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Happy Thursday!

Last call: Be sure to register for (and show up at) tonight’s GrepBeat Happy Hour from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Bonus: your first round will be courtesy of our sponsor, real estate stalwarts Davis Moore Advisors. Double bonus: all attendees will receive an exclusive one-day-only discount code for Grep-a-palooza, our inaugural full-day conference on June 9. As usual, you can also win swag by answering Pete’s trivia questions, which he gets more excited about than is probably healthy. So cap an afternoon at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week by hoisting a glass with the Triangle tech community. See you tonight!
 
Speaking of Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, event co-chair Chris Heivly is tomorrow’s guest on The Friday Nooner. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, or catch afterwards on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
 


VC Deep Dive

Our Suzanne Blake took a deep dive into the investment portfolio of five Triangle-based VCs—Bull City Venture Partners, Cofounders Capital, Harbright Ventures, IDEA Fund Partners and Oval Park Capital—since 2017. We wanted to see how the local VCs stacked up in terms of how many local companies they invest in; how early/late in a startup’s growth cycle they tend to invest; how hands-on they are as an investor; how many diverse founders/teams are they investing in; how much of a preference they have for serial entrepreneurs; average check size; and much more.
 
We think the story is worth your time. Bonus: lots of handy-dandy graphs!


 


RDSW Marches On

With all due respect to tonight’s GrepBeat Happy Hour, the inaugural Raleigh-Durham Startup Week is the big news this week in the Triangle tech scene. (Though in fairness to us, the GrepBeat Happy Hour is part of RDSW’s official schedule.) Suzanne hit multiple RDSW events on Tuesday, the first afternoon of the Tuesday-Friday conference, and returned with all the highlights here.
 
I was a panelist at an event yesterday, and today at 4pm the GrepBeat Godfather will join Levitate’s Jes Lipson at American Underground in a talk on bootstrapping, something they both know well. Joe will then lead the crowd to Bull McCabe’s all Pied Piper-like. The free events across downtown Durham continue this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon.


 


Healthy Bits

Many of us would like to acquire healthier habits and... hold on, I just got a text, let me check my phone... and while I’m here I should pop over to Twitter... wait, they did what now???
 
OK, my bad, I’m back. But it was precisely this realization about our ever-shorter attention spans that led Wholistics Health CEO Helen Pak-Harvey to pivot to dispense the startup’s health and wellness content via a chatbot that sends a daily morning message to a user’s smartphone. Durham-based Wholistics is a semi-finalist for one of NC IDEA’s $50K SEED grants. Read our full story here.


 


Fighting Burnout

While there’s some debate on whether we’re actually seeing a Great Resignation or not, nobody disagrees that the past two-plus years have been pretty stressful overall. While tech companies were better-positioned than most industries to adapt to work-from-home and hybrid work schedules, they’ve also brought new challenges in terms of burnout. (Exhibit A: What does it mean to “stay home” sick or take off if you’re already home?) TBJ takes a look at how some local tech companies like Brightly (formerly Dude Solutions) and ServiceTrade are trying to cope with—and prevent—employee burnout.
 
Spoiler: Brightly Chief People Officer Erikka Buracchio, who is quoted in the story, is a future guest on our Tech Culture Club podcast with host Melissa Phillippi.


 


Tasty Move

We mentioned Raleigh-based Without A Trace briefly in Tuesday’s newsletter after it took second place at a Launch Greensboro pitch event, but now TBJ has a more in-depth look on CEO Brooke Navarro and her startup. Without A Trace makes allergen-free snack foods; we first profiled them last February. Brooke spent 11 years working on Wall Street before taking the entrepreneurial plunge and moving to the Triangle in 2020.


 


Sales Pitch

While we focus first on Triangle-based VCs—witness today’s through examination of their portfolios—it’s also clear that money travels, especially in these Zoom-y days. Triangle Inno talked to a few out-of-state investors who do write checks to Triangle startups after a panel earlier this week about what they’re looking for. The firms are Atlanta-based Valor Ventures and Sands Capital out of Washington D.C.


 


Red Hat Bump

It’s safe to say that IBM isn’t regretting its $34B acquisition of Red Hat the way it keeps lifting its results and leading to headlines like these: IBM continues to ride Red Hat momentum, execs say (TBJ); IBM beats Street, stock jumps on stronger than expected earnings report (WRAL TechWire).


 


Build Great Software

Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a business and software development company. Their clients include tech and non-tech founders as well as Fortune 500 companies, so they can start small or scale fast depending on what you need. Every client is assigned a U.S.-based Product Director with at least 10 years experience bringing products to market, and they can manage the entire development process. They focus on how the software fits into your company to drive revenue and build the business. At Dualboot, they don’t just write your software—they help you grow your business. Intrigued? Email them here.


 

Extra Bit

Bandwidth CEO David Morken is the latest boldface name to join the Grep-a-palooza lineup, in his case as the closing keynote to bookend Pendo CEO Todd Olson, who kicks things off in the morning. Remember that you can get a special discount code for Grep-a-palooza if you show up at tonight’s GrepBeat Happy Hour.

 

Because too much news is never enough.

 

Here's some helpful content from our partners.

You can find all our Partner Feeds here.

 

Here are some great jobs at Triangle startups.

To see all posted jobs, go to CronJobs. If you'd like your company to be listed, tell us at cronjobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.

Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!*
 

This week’s victor is two-time champ Lucas Beal, who knew that I was at Monuts in Durham. Here he’s celebrating with some caffeine after a (humblebrag alert!) 5 a.m. workout. More about him in his own words: “Lucas is an attorney with Hutchison PLLC where he loves helping the firm’s life science and technology clients negotiate and navigate contracts and data privacy. Outside of work he can be found running with the F3 Churham group, playing tennis, or otherwise staying active so he can keep us with his three young kids.” Hey, this F3 thing sounds awesome, people should really check it out.

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