Happy Tuesday!
Happy Mardi Gras! And while it won’t be as debauched as Bourbon Street, you can keep the fun going at next Thursday’s GrepBeat Happy Hour, sponsored by TriNet. Mea culpa: last week the RSVPs were accidentally “locked,” but it’s all good now. |
|
Zookie’s Cookies hooked a deal in the Shark Tank on Sunday, just as we sorta hinted that maybe they definitely would in our crack reporting last week. The bake-your-own healthy dog treats from Raleigh serial entrepreneurs Justin Miller and Tom Simon landed a $50K investment for 30 percent of the company from guest Shark Alli Webb, the founder of Drybar. Mr. Wonderful (aka Kevin O’Leary) also offered the $50K, but he wanted 33.3 percent despite, Webb insisted, not even liking dogs. (“But he likes money,” said fellow Shark Lori Greiner.) Predictably, orders have been pouring in since what amounted to an eight-minute Zookie’s Cookies infomercial on primetime network TV.
WRAL TechWire has a full Q&A with Miller and Simon out today, while the TBJ’s (paywall-protected) story has a cool slideshow with all of the North Carolina companies that have pitched during the show’s 10 seasons and what they’re doing now. The last four companies were all from the Triangle and all landed on-air deals—before Zookie’s Cookies came, in reverse chronological order, RewardStock, PEEQ Technologies and Wine & Design, though the last deal fell apart after the show. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m running out of shark-related word play.
|
|
I moved to the Triangle last May without a job after the startup I was co-running in Chicago ran out of money—several times, in fact, but this last time seemed permanent. For 2 ½ months, I was essentially a fulltime networker meeting with anyone who would meet with me, especially if they were in the tech startup ecosystem. In general I found people in the Triangle to be warm, helpful and accommodating, but two people stood out as especially generous: Jan Davis and Brooks Malone. Each of them seemed to know everybody, gave me a ton of leads, made personal intros to multiple people, and kept following through after we met. Truly above and beyond for someone they didn’t know from Adam, not even through a mutual friend.
That’s why I’m particularly excited that in the latest edition of his The Download series, Brooks sat down with Jan. She’s a former CEO and a current angel investor and prolific advisor, whether in a formal role (including as a board member for local startups including Epifany and SEAL SwimSafe) or informally to pretty much anyone who needs it and asks. In fact, we met in the very coffee shop that she i.d.’s as being her go-to meeting spot: Café Carolina in Cary. Read the full Q&A here.
|
|
It’s no secret that developers are in high demand; we write about it almost weekly. It’s also no secret that programmers skew male and white (especially) or Asian. Consider that only 7 percent of tech developers are black, 8 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and 36 percent are women. Durham’s Code The Dream aims to change that with a free six-month crash course, following which some students stay on for pay as part of Code The Dream Labs to develop apps for mostly nonprofits.
GrepBeat’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez wrote about CTD’s Demo Day last Friday at American Underground as well as about the program as a whole. See the full story here.
|
|
During my aforementioned stint as a professional networker in the Triangle last summer, I tried hard to find out more information about Durham’s Eli Global and its reclusive CEO Greg Lindberg. From research it was clear that it was a large, successful company, but nobody I spoke to seemed to know much about either Lindberg or Eli Global. I did eventually have a seemingly productive, 45-minute call with Paul Brown, who was helping run Eli Global’s rapidly growing expansion into the insurance industry. Brown knew a few of my college classmates and we seemed to have a good rapport. At one point I mentioned that nobody seemed to know anything about Lindberg, and he said that Greg is a “very private guy,” but that Brown had been trying to convince him to be more open because insurance is a very regulated industry and regulators "want to know who you are."
Well, Lindberg certainly learned to get cozy with North Carolina’s insurance regulators, according to a reported federal investigation and a truly bonkers, in-depth Wall Street Journal story from late last week. (Title: Financier Who Amassed Insurance Firms Diverted $2 Billion Into His Private Empire.) Seriously, if you don’t subscribe to the WSJ, try to buy, beg, borrow, or swipe a password to get behind the paywall for this one. I’ll leave one nugget below in Extra Bits.
Bonus fun fact: North Carolina is one of 11 states in which the Insurance Commissioner is an elected position, which means they raise money for political campaigns from rich people like Lindberg, which... well, read the story. BTW I never heard from Brown again despite several follow-ups.
|
|
|
In honor of Friday’s International Women’s Day, the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce is hosting the 3rd Annual Take No Bull Women’s Conference, with an after party at WeWork. The lunchtime keynote will be given by Bee Downtown Founder and CEO Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, while GrepBeat favorites Jessica Mitsch (Co-Founder/CEO of Momentum coding school) and Shannon Media COO Rory Gillis are also on the jam-packed schedule.
|
|
|
It was hard to attend last week’s CED TechCon and not leave impressed with the two North Carolina School of Science and Math students, Niall Mullane and Olivia Fugikawa, who spoke about their robotics team. Well, if you want to see the Zebracorns—and their robots—in action, then don’t miss the Wake Country District FIRST Robotics Competition this Saturday at Holly Spring High School. (FIRST = For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.) It will run from 10:30-5:30, so you’ll have plenty of time to get home for Duke-UNC.
|
|
|
Because too much news is never enough
|
|
Extra Bit
It’s genuinely hard to pick my favorite passage from the juicy WSJ story on Greg Lindberg and Eli Global—which you absolutely should not miss—but this is the leader in the clubhouse, as much for the deadpan response as the dirt:
Mr. Lindberg also could be socially awkward and quirky, according to some former employees and people who have dealt with him on business matters. For years he wore only black pants and black T-shirts to work, and typically ate from bags of fruit and nuts. He gobbled vitamins and supplements and for exercise ran at high speed on a treadmill set at maximum incline for more than an hour, former employees say.
“Mr. Lindberg is health conscious and focuses on other variables in his life beyond what he wears,” his spokesman said. |
|
|
|
|
|
