happen. To me, the Ohio fund is that activation energy. It is the catalytic force. It is inspired in a lot of ways by Temasek, which is Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund formed about 50 years ago with a similar amount of capital that today is investing with over $400 billion under management. That was a place based fund. And the Ohio fund has a similar broad mandate in the set of investment opportunities that we are able to participate in, tethered to this place based Ohio centric thinking.

[00:15:03] Ron Laneve: Understood. What’s your role going to be? 

[00:15:06] Jeffrey Stern: The the team is mighty but small at the moment. So there’s only a few of us. We are all hands on deck on all things. My focus going forward as we get our infrastructure set up and our feet beneath us and as the dust begins to settle will be really focused on investing. Figuring out deal flow diligence and doing some of the thinking and work around how do we emulate some of the community building exercise that I’ve got to do as a hobby that maybe now can become work through Lay of the Land. And begin to stitch together the network across the state and amplify the storytelling that we do in parallel to the projects, companies, people that we are investing in. 

[00:15:46] Ron Laneve: I wish you the best of luck with that and it’s exciting as a homer here in Ohio and in Cleveland to see this initiative with the people behind it especially come to fruition and look forward to seeing its success. So congrats and good luck. 

[00:16:00] Ron Laneve: Let’s switch gears to talent a little bit. Through your podcast, like you said, you’ve interviewed a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs. I know because I’ve listened to you. You’ve interviewed a few recruiters like myself. You’ve started up companies. 

[00:16:13] Ron Laneve: What would be your suggestion to individuals right now? On the verge of graduating, or let’s say earlier in their career around, how to think about what’s next how to position themselves to be opportunistic with new roles coming forward? It could be a focus from a technology or niche perspective could be to your point just be more curious. What’s your take on helping that cohort get ahead? 

[00:16:44] Jeffrey Stern: I don’t know that I’ve reviewed as many applications as you probably have in your career, but I’m, well over a thousand and I’ve interviewed probably many hundreds at this point. To me, there are some very clear things that stick out to me as differentiators as part of that process.

[00:17:04] Jeffrey Stern: And the best phrasing I can think of that kind of captures the way I feel about it is that the most interesting people are the most interested people. Which, which in some ways relates to curiosity. And kind of layers, even in that story about the two kids in my math class who just excelled greatly at this thing that came naturally to them but, I could work a lifetime on and never even achieve a fraction of their competence. Which is that you can teach certain skills, but I really find it’s hard to teach passion and interest.

[00:17:38] Jeffrey Stern: And of all the applications that I’ve ever had, and really of all the hiring that I’ve ever done, the folks who demonstrated the most interest and passion for what it was that we were trying to do really just broke through the noise as very strong signal. When you have a thousand applications, you do need to apply some filter to understand, all right, how do we begin to piece together who we should actually hire here.

[00:18:04] Jeffrey Stern: A lot of people can have the skills and you can develop the skills and the acquisition of skills is going to become increasingly doable, especially as we build out these AI tutors and capabilities, even from a coding and development standpoint. An interest and a demonstrated passion, I think goes a very long way.

[00:18:22] Ron Laneve: Yeah, I agree. Sometimes the most simple things are the most valuable. A couple curveballs here. I want to throw at you. What keeps you in Ohio? You’re not from here. Ohio sometimes seen as maybe not the most advanced opportunity for new businesses and entrepreneurship. But, I think otherwise, and I think clearly you’ve had enough data to prove otherwise.

[00:18:43] Ron Laneve: What is it that keeps you here? 

[00:18:46] Jeffrey Stern: So like we mentioned perhaps it was before we started recording, I’m not from Ohio. I have no real ties to this place other than I have learned my grandfather was born in Akron but then proceeded to spend no time in Ohio. But I am still here in Ohio because I believe genuinely there is a generational opportunity that I am now working on helping to realize through the Ohio Fund. There’s a Caleb Atwater quote, which I came across through reading the Ohio guide, which is a fascinating book on holistic history of Ohio and the places within Ohio up into the 1940s, but dating back to the inception of the state. He said that Ohio is it’s hard to forget these words because they’re so strange but peculiarly felicitous as to soil and climate and productions that it would be Ohio’s own fault if they are not the happiest people in the union and I just came to see his point.

[00:19:46] Jeffrey Stern: I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by the people I’ve come to know here. The hundreds of entrepreneurs I’ve come to know here. I think came to see and appreciate an excellence in this place and a latent potential that I’ve been very motivated to help unlock and realize. 

[00:20:07] Ron Laneve: I’m gonna have to go look up that quote because that was pretty impressive that you remember that.

[00:20:11] Ron Laneve: A couple bonus questions and then I’ll let you go on your way. My new latest question I like to ask is what’s in your AI stack? What tools are you using these days? And for what? And what value you’re getting out of those? 

[00:20:22] Jeffrey Stern: It seems there’s the very explicit tools. And I transitioned between the Perplexities and those kinds of tools, but I’m pretty regularly referring to them at this point in kind of daily workflows and even in work I do for my own podcast, certainly very helpful.

[00:20:39] Jeffrey Stern: But I, I think where I’ve thought about AI in application most profoundly is in its ability to help us realize productivity gains from the manufacturing perspective. So less in my kind of personal day to day repertoire, but more about, tying back to these structural themes of reshoring, reindustrialization, manufacturing competency here domestically is that AI will have the ability to unlock a lot of potential in productivity for the automation and the actual building of things in a way that we, I don’t think have fully realized yet. 

[00:21:19] Ron Laneve: For sure. We’re just scratching the surface. Thanks for sharing. 

[00:21:22] Ron Laneve: I appreciate your time. This has been a good chat and it’s been a pleasure finally, learning more about your background and thanks for sharing everything. I can’t wait to watch the Ohio fun take off. And hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk again in a few months when when you have a couple more wins you want to talk about. 

[00:21:38] Jeffrey Stern: Absolutely. I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to share a bit of my story. I’m happy to reconnect at any point. 

[00:21:45] Ron Laneve: Thanks, Jeffrey.

May 11, 2024