Copy
View in browser

Sponsored by

Happy Thursday!

Some programming announcements: 1) As we flip the calendar from Q2 to Q3, we say goodbye (for now) to Dualboot Partners as the sole sponsor of the GrepBeat newsletter and hello to Durham Bottling Company, the soon-to-come coworking space from Smashing Boxes CEO Nick Jordan. See below for more info.

2) I'll be on vacation next week, but that doesn’t mean the newsletter is taking a break. GrepBeat’s new-ish Social Media Manager, Jackie Sizing, will be your able scribe.

3) The Friday Nooner is taking a brief hiatus for the month of July and will return on Friday, Aug. 6 with renewed vigor.
 


Easy Does It

Last night the GrepBeat team watched startups pitch themselves in person at a Demo Day. Up until March 2020, that would have been a thoroughly unremarkable occurrence—aside from the many remarkable Triangle startups and founders we encounter, of course. But given all that has happened the last 15+ months, it was great to get out to the WeWork in Raleigh for the final piece of CED’s GRO Incubator.
 
One of the startups that pitched was Top10Easy, or “T10E” to the kids. Today we’re running a feature story on the company, which will be a new slimmed-down search engine that would return a list of, say, the top 10 restaurants or plumbers or dentists in Raleigh rather than Google’s oft-overwhelming ocean of results. Founder Hal Sharpe was previously a publisher for Lake Gaston Phone Book in Littleton, N.C., for 22 years until 2017, so Top10Easy is very much a blend of old and new.

Read our full story on Top10Easy here. We also recently wrote feature stories on other GRO participants who pitched last night, including eParamus and IQ Everest.


 


Plan2Pivot

When the Triangle locked down like much of the world last March, we at GrepBeat naturally took a look at how local startups were adjusting to the dramatic changes and uncertainty. One startup that I wanted our writers to check in on was Plan2Play, which we had just written about that Feb. 6. Plan2Play was poised to present at CED’s Venture Connect summit last March (which ended up going virtual) as a platform to help facilitate IRL, in-person interaction among a company’s employees. Ouch: not a great place to be as of late March 2020. So we featured Plan2Play among three other workplace-related Triangle startups (All Elements, StrongKey and InHerSight) in an April 9, 2020 story to see how they were adjusting, and Plan2Play was in the very early stages of trying to figure out a pivot.
 
Fast-forward to the present and Plan2Play’s pivot is official. It’s turned its community-building platform toward fitness studios, gyms and wellness facilities. This week Plan2Play launched its CRM (customer relationship management) product called ARC, which is an acronym for “attract, run, connect.” Best of all: the startup’s name still works! See TechWire for the full story on Plan2Play’s pivot.


 


Political Winds

If you ever wonder how Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants score themselves those sweet, sweet tax rebates from state governments, yesterday’s TBJ had one reminder: lobbyists. All three companies have significantly expanded the number of lobbyists that are registered with the state to represent their interests in Raleigh. From June of 2019 to today (i.e. two years), Amazon went from two lobbyists to six; Apple from five to nine; and Google from two to six. Of course plenty of other companies in various industries also significantly increased their lobbying presence. TBJ has the full scoop.


 


Seeing Clearly

Sense Photonics, which has offices in Durham as well as San Francisco, Edinburgh and elsewhere across the globe, has launched a new Lidar platform for use in autonomous vehicles. “Lidar” stands for Light Detection and Ranging, which uses lasers to help create highly accurate, real-time and camera-like three-dimensional images. That’s especially useful and necessary, of course, for autonomous vehicles. See TechWire for more info.


 


National Pub

We wrote in April about the ABC show Free Enterprise, which stars Brian Hamilton—a past Download subject and the founder of Raleigh-based fintech Sageworks, which he sold to Accel-KKR—helping the recently incarcerated start new businesses. Last week, Good Morning America ran a piece on Brian and the show. The project emerged out of Brian’s work with his Inmates to Entrepreneurs organization.


 


Following Up

In Tuesday's newsletter we wrote about the $1M financing by RepVue, the Glassdoor (or Match.com?) for sales professionals led by ChannelAdvisor vet Ryan Walsh that we first wrote about in October, 2019. Here are some more RepVue stories from TechWire and TBJ. Quick, somebody tag this on Twitter!
 

 


Bottled Up

If you’re looking for coworking space, you can always play it safe and glom on to a big chain like WeWork. And hey, they’re perfectly nice. But if you’re looking for something more local, gritty and—dare we say it—cool, then the soon-to-open Durham Bottling Company may be for you. Smashing Boxes CEO Nick Jordan bought the space at 506 Ramseur Street a few years back as a new company HQ but always had grander plans for the 16,000+ square feet. Enter Durham Bottling Company (DBC), which might sound like a new nightlife concept but is in fact a coworking and event space with a stated mission to create a more inclusive and diverse community. DBC offers all the usual amenities you’d expect (free coffee, hot desks, private offices, etc.) but also has a sister nonprofit entity that will help stage a monthly event series. You can get on the waitlist here.

 

Extra Bit

Congrats to Scot Wingo and Aris Buinevicius for founding ChannelAdvisor 20 years ago today!

 

Because too much news is never enough.

 

Here's some helpful content from our partners.

You can find our full Partner News page here.

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

This week’s winner is Micah Rogers, who correctly noted that I was at Durham’s Lime & Lemon. Sayeth Micah: “I'm the Admissions Advisor here at Momentum, where we're training software developers and helping kick start their careers in the Triangle's quickly growing tech community! If you're interested in learning to code, let's chat. After many attempts, I'm thrilled to win the ‘Where's Pete?’ challenge and excited to add the coveted GrepBeat mug to my collection!”
 
Congrats, Micah! And hopefully this will forever put to rest the supposed “Momentum Jinx,” in which Jessica Mitsch was convinced that while RIoT seems to win a mug a month, Momentum never wins. Well, along with Momentum’s Director of Career Development Katie Dunn—who won on May 20—that’s now two Momentum winners in less than two months. Maybe it’s just a Jessica Jinx?

Any news we should know? Hit "reply" or send it to news@grepbeat.com.

Love what you see? Forward this to a friend.

Wait, a friend just forwarded this to you? Then subscribe!
Oh yeah, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

This thing doesn’t write itself.
Credit (or blame) Managing Editor Pete McEntegart.

It also doesn't pay for itself.
Write us at sponsorships@grepbeat.com to become a sponsor!






This email was sent to <<Email address>>
why did I get this?    unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences
GrepBeat · 121 East Parrish Street · Durham, NC 27701 · USA