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 $5M. Sorry, no life sciences/biotech/medical device startups. We’ll release the list of honorees at an invite-only event on Thursday, Sept. 23.
ICYMI: Here's our latest #TW90 (that's what the kids call The Week in 90 Seconds).
For Starters
How ancient does something need to be to qualify as “old school”? In the digital age, we’d posit, not very old at all. To wit: for Episode 8 of the For Starters podcast—thanks as always to our sponsor Robinson Bradshaw—host Robbie Allen discusses some customer acquisition tools that would have fit in perfectly well in 2005: email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
Of course everything that’s old is new again, and guests Eric Boggs (RevBoss CEO/F3’s Banana Split) and Jeff Cooper (Founder of Saltbox Solutions) lay out why these methods still work—and how to make them work for your business. Read some show highlights here, then listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Fun & Game$
If I could have made a living back in the day playing Intellivision baseball, well, I still wouldn’t have made a very good living since I wasn’t even the best on my block. (In fairness, the Whalen Boys had more free time—they didn't even have a paper route!) But eSports is now a big business, with college teams (like at NC State) and pro tournaments with big cash prizes and endorsement deals.
Caleb Smith is a former professional soccer player who, with his dad Vinny Smith, has opened a location of the Contender eSports franchise in Cary. Now the Smiths are using it as a hub to grow pro eSports—it recently hosted the first-ever North American championship for the game Diabotical—and also introduce kids to STEM careers through week-long gaming/design/coding camps and as part of an internship program with Apex Friendship High School. Read our full story on Caleb and Contender eSports here.
Freshening Up
Raleigh-based Allstacks, which makes tools that track the productivity of software development teams, rolled out a series of product updates yesterday. We first wrote about Allstacks in February, 2019, and it was also one of the Greppys nominees for Best Medium-Sized Startup, which were surely two big reasons that CEO Hersh Tapadia and team were able to close on a $4M funding round this summer. The product updates include new capabilities to power personalized reporting, expanded data sets and an enhanced forecasting algorithm. See Hersh’s blog post for more.
Inc. 5000
Sitation, an Apex-based ecommerce software and services startup that we profiled last May, checked in at No. 379 in the hot-off-the-presses Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the nation. The company has a three-year growth rate of 1,274%, making it the eighth-fastest-growing private company in the state according to Inc. We’ll likely have more coverage of the list in Thursday’s edition, but Sitation CEO Steve Engelbrecht was exceptionally quick on the email draw on this newsletter deadline morning and has thus earned primacy of place.
Trust The Process
Durham-based ProcessMaker has formed a partnership with Gnosis, a consulting and analytics firm based in Cyprus, to helped ProcessMaker expand its digital automation platform into Greece, Cyprus and elsewhere in Southern Europe. You’ll surely recall that we first wrote about ProcessMaker in October, 2018, and that in February of this year it raised $45M from Aldrich Capital Partners. ProcessMaker’s Gnosis partnership also sent me down a “Gnostic gospels/Gnosticism” rabbit hole this morning, and I’m not sure whether to blame or thank them. See TechWire for more info, though it's curiously silent about the Gospel of Thomas.
Red Carpet-baggers
TBJ’s Lauren Ohnesorge has put together a three-story package tracking the economic incentives that the state has offered to various companies (tech and otherwise) to relocate or expand in the Triangle, including a detailed look at what follow-though there has or hasn’t been since the deals were announced and what states NC beat out. (Texas, mostly.) One takeaway is that Apple landed a massive $845.5M package of incentives, which works out at nearly $282K for each of the 3K jobs that Apple pledges to create.
Obviously, that’s a heck of a deal for Apple, which will effectively wipe out almost all of its personal income tax withholding for its employees in the region for decades. So the question then becomes: is it a good deal for taxpayers? One key, if unanswerable, question: would Apple still have come without any tax incentive, or a materially smaller one? (Notably, Google is plunking down its Google Cloud engineering hub in Durham without any guaranteed incentives.) Then one would have to estimate the value of more indirect sources of state revenue—plus other less-tangible benefits to the state—that the presence of thousands of well-paid Apple employees and the halo effect of the Apple name itself might mean. And most importantly: will this help me get a good deal on an iPhone?
New Start
Today’s TechWire has an update on Bridget Harrington, who stepped down a few weeks back as the executive director of Innovate Raleigh to join Thinc Strategy, a Wilmington-based, female-led management consulting company. Bridget’s nearly four-year tenure as Innovate Raleigh’s first fulltime executive director included highlights like establishing the annual Innovate Raleigh Summit, creating the Triangle Innovation Hub and, of course, being a guest on The Friday Nooner. Best of luck to Bridget!
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.
