Just two days away from the GrepBeat Happy Hour this Thursday from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. Your first round will be covered by our sponsor Qodeo, which matches 7,000 VC/PE investors globally with diverse entrepreneurs. Bonus: all entrepreneur attendees will get 50% off Qodeo’s Concierge service, and one lucky trivia winner will score a free year of Concierge (saving $99-$240). Please register here so we can get a handle on numbers.
ICYMI: The latest Friday Nooner guest was Jamie Jones, the Director of Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Don’t miss the part in which Pete hijacks the proceedings to seek tips from Jamie (an accomplished long-distance cyclist and endurance athlete) on the Last Man Standing race he was participating in the following day. Spoiler: Pete won his race—called the Possum Scurry—by completing 43.5 miles. Now he’s telling everyone. Frankly, it’s insufferable.
The Download
In this week’s edition of The Download, our own Brooks Malone (arguably better known for his day job as Hughes Pittman’s man about town) sat down with Marina Harrell, the Co-Founder of Morrisville-based nonprofit Code Edge. Code Edge teaches coding to under-served African American and Hispanic students. “EDGE” is also an acronym for Code Edge’s motto: Engage in learning always, Dedicate yourselves to working hard to reach your potential, Gain knowledge by achieving all that you can, and Excel in your skills so that you have access to a better future.
It’s somewhat bittersweet to have come to the end of another season of our Exit Stories podcast, but Season 3 goes out with a bang with guest Eric Boduch, one of the co-founders of Raleigh-based Pendo. As you may know—and as Eric tells host Kevin Mosley (Jurassic Capital)—Eric has worked with current Pendo CEO Todd Olson for decades. The two founded their first startup together (Cerebellum) way back in the previous century, which had a good run and then a rocky end. But hey, you’ve got to get back on the horse, which they ultimately did with Pendo—galloping all the way to unicorn status.
Read some highlights of the show here, then listen to it here. Exit Stories will be back with a new season in 2023.
Ecosystem Summit
Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Day One of the two-day NC IDEA Ecosystem Summit in Winston-Salem. It was great to see a number of familiar faces, including recent Friday Nooner guests Jamie Jones (Duke I&E), Lauren Romer (Raleigh Founded) and Tim Scales (American Underground) plus Exit Stories guestKarly Pavlinac (WAAM).
The event continues today, capped by the live unveiling of the latest recipients of NC IDEA’s $50K SEED grants out of 158 applicants from across the state. NC IDEA will also release the names of the 13 winners of its ECOSYSTEM grants, with the specific focus on programs supporting under-served entrepreneurs in the state. I’ve actually seen all the winners but have been sworn to silence until NC IDEA makes it public, and it’s killing me. But check out our social accounts sometime after 4pm.
Health-y Raise
Durham-based digital health startup Validic has raised $12M in a new funding round led by Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Led by CEO Drew Schiller—a former Download Q&A subject—Validic offers telehealth, remote patient monitoring, electronic health records integration, and much more. It has now raised more than $30M going all the way back to its 2013 seed round of $760K led by Mark Cuban. Durham’s SJF Ventures also participated in this new round, which is (at least) the second Validic funding round it has been a part of. See TechWire for more info.
Sad News
Sad news: Wolfspeed co-founder and CTO John Palmour has passed away. John helped found Wolfspeed (then called Cree) at NC State in 1987 based on groundbreaking research in producing semiconductors. TBJ’s Lauren Ohnesorge spoke to many who knew John—who was also a lifelong hardcore Wolfpack fan—for this remembrance.
Battle Lines
Cary’s Epic Games is having some more days in court with Apple as the battle over the tech giant’s App Store has reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. At issue is the App Store’s “walled garden”—all apps for iPhone must be sold through the App Store, which takes a sizable 15-30% cut on all transactions. Apple says that’s to fuel its investments in security and privacy that help protect users, while Epic Games says it amounts to an illegal monopoly that inhibits innovation and, not incidentally, restricts the revenue of companies like Epic.
The two companies squared off in a lower court last year in a ruling that went mostly Apple’s way, and both companies appealed. This is one that could end up in the Supreme Court, which is fine with us because it would provide more content for months or even years. Here’s some more detail from TechCrunch.
Soft Landings
As the Twitter C-suite was among the most recent to find out, top execs of an acquired company are not infrequently shown the door not long after the deal becomes official. If that ends up being the case at Morrisville-based ChannelAdvisor—and for the record we are certainly hoping everyone keeps their jobs if they still want them—TBJ reports that at least there will be soft landings. Or “golden parachutes,” as the (people who long ago used to be) kids say. Last Friday, ChannelAdvisor shareholders voted to approve the previously announced buyout by New York-based CommerceHub, and the SEC filing outlines that CEO David Spitz and some other top execs would receive millions should they be terminated in connection to the deal.
Awards Corner
Let’s toss some plaudits: 1) NC TECH has named Pendo’s Todd Olson as its Tech CEO of the Year. NC TECH’s full awards ceremony will be held on Nov. 29. 2) The Research Triangle Cleantech Cluster announced its annual Cleantech Innovation Awards winners last week. The honorees include GrepBeat story subjects Sue Mecham and Judy Riffle of Durham-based NALA Membranes in the “Cleantech Research Innovation” category, and Durham-based FlexGen in the “Cleantech Impact: Energy” category. See TechWire for more. 3) TBJ has unveiled its Fast 50 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the Triangle. Some tech-y honorees include Spreedly, FM:Systems, Patagonia Health, Brightly Software, Prometheus Group, RapidScale and Pendo. Here are all the winners: Batch 1 | Batch 2
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