We’ve set the next GrepBeat Happy Hour for Tuesday, April 18, from 5-7 p.m. at Bull McCabe’s in downtown Durham. We’re making the rare foray to a Tuesday (from our usual Thursday) to cap the first day of Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, which you can read more about in co-founder Archie O’Connor’s Download Q&A in Item No. 2 below. Please register for the happy hour here so we can get a sense of numbers.
Our latest Friday Nooner guest was Katie Gailes, who made the case for Main Street businesses while donning the most fashionable hat in show history. You should also check out Jackie’s latest Week in 90 Seconds.
Back In Time
Today marks the official launch of Primordial, Colopy Ventures’ new initiative to invest in early-stage tech startups in the Triangle. [Full disclosure: GrepBeat is also part of the Colopy Ventures family.] Jenn Summe will run Primordial on a day-to-day basis as she sits (actually, she often stands) 10 feet away from me, while GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy adds yet another title as “Chief Soup Maker.” Yes, seriously.
Primordial will focus especially on the pre-seed stage, targeting early-stage tech startups with less than $500K in ARR. At the start, Primordial will be investing the Godfather’s money, but once it’s up and running and better proves its thesis it may well raise a fund—similar to the path of Jurassic Capital, which is Colopy Ventures' growth-stage investment arm. As for the name? Well, if Jurassic targets growth-stage startups, you need to go back further in (geologic) time for earlier-stage companies, all the way back to the “primordial soup.” Or something like that.
You should definitely check out the high-concept photo that graces the grepbeat.com story—in addition to reading it, of course. And if you’re an early-stage startup that fits the firm’s sweet spot, check out Primordial’s website.
The Download
This week’s Download subject is Archie O’Connor, the Co-Founder—along with former Friday Nooner guest Chris Heivly—of Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, which will return for its second go-round on April 18-20 (Tuesday through Thursday). Spoiler: Archie will also be the guest on the April 14 edition of the Friday Nooner for another chance to promote RDSW. And have we mentioned that we’re holding a GrepBeat Happy Hour on Tuesday, April 18, to cap the first day of events?
Archie did plenty before helping bring RDSW to life, of course, and you can find out a lot more about that in the full Download Q&A here.
The First 1K
Sometimes it feels like just yesterday that GrepBeat launched, but in fact it’s been almost five years since the first introductory newsletter went out on Tuesday, April 7, 2018. The first story went up on grepbeat.com two days later with the fitting headline “Hello, World!” Last Friday, we posted our 1,000th story on the site. This newsletter you’re reading is the 477th that we’ve sent. Thanks for taking this ride with us to further our shared goal of lifting the Triangle’s tech startup ecosystem!
Frequent Funders
While Primordial is a newcomer to the early-stage investing game, VentureSouth has been a pretty prodigious check-writer for nearly a decade. The VC fund and angel network is HQ’d in Greenville, S.C., but it has an official Triangle offshoot (VentureSouth Triangle, launched in 2021) and even before that had written checks to a number of Triangle-based startups.
Triangle Inno has an interview with VentureSouth Managing Director Paul Clark, a former Friday Nooner guest, in which he says he visits the Triangle about once a month and that the firm intends to keep up its investment pace even if the recession that has been predicted as imminent for the past year-plus actually does come to pass.
Sweeney Speaks
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Cary-based Epic Games, isn’t known for being chatty with the media. But when he was recently on the comfortable turf of the Games Developer Conference, he gave an in-depth interview to VentureBeat alongside Epic Executive VP Sax Persson. In the wide-ranging discussion, Tim once again goes to bat for the Metaverse, which he thinks of much more broadly than the niche-y NFT craze that seems to have already crested.
Growing Pains
There’s ongoing and understandable intrigue as to how Raleigh-based First Citizens Bank will fold in newly acquired Silicon Valley Bank, especially considering almost nobody would have included the two banks in the same sentence a month ago. One key to holding on to SVB’s remaining depositers and encouraging others to return, TBJ reports, will be holding on to SVB’s bankers who have the relationships.
That could mean hefty retention bonuses and generous incentives, which could raise another issue that the article doesn’t mention but I’m guessing that First Citizens will need to manage. Namely, not upsetting its current employees if it’s suddenly handing out big bonuses to the New Kids On The Block who, after all, are only part of First Citizens because the bank they helped manage just imploded—which isn’t typically a resume-booster. A separate TBJ story explores a related issue as to whether other smaller or mid-size banks might also compete for current and former SVB depositers.
Build Great Software
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Extra Bit
Here’s a shoutout to Christina Koch, a grad of both NC State and Durham’s North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics, for being one of the four astronauts chosen for NASA’s new Artemis moon program. She already holds the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman.
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