Happy Tuesday!
The invite is officially out for the next GrepBeat Happy Hour on Jan. 17, sponsored by Cherry Bekaert. Speaking of sponsorships, do you want to see your company featured in a full-on, hand-written, stand-alone, all-about-you newsletter item like the (scintillating) ones below? With your help—and your $—we can make that happen. Here’s the details. |
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Did you know that most women’s clothing doesn’t have pockets? Brooks Bell knows that, and she knows why—thanks to a podcast episode that she recommends on the history of pockets. That nugget is just one of the many interesting things about Bell, the better half of the Triangle’s top Tech Power Couple, alongside husband and serial entrepreneur Jesse Lipson. Bell stands alone today as the latest subject of The Download series by Brooks Malone.
Bell’s eponymous firm (it's simply called "Brooks Bell," and we haven't decided if that makes things simpler or way more complicated) helps companies optimize their sites and ecommerce efforts via rigorous A/B testing and other optimization efforts. As you’ll see in The Download, she’s also done some A/B testing on whether or not their dog should sleep on the bed. No spoilers.
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In some truly big news for crytpocurrency, Cary-based Epic Games is now accepting the virtual currency Monero on its Fortnite retail store...hold on now, we’re being told it was an accident. Late last week, Monero suddenly showed up as a payment option, but before arch libertarians and ban-the-banks-ers could fully celebrate, Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney took to Twitter to announce that it was all a big, fat-fingered misunderstanding.
If you still want to dip your toe into the crypto game, though, consider Lolli. The startup—which is founded by New York-based UNC grad Alex Adelman while Co-Founder and CTO Matt Senter (NC State) works out of Durham—is an e-commerce site in which rewards are doled out in Bitcoin.
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Buoyed by the success of his first Startup Summit event in Raleigh in October, Mark Bavisotto is stepping down from his role as regional director and Triangle chapter head of Startup Grind—an international organization affiliated with Google for Entrepreneurs—and trying to make Startup Summit a year-round brand. First up is a monthly event series called “Learn and Network Night,” which will kick off on Jan. 24 with a session on influencer and social media marketing led by Grace Ueng, CEO of Cary’s Savvy Growth. Bavisotto and partner Keith Washo say they’ll be announcing other new initiatives soon.
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Issuer Direct Corporation is already a bit of an outlier as a publicly traded tech (or tech-adjacent, anyway) firm HQ’d in the Triangle. Now it’s considering bucking a recent trend by moving away from the RTP area and heading to either downtown Durham or Raleigh. The communications and compliance firm’s 80 employees currently work out of 17,000 square feet in Morrisville’s Perimeter Park, but are pondering a “more urban environment” as it increases headcount.
Meanwhile another public tech-y company, Bandwidth, is adding another 30K square feet to its current 128K-square-foot lease at NC State’s Centennial Campus.
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While we’re talking about where people work, it seems like only yesterday (OK, Thursday) that we were musing about the Coming Coworkingpocalypse. Well, we think it’s officially started. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which was reportedly planning to plow another $16B into WeWork to take a majority stake, is now going to invest a much more modest $2B, allegedly spooked by WeWork’s massive losses as it rapidly expands all over the planet, including the Triangle. We’re not great at math, but $2B is a lot less than $16B. (Disclaimers: SoftBank has already invested $9B in WeWork, and the latter is spinning the backtracking as more due to SoftBank’s stock taking some recent hits that leaves it feeling less flush.)
WeWork obviously isn’t on death’s door—it’s definitely a First World problem when a $2B investment is a major disappointment—but we still predict that the bloom will be coming off the rose of the coworking behemoths starting in 2019. And if you question our soothsaying, we can show you a time-stamped text predicting a Clemson victory over mighty Alabama last night. (Disclaimers: We projected a 34-31 squeaker rather than a massively satisfying 44-16 beatdown, and that same text thread might include numerous snarky references to Alabama coach Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide’s kicking game. So I’m an LSU fan; sue me.)
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Because too much news is never enough
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See our full, ruthlessly curated calendar of Triangle tech events here.
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