Tomorrow's Friday Nooner welcomes Sue Mecham, the CEO of NALA Systems—a former GrepBeat story subject and an NC TECH Startup To Watch for 2021—and, most importantly, a past "Where's Pete?" winner. You can watch live tomorrow at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook or afterward on those same platforms or in podcast form.
We're also just one week away from the next GrepBeat Happy Hour, which will be next Thurs, March 10, from 5-7 p.m. at the Lynnwood Brewing Concern in Raleigh (1053 E Whitaker Mill Rd). Your first round will be courtesy of our sponsor, Raleigh-based brand strategy and design consutancy Thompson & Prince, which will also be offering a trivia grand prize of a free logo design. Register now!
Launch Awesome
Steve Klein is no stranger to the Triangle startup scene or, indeed, to GrepBeat readers. The NC State grad is best known as the Co-Founder of Statuspages.io, a platform that helped tech companies keep their customers up to date on service outages that was acquired by Atlassian in 2016. He talked all about that experience as a guest on ourExit Stories podcast. And surely you recall that Steve was the winning bidder for the “Pete” NFT, with the proceeds going to the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Now Steve has launched a Slack community called Launch Awesome that’s geared to product managers and marketers to share strategies on a successful product and feature launch. Read our full story about Launch Awesome here. And if you’d like to join the community, go here.
Healthy Start
One of the (multiple) reasons for the significant disparities in health outcomes and life expectancies across racial groups is the lack of diversity among participants in clinical trials. That’s the problem that RTP-based startup CliniSpan Health is trying to solve. Its platform matches clinical trials with willing participants recruited in part by “digital health influencers.” Trials for Covid-19 vaccines—several of which were conducted in the Triangle—helped jumpstart CliniSpan’s progress. The startup received a $50K SEED grant from NC IDEA, is participating in the current cohort (the 10th) of the RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP) and will be presenting at CED’s Venture Connect Summit on April 7.
Read our full feature story on CliniSpan Health here.
Trend Spotters
Social media managers need to stay on top of whatever Everyone Is Talking About Online, especially if it impacts their brand. But what if they had a way to predict viral topics before they’re officially trending for all to see? Recent NC State grads Trevor Ferree and Aidan McCarthy launched their Raleigh-based startup TSV Analytics to provide those tools. TSV Analytics is another participant in the 10th RAP cohort—aka RAP X. Read our full feature story on TSV Analytics here.
State Of The Region
Speaking of RIoT, our Suzanne Blake attended RIoT Executive Director Tom Snyder’s annual “State of the Region” address on Tuesday, timed along with the President’s State of the Union. This year, Tom focused on how the Triangle can be a leader in what he calls the “data economy.” Read our full story on Tom’s address here. You can also read the full text of his speech here, though you should know he tweaked it a bit live.
Moving In
Utah-based unicorn Lucid Software—the visual collaboration software startup raised $500M+ last summer at a $3B valuation—has opened a second U.S. office in Raleigh. Lucid paired the news with an announcement that it’s making a permanent shift to a hybrid, remote-friendly workforce, while maintaining its physical offices for in-person connection and collaboration. Now those offices will include one in Raleigh. See more info here.
This One Time...
Cary’s Epic Games announced yesterday that it has acquired the online music store and community Bandcamp. It’s something of a departure for Epic Games since Bandcamp is a bit afield of its usual targets in the video game and graphics industry. On the other hand, Fortnite has emerged as an innovator in the music space by hosting in-game live concerts from the likes of Ariana Grande and Travis Scott, and Epic Games recently purchased Harmonix, the developer of the Rock Band video game. Music streaming, anyone? TechWire and TBJ have additional info, the latter with more analysis on what the deal might mean.
Behemoth Bits
Let’s turn to some small-ish news items from giant tech companies that are either planting deeper roots locally—or pulling them up. 1) TBJ reports that Apple is actively seeking more office space in the Triangle as it begins to ramp up its local workforce even before it builds its new campus. 2) Googleannounced that it wants its workers to come back to the office at least three days a week starting on April 4, ending the “voluntary WFH period” that will have lasted more than two years. Google, of course, is building a cloud engineering hub in Durham. 3) Amazon is closing its 68 retail locations, which include one in Raleigh’s Crabtree Mall, and scrapping plans for future locations that were to include one in Durham. See more from TBJ (which has the more in-depth story) and TechWire (which ran a CNN story).
Stewart Sisters
Here’s one for Women’s History Month: The Stewart family sisters—Jeanette O’Brien, Keanya Phelps, KarenElaine Stewart and Shawna Cooper—have all taken (or are about to take, in Shawna’s case) Durham-based Momentum’s immersive full-stack engineering program for career-changers. The four sisters, who are black women ranging in age from 34 to 51, are the daughters of a father who’s a retired software engineer, while their lone brother is also an engineer.
Jeannette graduated in Momentum’s second cohort in 2018 and works at Red Hat, Keanya graduated in February and was snapped up by Durham-based Caktus Consulting Group (we wrote about a Momentum-Caktus partnership last month), KarenElaine is midway through the program as a LexisNexis scholar, and Shawna starts her program on March 21. Read the full story from Momentum here. And congrats to the Stewart sisters!
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.
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 pint glass!*
Today’s newsletter already has a RIoT feel, so let’s keep it going. This week’s winner is Caroline Griffin, RIoT’s Director of Operations, who correctly id’d my location as Raleigh’s Landmark Tavern. Here’s what she has to say when asked to describe herself in the third person: “Caroline, a Raleigh native who already claimed a GrepBeat coffee mug, is so excited to be a part of the explosive growth in the Triangle. You can catch her around town with her husband, Eddie, and dog-son, Angus, or at most any live show. She’s looking forward to drinking an ice cold Red Stripe out of her new GrepBeat pint glass. Cheers!”
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