We’re exactly one week away from the next GrepBeat Happy Hour on Tuesday, April 9, at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham to cap off Day One of the four-day Raleigh-Durham Startup Week. Your first drink will be courtesy of our great sponsor, Dualboot Partners. Please register so we can get a sense of numbers. Sorry, Pete won’t be staging another standup comedy show later that same night at Bull McCabe’s; instead—self-promotion alert!—he’ll do so two nights later on Thursday, April 11 (get tickets here.)
ICYMI: Susan Mahlburg—the CEO of Durham-based edtech DiffyQ—was the guest on the latest Friday Nooner, sponsored by Whitley Recruiting. The GrepBeat Godfather missed the show due to a Spring Break trip, but that doesn’t mean you should miss it too.
True Win-Win
Sports data startup Gemini Sports Analytics, which uses machine learning to help pro and college sports teams use data to win more games, moved to Raleigh from Miami in January. And now the NC State men’s and women’s basketball teams have both made the Final Four. Coincidence?!
OK, probably yes. While Gemini Sports counts the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts and college’s Texas A&M Aggies among its customers, to the best our knowledge the Wolfpack haven’t signed on. (Yet.) But the three-year-old startup has shown impressive traction since releasing its product last year and recently raised $3.25M, boasting investments from the owners of nine professional teams. Read our full story on Gemini Sports here.
Safety First
All sorts of potentially expensive mayhem can happen on job sites, from injuries to property damage to security breaches to spills of hazardous materials. Employers and contractors need to stay on top of documenting everything, which is easier said than done in real time. Enter Cary-based incidentli, a cloud-based platform that enables employers to record issues in detail right after they occur and route the info to insurers, HR departments, safety officers and whoever else needs to know.
CEO Adee Feinstein, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits under his belt, pitched incidentli at Venture Connect on March 21. Read our full story here.
Nothing Doing
If you’ve driven by the former site of the Cary Towne Mall lately, you’ll note that the abandoned mall is definitely not a sparkling mixed-use development with a hotel, 75,000 square feet of retail and up to 2.7 million square feet of office space including the new HQ of Epic Games. In fact, one Cary Town Council member told the N&O that it looks like a “moonscape.” That’s in this story that recaps the latest on what Epic Games’ is doing at the site that it purchased on Dec. 31, 2020 for $95M––and the “latest” is basically nothing, with the company staying pretty mum on what it’s even thinking.
Of course at the end of 2020, Epic Games––flush with early-pandemic-fueled revenue as seemingly every gamer in the world was stuck at home gaming––surely thought it would have grown its number of Triangle-based employees significantly by now. Instead its world—and the world in general—changed and Epic likely has a somewhat smaller (though still large) local workforce and isn't feeling as flush as it did then.
Also, not sharing much publicly is pretty on-brand for CEO Tim Sweeney and Epic. To wit: we’ve tried to get Tim or another senior Epic Games exec as Grep-a-palooza speakers each year, without success. Though this year we did get our first actual reply, this admirably to-the-point email from Tim that I am re-publishing here in its entirety: “Sorry, can’t.”
Trimming Space
WeWork’s bankruptcy filing has left its two current Triangle locations––one in Durham, one in Raleigh––in limbo. Some of that uncertainly cleared up yesterday when, as part of a bankruptcy filing, WeWork revealed that while it will keep its location at Durham’s One City Center, it will shrink its current footprint of 58,000 square feet across two floors by an undisclosed amount. Mum is still the word on the Raleigh location at One Glenwood. See TBJ and the N&O for more.
AI Impact
We mentioned in last Thursday’s newsletter that Durham-based coding school Momentum has decided to close, but I also want to share this Triangle Inno story about it because it mentions something interesting. Namely, Momentum CEO Jessica Mitsch Homes told Triangle Inno that demand for the entry-level software developers the school graduates has been drying up because software companies have been using generative AI to help with coding tasks “faster than we ever could have imagined.” Rather than a senior developer teaming with a junior colleague to code, it seems, increasingly the latter “assistant” role is being played by generative AI.
Of course, in the longer term, hiring a lot fewer entry-level coders means there will be fewer senior developers and collective expertise down the line. But that’s a problem for another day. In the near and intermediate term, software companies using generative AI effectively can get the same amount of development done with fewer developers, which will have all sorts of impacts.
Blue Ridge Ruby
Two-time “Where’s Pete?” winner Joe Peck––he won for best-looking home office during the earliest days of the pandemic in mid-March, 2020, and again in one of the last “Where’s Pete?” editions for knowing I was at Durham’s Jetplane Coffee in May, 2022––has moved from Durham to Asheville, but he still has ties to the Triangle tech community. Part of the way he keeps those ties alive is by co-organizing Blue Ridge Ruby, a conference for Ruby developers that will be held in Asheville for the second year on May 30-31 (Thursday/Friday).
Among the speakers with Triangle ties are Durham’s Lauren Auchter, Wake Forest’s Louis Antonopoulos and Dustin Haefele-Tschanz of Durham-based Spreedly. Joe hopes to see even more Triangle-based attendees than at last year’s inaugural event. See all the info here.
Build Great Software
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Grep-a-palooza Bit
Grep-a-looza 3 sponsor alert: we welcome NC State’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship group back for its second year as a University Sponsor. So far our other sponsors for this year’s event are Hutchison, Robinson Bradshaw, Financial Symmetry and NC IDEA’s ENGAGE grant. Would you like your company (or university) to be represented alongside them? Of course you would! Reach out to our Business Development Manager Cesar Romero to make it happen. Grep-a-palooza 3 will take place on Tuesday, June 4, at the Durham Convention Center.
See all posted jobs here. If you'd like a job to be posted, tell us at jobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!*
No, we're not bringing this feature back. (We were already repeating coffee shops; in fact this was our second contest at Durham's Jetplane Coffee.) But I realized that newer readers may have never heard of "Where's Pete?" and thus may have been confused when we mentioned it above in Item 6.
Each Tuesday, we showed a pic of Pete drinking coffee (well, pretending to drink coffee) at a different Triangle-area coffee shop. and readers needed to guess where. One lucky winner earned a GrepBeat mug and recognition in the Thursday newsletter. Joe Peck won for the second time in May, 2022, by correctly identifying this location.
"Where's Pete?" ran from June, 2019, through June, 2022, with an "outside of restaurants" phase at the start of the pandemic (remember when we couldn't go inside coffee shops?) and a "inside of bars" phase (turns out they mostly look alike) before finishing with a return to coffee shops.
Real talk: doing our best to serve you costs money. Businesses and organizations that would like to support our efforts should see our sponsorship opportunities here.
