The latest Friday Nooner episode featured Nichole Lowe, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based Zoee, a platform for virtual coaches. She was also the only guest we've ever had who’s worked directly with Prince.
There’s less than a week remaining for the Early Bird pricing for Grep-a-palooza 2, our full-day tech conference that will take place on Thursday, June 1 at the Durham Convention Center. The Early Bird rates are $149 for Startup Founders/Employees and $249 for Everyone Else and extend through this Sunday, April 30. On Monday May 1, the price will go up to $199 for Startup Founders/Employees and $299 for Everyone Else. So don’t delay, register today!
Diving In
Like many would-be startup founders, before taking the plunge, working lawyer Jonathan Crook needed to address for himself the eternal question: “What is the worst that could actually happen”? His answer: “No one is interested, everyone thinks it’s dumb, and I go back to being a lawyer.” Feeling assured that the nightmare scenario of failing wasn’t so scary after all, Jonathan dove in with Raleigh-based legaltech Blue Pencil Box. The startup lets lawyers and other interested parties keep track of non-compete and restrictive covenant laws across different states.
Blue Pencil Box is a semifinalist for one of NC IDEA’s $50K SEED grants. Read our full feature story here.
Table Talk
Excel and Google Sheets have helped to bring spreadsheets to the masses, but for teams and other parties trying to share and work on more complicated data sets, their limitations begin to show fairly quickly. That insight is what led Jiazhu Hu to create Cary-based TablDA. The name is a combination of the words table, data and application, which gives a pretty good idea of what the startup does.
Side note: Jiazhu got on our radar when he introduced himself at the GrepBeat table at Venture Connect. Never be afraid to pitch your Triangle-based, early-stage tech startup to be featured in GrepBeat. Telling such stories is literally our reason for being.
Red Hat joined a long and frankly depressing list of big tech companies yesterday when it announced layoffs, in its case a reported 4% of its workforce. Red Hat employs about 19,000 people worldwide, with about 2,000 in its Raleigh HQ. Parent company IBM—which acquired Red Hat for $34B in 2019—had already laid off about 5,000 employees, so it seemed unlikely that Red Hat would be totally spared. Still, this is big news locally because Red Hat is one of the Triangle’s biggest and longest-running tech success stories and never seems to suffer a significant hiccup.
Yesterday the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court decision in the case between Cary’s Epic Games and Apple over what Epic had claimed were illegal antitrust actions related to the tech giant’s App Store. Apple crowed that “today’s decision reaffirms Apple’s resounding victory” in this case, while Epic CEO Tim Sweeney also seemed to be declaring at least a partial victory while mulling next steps. Sorry Tim, but most non-Epic Games-ers consider the legal decision to be broadly in Apple’s favor. But Epic Games still has a similar case pending against Google for its own app store.
Meanwhile Tim took a break from trashing Apple and Google to target the “losers and goons” who were campaigning against Twitter’s new verification rules. I will withhold my comments until Twitter’s blue-check “rules” are actually made clear and don’t change suddenly, capriciously and without notice for at least 24 hours.
Bipartisanship seems awfully tough to come by these days at any level, so it’s nice to see state senators Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake County) and Todd Johnson (R-Cabarrus and Union Counties) teaming up to introduce bill S446, the Right to Start Act. In short, the bill is designed to help new businesses grow. For instance, the bill would defer the payment of business taxes for companies that are less than five years old and have less than $5K in net income for the taxable year. (That’s net income, not revenue.) The senators make their case for the bill in this TBJ editorial: Need to build North Carolina's entrepreneurship cluster.
Awards, Etc.
1) We have the winners from The Launch Place’s IdeaFest Pitch Competition that we mentioned last Thursday. First place and $5K went to Lauren McCullough of Tromml, which provides analytics to resellers of aftermarket auto parts. We featured the startup last December, while Triangle Inno wrote about Lauren and Tromml just yesterday. Second place went to Nanode Battery Technologies, which we profiled last month.
2) NC TECH and Business North Carolina have named 30 “Next Tech” award winners for the categories of Tech + Innovation, Tech Sales + Marketing, and Tech Professional Services. There are too many to mention them all here but the list has a decidedly Triangle tech flavor with many companies that will be familiar to GrepBeat readers such as Pendo, Allstacks, CData Software, Code The Dream, Dualboot, CliniSpan Health and Ablr. See TechWire for more.
3) CED has named the nine startups that will participate in its GRO Incubator program that will conclude with a Demo Day on June 29. We’ve previously profiledJobvious, and if history is any guide we will likely write about several more before the summer is out.
Familiar Names
Here are several new stories on startups and/or founders that we’ve previously featured: 1) Triangle Inno profiled Durham-based Needslist, a white-label software that matches charitable organizations and nonprofits that have a need with those who are offering services or resources. Needslist co-founder Amanda Levinson was a Download Q&A subject in December 2020.
2) NALA Membranes and CEO Sue Mecham also got the Triangle Inno treatment. We first profiled the startup in June, 2020, and again in July 2022 when it raised $1.5M, while Sue has also been a Friday Nooner guest.
3) WorkDove co-founder Melissa Phillippiexplained to Triangle Inno why she chose to step back from her former CEO role and has now joined Vaco, which was a longtime WorkDove client. Loyal GrepBeat readers will recall that WorkDove is a portfolio company of our Colopy Ventures sibling Jurassic Capital, and that Melissa hosted our Tech Culture Club podcast (and very successfully I might add). We wish her the best in her next chapter!
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.
Extra Bit
Durham-based VC firm IDEA Fund Partners is seeking applicants for its Summer 2023 Venture Fellows Program. The applicants can be undergraduate or graduate students, but the position is also open to non-students. It’s a non-paid position but sponsorship for course credit is available. Applications are due by Friday, May 13. See more info here.
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