We’re just one week away from the first GrepBeat Happy Hour of 2024—next Thursday, Feb. 29, from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Your first drink will be courtesy of our great sponsor, the Emerging Companies & Venture Capital group of Wyrick Robbins law firm. Added bonus: immediately following the happy hour, Pete will be hosting a free standup comedy showcase at Bull McCabe’s with eight very funny local comics from 7:30-9 p.m. Find the Eventbrite for the GrepBeat Happy Hour here, and the Eventbrite for the comedy show with full details here. While both events are free, it’s always helpful to get a sense of numbers, so please register.
Tomorrow’s Friday Nooner guest is Andrea Inokon, the COO of Raleigh-based fintech Cadence Cash, which helps small businesses—especially those owned by minorities and women—access capital quickly. You can watch live at noon on LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or catch afterward on those same platforms or in its podcast form.
Into The Pool
Many parents with school-age kids can tell you that they seem to spend half their time driving their kids to and from school, with far-flung after-school-activity stops tossed in for good measure. Krishnanand Kamath was one of those parents. In response, he has launched Cary-based startup Carpool.School, a platform that helps parents and schools arrange convenient carpools. The startup participated in last fall’s cohort of CED’s GRO Incubator—we wrote about the program’s Nov. 16 Demo Day—and today Krishnanand is back for his full GrepBeat close-up.
We tend to talk more about startup successes than mistakes in this space, but discussing failures—and how others can avoid them in the future—are an important way to lift the startup ecosystem. That’s the topic of this week’s In The Soup podcast, which dives into the biggest mistakes that startup founders tend to make and how to dodge such potholes. Hosts Jenn Summe (Primordial) and Melissa Crosby are joined by founders Chris Geiss (Seguno) and Brian Reale (ProcessMaker) for some real talk. (And “Reale talk.") You can listen and subscribe here.
In The Air
Yesterday’s Triangle Inno included a feature story on RTP-based startup Anumá Aerospace, which is pioneering a new take on the centuries-old concept of vacuum lift to design helium-free airships that have the home-run potential to decarbonize long-haul shipping. We profiled the startup and its married founders Jamie and Diane Little in October.
Right now, the startup is mostly funded by grants, including one from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the tech’s near-term potential to create a better weather balloon. It’s one of the more intriguing deep-tech startups in the Triangle.
Twisty Path
TBJ/Triangle Inno's Lauren Ohnesorge has another update on the winding road to what will hopefully result in a fix of Section 174 of the federal tax code to remove what’s become billed as the “innovation tax.” The latest is that the Senate still hasn’t voted one way or another on the tax bill that passed the House on a bipartisan basis on Jan. 31, of which the Section 174 tweak is but one small part.
The main issue is whether companies—including research-heavy startups—can expense their full R&D costs immediately like they used to or whether they are limited to amortizing that expense over five years, which is leading to big tax bills at a point when many startups have little or no revenue.
NIMBY!
In the tech-adjacent category, the Ukrainian leader of a malware group alleged to have targeted victims in Cary—and many other non-Triangle places about which we frankly care less—pleaded guilty last week to federal charges on two separate schemes. Take that, Vyacheslav Andreev! The North Carolina scheme involved bank accounts, with people targeted by phishing emails that would put malicious code on their computers that enabled the hackers to gain access to their bank accounts. See TBJ for the full story. Pro tip: never click on any email links aside from the GrepBeat newsletter.
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