Don’t miss tonight’s GrepBeat Happy Hour at Bull McCabe’s in Durham from 5-7 p.m., where the first round will be courtesy of our generous sponsor, Wade Minter and Dualboot Partners. A few notes: we’ll be positioned in the great outdoors on the back lawn, where large tarps will provide some shade. Note: please bring your mask for if/when you go inside to the bar or restrooms, and please bring your brains so you can correctly answer trivia questions to win swag. Register here, and see you tonight!
Keep those nominations coming for our inaugural Startups To Watch list. The deadline is Monday, Aug. 30, and yes, you can nominate your own startup. To be eligible, the startup must be headquartered in the Triangle and have annual revenues of less than $5M. Sorry, no life sciences/biotech/medical device startups. We’ll release the list of honorees at an invite-only event on Thursday, Sept. 23.
Drink It In
Casalú is the first startup we’ve covered that has its origin story set poolside with a drink in hand—or at least the first one who came clean about it. Ricardo Sucre doesn’t like beer but does enjoy hard seltzers, yet he hadn’t found one that was rum-based or spoke to his Latino heritage (he grew up in Venezuela). So Ricardo created his own, and after bringing on his fellow NC State alum Gabe Gonzalez as co-CEO—Gabe just so happens to be the Program Manager at NC State’s Entrepreneurship Clinic— Casalú was born. Read our full story here.
Tread On Me
How do you know when your tire needs to be changed, whether you’re the owner of a single car or a fleet of buses or delivery trucks? What’s the best way to feel confident that you’re not waiting too long—or just as importantly in terms of expense and extra rubber waste, not pulling the trigger too soon? Durham’s Tyratahas the answers. Developed in Duke University labs, Tyrata’s IoT sensors measure tire tread via several innovative means, from sensors installed inside the tire to speed-bump-like sensors for bus and truck fleets, including the GoDurham system. Read our full story on Tyrata here.
Level The Field
Attention small- and medium-sized food, beverage and ecommerce companies: Clerdata is here to help you use data science to evaluate your marketing efforts. We first wrote about the startup last November when it was going by Lumen Insights, but this week it’s re-branded as Clerdata to match the name of its newly launched software product.
Founder Meghan Corroon was formerly the technical director for UNC’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation portfolio evaluation, and also did complex data-science work for several national governments in Africa. Now she and her team of data scientists want to help SMBs use tools that were previously only available to large enterprises, with a product that is engineered to be privacy-friendly by not relying on consumer tracking. See Meghan’s LinkedIn post on the launch for more info.
Plaudits Due
TBJ has unveiled its 2021 class of CEO of the Year and C-Suite Awards winners and the tech (and tech-adjacent) industry is well-represented. Here are some of the names we saw: Drew Schiller, Validic; David Spitz, ChannelAdvisor; Scott Levitan, Research Triangle Foundation; and Michele Atchison, TrialCard. Congrats to all the honorees!
Time To Troll
Fortnite is the best-known game produced by Cary's Epic Games, but it’s become clear that the most popular game among its senior management is trolling Apple. When the Senate unveiled a proposed bill this week that would limit the power of tech giants like Apple and Google to set restrictions on companies (like Epic Games) that sell products through their app stores, Epic was quick to release a public statement lauding the bill for helping “level the playing field for small companies standing up to monopolists who are abusing their market power.” I guess “small companies” is all relative, since Epic’s most recent valuation of $28.7B does indeed start looking puny compared to Apple’s market cap of $2.45T. (Yes, the “T” is for trillion.)
Meanwhile Epic CEO Tim Sweeney went on a tweetstorm blasting Apple’s new neuralMatch, which is designed to help fight child pornography but which Tim calls “government spyware.”
Getting Stuck
With the Delta variant still on the march, companies large and small are having to weigh whether to issue vaccine mandates for their employees. It’s something that’s even being considered at Colopy Ventures, though the GrepBeat team is already 100% vaxxed. TBJ writer and coffee aficionado Lauren Ohnesorge has some advice for Triangle tech companies weighing mandates like Red Hat and SAS have already instituted: talk to your competitors. This could be an especially good time to present a united front by industry, just as the UNC and Duke medical systems talked first before each establishing a vaccine mandate at the same time. My humble suggestion: just get vaccinated already!
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.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
I had to turn to Twitter this week to find a winner because the only correct answers before then had come from former winners, who are thus ineligible. Twitter did bring out a number of folks who correctly identified the location as Chapel Hill’s Caffe Driade, with the mug going to the first to do so: Ed Anderson. Here’s what Ed has to say about himself: “Durham resident, Father of Lee, Husband of Beth, and, most importantly, Friend of Pete; still don't know what a 'grep' is.”
Full disclosure: Ed and I were classmates at Williams (Mass.) College, as was his wife, Beth. In fact Beth happened to see me in person when the Caffe Driade picture was taken late last month, though I didn’t know that until afterward because she said I was so “focused” on getting the pic snapped so I could hurry on to the next location that she didn’t want to interrupt me. Still, we respect the quality of communication at the Anderson household. But really, Ed, I’m not sure we can stay friends unless you learn what “grep” means. (Of course, we all know that “GrepBeat” means “awesome.”)
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