The latest Friday Noonerfeatured a lively discussion on potential Triangle tech IPOs—jumping off Spiffy Czar Scot Wingo slickly floating the letters “I-P-O” into the ether—followed by guest Mark Self, the CEO of Raleigh-based mpro5 North America. Also, Pete spells out the ingredients in his six-morning-a-week breakfast smoothie. You’re welcome.
For Starters
Our For Starters podcast returns for its second season with a new host—ArchiveSocial/Optimere founder Anil Chawlatakes over for Automated Insights founder Robbie Allen—and a new laser focus on finding product-market fit. One key holdover is the show’s sponsor, law firm Robinson Bradshaw. (Plus, of course, producer extraordinaire Jackie.) We’ll be dropping a new episode every Tuesday for 10 weeks.
This season kicks off with Kevel founder (and former Download Q&A subject) James Avery in the guest chair. James talks about how and his team found product-market fit at the adtech startup that was formerly named Adzerk before a late 2020 re-branding that accompanied a $11M Series A, which was followed a year later by a $10M Series B. That's a level of investment dollars that only flows after you've cracked product-market fit.
Read some show highlights here, then listen (and subscribe!) to the episode here.
Another Exit
Apologies for not noticing this until today—thanks toDownload scribe and Hughes Pittman man-about-town Brooks Malone for making me aware—but Raleigh-based edtech startup LearnPlatform was acquired just before the holidays by Infrastructure, a publicly traded learning management software company. LearnPlatform Co-Founder and CEO Karl Rectanus was a Download subject in April, 2019, and we first profiled the startup in February, 2020.
Since launching in 2014, LearnPlatform has had many touchpoints with the Triangle tech ecosystem—from an NC IDEA grant in 2014, to NC TECH Startups To Watch status in 2016, to multiple Raleigh Founded/HQ Raleigh offices, to inclusion on the inaugural Triangle Tweener list from Scot Wingo. Karl and his team will continue to grow LearnPlatform within Infrastructure. Here’s a blog post from Karl on the startup’s path to this point and what he sees for the future. Congrats to LearnPlatform on notching another successful exit for our tech startup community.
Gatekeepers
In the current Supreme Court term, the justices have agreed to hear a case that could have far-reaching impacts on how social media companies manage their sites—and a prominent local family will be paying especially close attention. Google was sued by the family of a woman who was among those killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris for allegedly promoting ISIS recruiting videos via its YouTube recommendation algorithms. The question before the court is whether recommendation algorithms are exempt from the liability shield provided to big tech companies for content on their sites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Triangle Inno reports that Anne Cameron Cain, the daughter of Raleigh diplomat Jim Cain, filed a similar lawsuit against Twitter in the aftermath of her husband being killed in a 2016 ISIS attack in Brussels. That lawsuit was dismissed, but the issues are broadly similar and the two cases share an attorney.
Tech companies say that if they’re legally liable for anything and everything spit out by their recommendation algorithms or feeds, they’d be forced to take a far heavier hand on censoring content and the internet would “devolve into a disorganized mess,” says Google in a court filing. Here’s the Triangle Inno story as well as a Bloomberg overview of the issues.
All Grown Up
We mentioned a while back that Elizabeth Loverso is now the managing director and day-to-day leader of Cary-based video game studio Red Storm Entertainment. Now she’s the latest subject in TBJ’s “Executive Voice” feature, where among other things you can learn what she wanted to be when she was 8. Personally, I wanted to be the Managing Editor of GrepBeat. Mission accomplished!
Global Reach
Steve Rao’s TechWire guest column on the contributions of Indians and Indian-Americans to the Triangle’s tech and business scene included one stat that jumped out to me. To wit: between 2014-2018, Indian businesses invested more than $409M in the state to create more then 4,400 jobs—more than were created by Indian investments in any other state. It sounds like the office that the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina has set up in Bangalore is paying off.
Build Great Software
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Dualboot is a software and business 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 years of 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.
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