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Disney-Epic Games

Cary’s Epic Games scored a major W yesterday when Disney announced on its quarterly earnings call that it’s investing $1.5B into the maker of Fortnite and that together they will collaborate on an “all-new games and entertainment universe” using Disney stories and characters. It marks Disney’s biggest entry into video games. Meanwhile it’s huge news for Epic Games, which might be finally turning the metaphorical page from its long-running legal disputes with Apple and Google and back toward its core business of expanding Fortnite and making new games. See more from the N&O, TBJ and—for a national take—Axios.

Domestic Help

There are some 50 million women in India who work as maids—an estimated 13% of the country’s GDP—but they’re typically employed on an informal basis, paid in cash and have virtually no benefits or protections. Duke MBA student and serial entrepreneur Arya Diwase (she’s actually simultaneously earning a masters in public policy) is launching the startup Himayat with two co-founders as a two-sided platform for maids and their employers in India to address those very issues.
 
Arya and Himayat are participating in Duke’s year-long Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs Accelerator. We’ve also written about fellow cohort members Alleviate Health, Hayha Bots, SaveOr, College To Climate, Aurganics and Infinity Portal. Read our full story on Himayat here.

In The Soup

This week’s episode of our In The Soup podcast discusses how to avoid legal mishaps. Actually, in the show they refer to them as “f-ups,” but rest assured, there is no use of the actual f-word. That’s good, because I don’t stand for that sort of language on my watch. (Side note: Pete Smack the comic is clean and cuss-free.)
 
Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby get their legal advice this week from Triangle startup lawyers Venus Liles (Liles Law) and Trevor Schmidt (Hutchison). You can listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.

Meet Investors

Raleigh-Durham Startup Week is returning to the Triangle this year on April 9-12 (Tuesday through Friday), with the first two days in Durham and the second two in Raleigh. The full schedule is still in the works, though we can tell you that GrepBeat will be hosting a Happy Hour to cap the first day—Tuesday, April 9—at Bull McCabe’s from 5-7 p.m.
 
We can also tell you now about something exciting that's new to this year’s event: founders can sign up to meet with investors, including some who will be traveling from out of town. The 15-minute investor blocks will be offered from 9am-12noon on Tuesday, April 9, in Durham and Thursday, April 11, in Raleigh. Before you meet, you will be paired with an investor that is a good fit depending on your industry, company stage, etc. It’s a great opportunity for founders who are fundraising or are thinking about potentially fundraising (O.K., so pretty much all founders) to meet with angels and VCs. You can sign up here, and read more about it on Jenn Summe’s LinkedIn post.

What's The Deal?

We’re not far from the three-year mark of Apple’s April, 2021, announcement to establish an RTP campus, saying it would invest $552M and create at least 3,000 jobs paying an average of $187,000 a year. While Apple has acquired a site to build a campus, shovels haven’t been moving dirt yet. That leads this TBJ story to ask: what’s taking so long? It’s a fair question that doesn’t have a simple answer, and as usual the tight-lipped tech giant isn’t talking publicly.
 
A few takeaways from the story: Apple has already been hiring locally and working out of several temporary locations, it doesn’t need to make its first report to the state re: its tax incentives until March 1, and three years isn’t really that long a time on a project this large—especially given than 2022 and 2023 weren’t great years in the macro sense for large tech companies and major construction developments.

Same Page

RIoT Executive Director Tom Snyder hosted the sixth annual State of the Region event in Raleigh on Tuesday, and WRAL TechWire was there for this report. Tom banged the drum for his belief that state officials should focus less on granting huge tax incentives to big out-of-state companies like Apple, for instance, and instead re-deploy some of those funds to local and state entrepreneurs looking to build the next big company right here. When I saw that one of my first thoughts was, “Thom Ruhe would be wildly shaking his head in agreement,” and sure enough it turns out NC IDEA’s CEO was at the event and is even quoted in the story agreeing with Tom. It's a Tom-Thom mind meld!
 
For the record, I agree with the sentiment that more public resources should go toward helping homegrown startups and keeping them here, and fewer to trying to lure out-of-state companies to move here or establish a branch office.

More Voices

In the more-the-merrier spirit, here are two Triangle Inno accounts on stories that we also wrote about earlier this week: A) Original Organic Transit founder and ELF inventor Rob Cotter has re-acquired the company and has big plans for the eco-friendly, bike-car hybrid; here’s the Triangle Inno story and our story from Tuesday; B) Raleigh-based legal tech startup Blue Pencil Box was acquired by Atlanta-based law firm Fisher Phillips; here’s Triangle Inno’s story, and our Monday story.

Build Great Software

Extra Bit

GrepBeat wants to beef up our business side so we can more sustainably fulfill our mission of lifting the Triangle tech community. We’ve posted the following positions: Executive Director and Director of Sales and Marketing. Please check them out, and share!

Because too much news is never enough.

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