Happy Tuesday!
Some programming announcements: 1) There will be no edition this Thursday, July 4. Happy Independence Day! 2) I’m on vacation next week on a Caribbean cruise (yes, another one) but don’t worry, the newsletter will be in the very capable hands of our UNC intern, Suzanne Blake, i.e. the person who already writes pretty much all our stories. 3) Registration is now open for the next GrepBeat Happy Hour on Thursday, July 18, at Bull McCabe’s in Durham sponsored by our good friends at Cherry Bekaert. Unless I decide to just stay in the Caribbean. |
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Sewing isn’t usually a sign of youthful rebellion, but it has been for UNC grad Ace Lane. When her great-grandparents came to America from Eastern Europe and the women were all sent to work in sweatshops making garments, they vowed that their descendents would never sew. But Ace not only started sewing her own clothes when she was around 10 years old, she’s now co-founded Shearless, a Chapel Hill-based startup that brings tech to sewing. Read Suzanne’s full story here, which includes a cool graphic from our NCSSM intern Rachel.
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Bartering is one of the oldest means of economic exchange—call it the B.C. Bitcoin—but Anansi is giving it a makeover for the knowledge economy. Two Dukies, one a recent grad (Jaymin Patel) and the second a rising senior (Sam Lester), founded the startup as a way for people to trade knowledge for free, such as swapping Chinese lessons for learning to play the guitar. Like Shearless, Anansi is one of the 10 companies in Cohort 12 of the Launch Chapel Hill Accelerator.
Read Suzanne’s full story on Anansi here.
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WRAL TechWire is in the middle of an interesting series that ranks the best and worst Triangle tech companies to work for, relying particularly on feedback given on Glassdoor. The lists include both those companies HQ’d here as well as out-of-towners with large local presences. TechWire unveiled the first batch of 15 companies on Friday and the second on Monday, with another 20 evidently on the way today.
Frankly, I can't tell what the rationale was for how the companies were broken into different groups, but presuming that the rankings are all apples to apples, the best-performing companies so far are Pendo (which was No. 1 with a pink bullet), Spiffy (which made news last week) and Bandwidth. The booby prizes, however, go to Global Knowledge (which recently confirmed layoffs) and Frontier Communications. [Last-second Update: The next batch of 20 are out, led by Wilmington-based fintech nCino, though how the startup cracked a list of Triangle tech companies is not something I'll be able to get to the bottom of in the next five minutes.]
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Both CED and NC IDEA announced new Board Chairs and Board Members yesterday. In a bid to not play favorites among them, we’ll approach it alphabetically. First, Brad Schomber, the CFO of Raleigh-based AI startup Diveplane, was elected the Chair of CED’s Board, taking over for Spoonflower Co-Founder Stephen Fraser. CED also announced 14 new Board members, including Cofounders Capital’s Tim McLoughlin.
Meanwhile Patti Gillenwater, the CEO of Raleigh-based executive search firm Elinvar, has been elected the Board Chair for NC IDEA. Three more new directors were added to the board—Linda Hall of RTP, Luke Walling of Sherrills Ford and Durham’s Stelfanie Williams.
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While we’re discussing tech support organizations that use ALL CAPS, NC TECH has opened submissions for its annual awards, which will be presented on Nov. 21 (and sponsored by Cherry Bekaert). Submissions close on July 19.
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As our loyal readers know, we are big supporters of the new NCSSM (North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics) summer internship program at Triangle tech startups—and not just because GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy helped launch the program, our own NCSSM intern Rachel Shaw has been such a hit, and Pattern Health intern Feodor Mejouev is the most determined Where’s Pete winner of alltime. But yes, mostly for those reasons.
Anyway, RTP-based Devada (the online community for developers formerly known as DZone) is lucky enough to have two NCSSM interns, Martin Ha and Robert Dimitrov, and they wrote all about them in this blog post. Huzzah!
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Check out our Twitter today for the first-ever GrepBeat video, which features a dramatic scooter-race showdown between GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and Bull City Venture Partners' Jason Caplain. We laughed, we cried, and then we laughed again—all within 28 seconds. Don't miss it!
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Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
Since there won't be a Thursday edition this week, Where's Pete is taking a breather. It'll also be off next week because, well, so is Pete.
Until then, we'll leave you with this bonus shot of Pete in GrepBeat World HQ, wearing his USA jersey both to honor the Fourth and for today's Women's World Cup between the U.S. and England. U-S-A!!!
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Because too much news is never enough
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