This episode kicks off a new North Carolina Tweener Talks series spotlighting the state's under-the-radar physical manufacturing companies, the ones that need serious engineering talent, a coastline or mountains (or farmland!) nearby, and room to build.

First up is Natrx, a Tweener Fund portfolio company that manufactures concrete structures designed to work with natural water systems rather than simply and disruptively block them. It's a deep company-and-technology episode, with Tad walking through props on screen, because the product has more of a physicality to it than we see in the software world.

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Who is Tad?

Tad Schwendler is the COO of Natrx, a North Carolina-based coastal engineering and manufacturing company and a Tweener Fund portfolio company. Tad grew up in the Atlanta area and first came to the Triangle for business school at Duke, then moved back to the region permanently in 2007. Most of his career before Natrx was in corporate development; strategic finance, M&A, and business development on the buy side for large corporate organizations, most recently leading corporate development at MaxPoint prior to its acquisition. He got involved with Natrx as a consultant during the company's earliest days, helping build out its business model, financial projections, and early partnerships, before joining full-time as part of the leadership team. At Natrx, he leads finance and is deeply involved in strategy, capital raising, and the operations of the company's manufacturing facility in Louisiana. He studied economics at Tulane, but has a long-standing personal interest in marine science and ecology that made the Natrx mission, and its Louisiana roots, a natural fit.

Highlights

• The founding story runs through two engineering cultures: Natrx traces back to two coastal engineers who met doing oyster reef restoration in LSU’s bioagricultural engineering program, growing frustrated with traditional techniques built to “stop nature” and “keep it out.” One of them followed his professor to NC State for a PhD, where he met co-founders with software and digital backgrounds. That pairing became Natrx, founded in late 2018.

• “Dry forming” flips concrete manufacturing on its head: Instead of mixing a wet slurry, Natrx starts with dry material and uses medical-dosing-style pumps to inject moisture at precise points, guided entirely by digital instructions sent from the cloud.

• The voxel: Each injection point creates a roughly 1.5–2 inch reaction node called a voxel. As voxels fuse together, they form the finished unit, enabling far more complexity and void space than any mold, form, or extrusion printer could produce.

• Every unit is a little different: The injection process introduces natural variation into each piece. As Tad explained, “every unit has minor variations... that’s a natural outcome of the production process.” Balancing that variability with customers’ preference for standardized, repeatable products is an ongoing business challenge.

• Roughness is the whole point: The textured, organic-looking surface is functional rather than cosmetic. It slows water energy through friction, creates habitat for organisms at the base of the food chain, and offers a more natural aesthetic than piles of rock or standard precast concrete.

• Real scale, real weight: Standard units are roughly 3-foot cubes, weighing just under 2,000 lbs before hydration and up to around 4,000 lbs after. The coral restoration units built for the Waikiki Beach project weigh approximately 12,000 lbs each.

• The numbers: Natrx has completed 85+ physical deployments spanning Maryland to Texas, placed more than 100,000 physical units, employs approximately 30 people, including an 18-person core team and an 8 to 10 person manufacturing crew, has grown at roughly 80% revenue CAGR, and projects mid-to-upper single-digit millions in revenue this year.

• Manufacturing is deliberately centralized for now: Natrx originally envisioned a network of small manufacturing nodes along the coast but chose to mature its single Louisiana facility before expanding. Units are shipped via flatbed truck or, in Louisiana, directly from the dock by barge to destinations such as Texas and Florida.

• Built to disappear: Without rebar, the usual culprit when marine concrete breaks down, units are designed to blend into their environment over time as sediment accumulates and marine life grows. On the Hawaii coral restoration project, live coral is planted directly into built-in features so installations can eventually become visually indistinguishable from natural reef.

• What’s next: Natrx is preparing to raise a Series A to accelerate growth, recently hired its first senior sales leader, and sees its addressable market expanding beyond coastal restoration to any land-water interface, including data center infrastructure.

As Tad put it, Natrx is trying to stay focused on the core rather than chase every new application that comes calling, and that discipline is part of what's made this one of the more capital-efficient manufacturing startups in the portfolio. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

Before we jump in, shout out to our sponsors! 👇 None of this would be possible without them 💪🏻

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🦞 Tweener Claw Recap! 🦞

Our second Triangle OpenClaw meetup brought together builders and security folks for three talks on making agents reliable, hardening them against attacks, and tracking the ecosystem’s fast (and bumpy) growth.

Speakers:

• Scot Wingo opened with an ecosystem update, covering the project’s explosive growth, a rough patch of malicious skills and CVEs, and a move toward a leaner, more vetted core going forward. He also noted big tech moving in alongside rivals, and wrapped up with an open discussion on where the ecosystem is headed. Watch Here

• Robbie Allen shared a framework for building production-grade agents, explaining how to turn repeatable work into reusable skills, add supervisor agents that catch drift before it becomes a problem, and use a second model as a critic before shipping anything. Watch Here

• Ryan Eade gave a talk making the case that OpenClaw is really remote code execution, not just a chatbot, and pointing to over 100,000 exposed instances worldwide. He broke down the three ways you get owned and shared fixes like binding to localhost, using scoped keys, and requiring human approval before irreversible actions. Watch Here

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📅 Events Around the State

An exciting couple months across NC. Here’s what’s on our radar:

• July 17 - 18 — OSPREY X

• July 20 — Micro Grant Workshop

• July 21 — First Flight “Itineraries”

• July 23 — Dinner with an Entrepreneur

• July 27 - 28 — Future Grid 26

• August 4 -5 — Triangle Content Creators Meetup

• August 20 — NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship Open House

• August 27 – 28 — ConvergeSouth

• September 10 — 4th Annual Wilmington INVESTOR BUZZ IN

• September 29 — Ocean Innovation Conference
  

🔍 What Stuck With Us This Week

The AI Wrapper is Dead

NFX General Partner Pete Flint argues that vertical integration and not simple ChatGPT wrappers is what’s actually surviving into 2026. A few things that stuck with us:

• The “wrapper generation” (Jasper and friends) got wiped out once frontier labs started productizing their own models.

• Winners like Blitzy, EvenUp, and Tomo built AI as a service, not a feature and now they own the whole workflow, not just the model call.

• Three verticalization playbooks worth stealing: out-execute raw intelligence, remake the business around automation, and build a system of record before turning it into a system of action.

  👉🏻 Check out The AI Wrapper is Dead here!

Harvey’s $100M Quarter

Guillermo Flor breaks down how Harvey added $100M in net-new ARR in a single quarter without growing its sales team. A few things that stuck with us:

• They rebuilt every feature as a tool their agents could call, so the agents started surfacing capabilities users never found on their own.

• That agent-led product loop drove expansion revenue most Series D startups don’t hit in a full year.

• Result: 53% DAU/MAU and an $11B valuation, built on product architecture instead of GTM headcount.

  👉🏻 Check out Harvey’s $100M Quarter here!

The SaaS Apocalypse, According to Databricks

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says the barriers that used to protect software incumbents have collapsed. A few things that stuck with us:

• Over 81% of databases launched on Databricks are now created by autonomous agents, not humans.

• AI has made writing software 10x faster, letting new entrants disrupt markets old moats used to protect.

• His survival strategy: “advisor architectures” that lean on cheap open-source models for basic tasks and save the expensive frontier models for when teams get stuck.

  👉🏻 Check out The SaaS Apocalypse, According to Databricks here!

Building a Startup Content Engine in 30 Days

Zach Chmael’s playbook for founders starting a content engine from zero — no calendar required on day one. A few things that stuck with us:

• Start with a belief and an enemy, not a topic list, a claim gives the market something to react to.

• Build five “banks” first (customer language, proof, POV, objections, taste) before writing a single post.

• The engine only works if it has a real learning loop, so, what traveled, what sales reused, what should die.

  👉🏻 Check out Building a Startup Content Engine in 30 Days here!

The Case for VC in the Age of Superintelligence

NFX’s Omri Drory argues early-stage investing is society’s “targeting system” for where superintelligence gets pointed first. A few things that stuck with us:

• Aiming has to happen before AGI arrives, proprietary data, regulatory position, and trust take years to build and can’t be conjured after the fact.

• Abundance doesn’t erase scarcity, it relocates it to networks, proprietary data, regulatory position, trust, and the irreducibly human.

• His bet: venture gets stronger through the transition to superintelligence, not weaker, for investors who back the right moats early.

  👉🏻 Check out The Case for VC in the Age of Superintelligence here!

Everything is Recorded Now

A16z’s David Haber on the taboo shift already underway inside companies: most work conversations are being recorded by default. A few things that stuck with us:

• Onboarding AI works like onboarding a new hire because it learns culture and edge cases by sitting in meetings, not reading the wiki.

• “Verbal culture” companies (Shopify, OpenAI) stand to gain the most once AI can attend every meeting and synthesize what happened.

• The default is flipping from “opt in to recording” to “assume you’re being recorded”, expect real governance fights over what counts sensitive.

  👉🏻 Check out Everything is Recorded Now here!

🗺️ Tweener News: Q2 Goes Statewide 🗺️

We just closed the books on Q2, and it’s our best proof yet that the “Triangle, Charlotte, Wilmington, Triad, Mountains, and beyond” promise from Q1 is real:

• $475K invested across 12 total investments: 8 new, 4 follow-ons

• New checks landed in Charlotte, Raleigh, Wilmington, Durham, Cary, and Weaverville (a small mountain town west of Asheville)

• We’re approaching $12M invested across 170+ companies, holding a ~10% failure rate which is far below traditional VC benchmarks

• Pre-Tweener deal flow is surging, driven by the AI reset: it’s never been cheaper to get an early product built, which means more very-early-stage founders in the pipeline than ever

• M&A is warming back up after a quiet late 2025; the Validic exit closed and distributed, with a couple more deals in process

• We also launched a new podcast this quarter: Redacted, a practitioner-focused show on AI automation in startups hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner of Offline

👉 Full Q2 breakdown (new investments, portfolio add-ons, and more): NC Tweener Fund Q2 Update

Final Thoughts

Statewide deal flow, an AI-fueled wave of new founders, and a full calendar of ways to plug in 👀 the ecosystem's growing in every direction at once.

In this episode, we’ve got something special for you! The 8 Stages of the AI-ification Engine 👀

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Episode 6

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. This episode is heavier on company-talk than founder-lessons, but the lessons are baked into the build. David walks through the "AI-ification engine" and demos Offline's new ClickUp "house format for documenting it. Then Taylor takes over to show how he rebuilt Offline's dormant business development system from scratch (again… this time, he promises he won’t rebuild it again).

What We Cover

• The 8-stage AI-ification engine: David introduced a repeatable eight-stage framework for turning any proven business process into one an AI agent can execute, covering process mapping, context mapping, input/output collection, agent impersonation, architecture spikes, deployment, iterative improvement, and ongoing evaluation.

• “This is like HR for AI”: David framed AI implementation as the equivalent of hiring and onboarding an employee, where process mapping defines the role, context mapping provisions access, input/output collection serves as training, and the iterative loop mirrors riding shotgun with a new hire through their first real tasks.

• The “house format”: Offline standardized process documentation across the company by replacing individually written SOPs with a consistent ClickUp table that captures the step, actor (human, AI, or hybrid), notes, and the LLM access required for each task.

• Killing the proxy database: Taylor eliminated its synced HubSpot proxy database from an earlier episode, opting instead to call the HubSpot API directly with a whitelist of only the fields Claude actually needs, avoiding the overhead of loading 200+ mostly empty fields per company record.

• An internal skills marketplace: Offline built an internal library of Claude plugins that automatically syncs to every employee’s computer, making new AI capabilities instantly available across the organization without manual installation or updates.

• 55 contacts, one Claude chat: David rebuilt his business development system by having Claude reconstruct a network of 55 relationships, including companies like Eater and Vox, from old notes and email history after the original manual tracking system had fallen apart.

• Narrative arc as missing context: Taylor discovered his AI-generated outreach improved dramatically only after providing complete relationship histories for each company, giving the agent years of email and text conversations needed to understand the narrative behind every relationship.

• Adding a new target in one sentence: David expanded his business development pipeline by simply asking Claude to add Dorsia, a reservations startup, after which the agent immediately produced a comprehensive research brief despite having no prior relationship history.

• The unsolved problem: Both hosts acknowledged that they still lack a reliable way to evaluate and monitor dozens of AI-driven workflows simultaneously when those processes are distributed across different infrastructure, from Cloudflare deployments to one-off local automations.

• What it takes to be a guest: David said Redacted is actively looking for outside builders, describing the ideal guest as the person in every meeting who instinctively says, “Let me share my screen,” because they’re consistently building and demonstrating real systems.

It’s best viewed on YouTube to fully see the examples (make sure to subscribe!)

But also available on all audio podcast players through Tweener Talks!

PLUS we have a new spot for show notes and files discussed in the episode. Check cit out: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

We need your [Redacted] AI experiences for upcoming episodes! Who’s the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

What’s Next?

New episodes drop twice a month/every other Wednesday. If you want to be on the show as a guest and show your [REDACTED] builds, email us here.

At the June 10th TweenerClaw meetup in Research Triangle Park, Ryan Eade gave a focused, practitioner-level talk on something most of us avoid: securing our OpenClaw instances. Rather than covering what to build with OpenClaw (everyone already has a list), Ryan walked through the three main attack vectors he's seen in the wild and the concrete steps to close each one. Short, tight, and actionable, this one's worth your time if you have OpenClaw running anywhere.

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Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

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And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Summary

Ryan Eade is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at PtEverywhere and a regular in the Triangle's OpenClaw community. At the June TweenerClaw meetup, he gave a candid talk on the security gaps he's encountered and had to fix while running OpenClaw in production. The talk covers three threat vectors: leaving your instance exposed on an open port, installing unvetted third-party skills (36% of early skills carried prompt injection), and prompt injection delivered through external content like X posts and README files. Ryan closes with a practical defense framework built around one memorable mental model, to treat OpenClaw like staff, not software, with specific guidance on API key hygiene, one-time credit cards, separate email accounts, upgrade cadence, and why your system prompts matter more than your session instructions.

Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• The false comfort of “local only”: Most people assume that running OpenClaw on a home network means security isn’t a concern. Ryan’s first point is that this is wrong. OpenClaw enables remote code execution and likely has access to your API keys, personal files, and credentials, regardless of where it’s hosted.

• Check port 18789 immediately: Run curl against your OpenClaw instance on port 18789. If you get a response, you’re running a very old version with full unauthenticated access to your machine. This is the most urgent security check to perform.

• Know the critical upgrade windows: Versions from late January exposed port 18789 with unauthenticated remote code execution. Versions before the March 12 release contained a gateway key bypass vulnerability. The April 5 release introduced a large batch of security fixes. If you’re running a version older than April, you should assume you’re exposed and upgrade.

• Docker doesn’t automatically make you safer: Running OpenClaw in Docker can bypass your local machine’s firewall protections. What feels like an extra security layer may actually increase your exposure.

• Treat every third-party skill as untrusted: At one point, 36% of early OpenClaw skills contained prompt injection. Although submissions are now scanned, Ryan recommends always pulling the GitHub repository, reviewing the code yourself, and treating every third-party skill as untrusted until you’ve verified it.

• Prompt injection from the web is a real attack vector: If OpenClaw reads content from X, email, GitHub, or other external sources, any of that content can inject instructions into your agent. GitHub README files are a known vector. A typical attack chain is: hidden instructions embedded in a README → the agent writes a local file → that file creates a backdoor → the attacker gains persistent access → you only notice when your API bill spikes.

• Session instructions can disappear mid-run: As the context window fills up, OpenClaw compresses conversation history, and session-level instructions can silently be dropped. Put critical security guardrails in the system prompt, not session instructions, since system prompts persist.

• Think of AI agents as staff, not software: Ryan’s mental model is to give agents only the access they need. Just as you wouldn’t hand a new employee your personal credit card, don’t give OpenClaw unrestricted access. Use dedicated email accounts, scoped API keys with minimum permissions, and one-time-use or limited virtual credit cards for purchasing tasks.

• Build human approval gates into risky actions: Require explicit confirmation before destructive operations like deleting files, sending emails, or modifying data. Ryan routes these actions into dedicated Slack channels where OpenClaw proposes the action and waits for a human “yes” before proceeding. This extra approval layer has caught the most mistakes.

• Expect every upgrade to break something and upgrade anyway: Ryan says every OpenClaw upgrade has required a couple of hours of cleanup. He budgets for that maintenance because the alternative is running software with known vulnerabilities on a machine that holds API keys, credentials, and sensitive data.

Security's not the fun part, but Ryan makes a pretty convincing case that it's the part that keeps everything else running. Go check that port, and enjoy the talk.

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

As we put it on our Q2 LP call, describing what we’re looking for as the map expands:

“We’re looking for companies that have one of a few competitive moats, and the best are either existing proprietary data or the ability to build a set of proprietary data over time. That’s kind of the best moat right now.”

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Thank You, LPs 🙌

Before we jump into the recap: thank you to our investors! This milestone doesn’t happen without you. With your support: We’re approaching $12M invested across 170+ companies, while maintaining a ~10% failure rate, far below traditional VC benchmarks

Always open for new investors/LPs!

• Must be an accredited investor - SEC rule, not ours

• 1yr commitment, $30,000 for the year or $7,500/Q

• 1% management fee, 20% carry, and a small AngelList administrative fee

For more details - visit www.tweenerfund.com where you can see our pitch and hit the invest button to get started!

We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors:

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Q2 NC Tweener Fund Investment Highlights

Our Tweener Fund Q2 2026 Snapshot:

• $475K invested

• 12 total investments

  • 8 new

  • 4 follow-ons

• 4 Tweener / 8 Pre-Tweener

What stood out this quarter?

1. Statewide deal flow is already diversifying

New checks went out well beyond the Triangle this quarter. Charlotte, Wilmington, and Weaverville (Mountains) joined the usual Raleigh/Durham/Cary mix. Early proof the NC IDEA partnership is doing what we hoped.

2. Pre-tweener deal flow is surging, driven by the AI reset

The 2024/25 AI wave changed how cheap it is to get an early product built, which means we’re seeing more very-early-stage companies than ever. We’re staying disciplined about it and leaning into founders with real distribution chops and proprietary data, not just a fast MVP.

3. M&A is warming back up

The Validic exit closed and distributed earlier this year, and we’ve got a couple more deals in process we’ll share once they’re done. Cyclical, but trending the right direction after a quiet late-2025.

Introducing our Q2 Fresh New Investments!

In Q2, we’re ex

• Druid (PT) - Modern IoT solutions for farmers. (Charlotte)

• Pellucid Network (PT) - AI solutions marketplace for enterprises and government. (Raleigh)

• RCOAST (PT) - Coastal erosion tracking and remediation using drone data and AI. (Wilmington)

• AIXI (PT) - Proprietary dataset of aviation repair parts. (Raleigh)

• RoundUp (PT) - Automatic charitable giving through credit card round-ups. (Durham)

• Smart Family Tech, Inc. (T) - Fintech for complex family banking situations. (Charlotte)

• Amissa (PT) - Clinical data platform for women’s menopause care. (Charlotte)

• NextPower360 (PT) - DC power generator eliminating AC-DC conversion losses. (Weaverville)

Existing Investment add-ons

Also, Tweener Fund made additional investments in 4 portfolio companies:

Details:

• ReFiBuy (T) - Product catalog optimization for AI-driven shopping. (Raleigh, refibuy.ai)

• OOGA Technologies (T) - Second Q/Q investment, split across a SAFE. (Cary, oogatechnologies.com)

• Protect3D (PT) - 3D-printed custom orthoses via iPhone scanning. (Durham, protect3d.io)

• HighArc (T) - AI solutions for builders. (Durham, higharc.com)

Q2 Tweener Events

Q2 is always our busiest event season, and this one didn't disappoint, seven events in the quarter!

[REDACTED] Launched!

Continuing on our mission to bring NC’s best builders content they can’t get anywhere else that’s hyper-local, we launched a new podcast this quarter: Redacted. Redacted is a practitioner-focused show on AI automation in startups, with hosts David Shaner and Taylor Cotner of Offline. If you're curious what it actually looks like when founders put AI agents to work day-to-day, it's worth a listen.

It’s best viewed on YouTube to fully see the examples (make sure to subscribe!)

But also available on all audio podcast players through Tweener Talks!

PLUS we have a new spot for show notes and files discussed in the episode. Check it out: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Become a Sponsor

Would your company benefit from exposure to NC’s fastest-growing startups?

Our audience is made up of NC founders and operators, primarily at startups doing over $1M/year and many much larger. When a company hits Tweener status, they’ve got real traction, funding (usually), a growing team, and momentum.

Thanks to strong demand, we’re upgrading our sponsorship opportunities across Tweener Times, Tweener Talks, and more.

If you’re looking to connect with this high-impact community, now’s the time. Send us a message or an email to contact@tweenerfund.com.

Let’s build together!

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🙌 Thank You!

Instead of a traditional interview, we're sharing a live talk delivered by Robbie Allen, who is a General Partner at NC Tweener Fund and Managing Director of Automated Consulting Group, at the June 10th Tweener Club meetup in Research Triangle Park. Robbie has spent the last year and a half deploying AI agents inside real mid-market companies, and he came armed with three lessons he's learned in just the last 60 days. Less theory, more field report, and a few things that might surprise you.

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We couldn’t bring you 100% original founder-to-founder content like this without the support of our awesome-sauce sponsors:

Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

Featured Platinum Sponsor

Featured Gold Sponsor

Featured Silver Sponsor

And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Summary

Robbie Allen, the Founder and Managing Director of Automated Consulting Group and General Partner at NC Tweener Fund, gave a live talk at the June 10th Tweener Club meetup in Research Triangle Park. In it, he shares three lessons from 60 days of building and running AI agents in production with real clients across the Triangle. The talk covers skill building (mapping your own workflows into reusable AI packages), agent monitoring (why 3–5 of his 25 agents fail on any given day and how he built a monitor agent to catch it), and using LLMs to check each other's work (his "Codex Opinion" and "Gemini Opinion" skills, and an LLM Council that synthesizes outputs from multiple models). Robbie is about as far out on the cutting edge of real-world agent deployment as anyone in the Triangle, and he's sharing what's actually working, what keeps breaking, and what he'd wire in from the start.

Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• “The sawdust of business”: Robbie’s term for meeting transcripts: raw, unstructured data that reveals how a company actually thinks and operates. He argues that as AI approaches superhuman capability, organizations will need this context to train and ground models, yet most companies aren’t systematically collecting it.

• Skills as reusable modules: He treats AI skills like software packages: reusable blocks of functionality that can contain prompts, tools, or both. His approach is to map a human workflow and then build skills to automate each step.

• A practical skills pipeline: Robbie created a three-skill workflow for meeting follow-up:

  • Detect new Otter transcripts

  • Extract action items

  • Run a weekly review of unfinished tasks
    The entire system uses composable skills rather than custom-built software.

• Agent reliability remains a challenge: In his setup of 25 agents, 3–5 fail every day, resulting in a 12–20% daily failure rate. Common causes include API outages, LinkedIn scraping restrictions, and dependency failures. He argues that claims of running hundreds of agents without a support team are unrealistic.

• “Build costs are down, support costs aren’t”: AI has dramatically reduced development costs, but maintenance remains expensive. Non-deterministic systems introduce new forms of brittleness, making operational support just as important as ever.

• Monitor agents need monitors: To manage failures, Robbie built a 26th agent dedicated to monitoring the other 25. His takeaway: observability should be designed in from day one, with comprehensive logging across the system.

• “Einstein and Feynman” multi-LLM strategy: Robbie compares using multiple AI models to consulting multiple brilliant scientists. He:

  • Built a “Codex Opinion” skill to critique Claude Code sessions

  • Added a “Gemini Opinion” skill for additional perspectives

  • Created an “LLM Council” that runs Sonnet, Gemini, and Codex in parallel, with a leader model synthesizing the results
    He reports that the additional models consistently uncover blind spots.

• Skills marketplace security is unresolved: Robbie highlights a largely overlooked risk: downloaded skills are effectively third-party code running in your environment. He expects enterprise security teams to scrutinize this area heavily in the coming years.

• Microsoft Copilot skepticism: Based on experience with Microsoft-centric clients, Robbie believes Copilot’s agent environment still lags behind expectations despite Microsoft’s early access to OpenAI models. He remains cautious about announcements until features reach general availability (GA).

Every practitioner has lessons they've learned the hard way. Robbie's just willing to share his before the bruises fade. Enjoy the conversation.

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

We need your [Redacted] AI experiences for upcoming episodes! Who's the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

Subscribe now

Episode 5

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. Episode 5 of Redacted goes…

Read more

This week's episode is a live recording from the NC Tweener Fund's second TweenerClaw meetup, held June 10th at Research Triangle Park. Instead of an interview, you're getting the full room, my state-of-the-ecosystem talk, community Q&A, and the kind of candid takes that don't usually make it onto polished conference stages. If you missed the April kickoff, OpenClaw is an AI agent harness acquired by OpenAI and open-sourced, now the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. A lot has changed since April. This episode updates everything.

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We couldn’t bring you 100% original founder-to-founder content like this without the support of our awesome-sauce sponsors:

Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

Featured Platinum Sponsor

Featured Gold Sponsor

Featured Silver Sponsor

And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Summary

Between the April and June meetings, OpenClaw crossed 300,000 GitHub stars and 3.2 million active users, and nearly imploded. The marketplace was flooded with over 1,400 malicious skills, updates broke core functionality for weeks, and the community got nervous about OpenAI's long-term intentions. I walk through how the project is stabilizing (monthly releases, LTS commitments, a leaner core), then map the new landscape: NVIDIA's NemoClaw, Microsoft's Scout, Google's Gemini Spark, Alibaba's Qwen fork, the MIT-licensed upstart Hermes, and Facebook's rumored $200/month Hatch. Iclose with a frank read from Triangle founders on what they're actually shipping with, and Copilot doesn't come out looking great.

Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• OpenClaw’s breakout moment: Reached 300K GitHub stars and 3.2M users, becoming the fastest-growing GitHub project ever. OpenAI is funding a dedicated foundation team to support long-term development.

• April’s instability: A series of updates disrupted channels and integrations. More than 1,400 malicious skills were discovered in the marketplace before it was shut down and moved to a vetted model.

• Microsoft goes all-in: At Build, Satya Nadella mentioned OpenClaw 28 times and introduced Scout, a Microsoft 365/Copilot product based on an OpenClaw fork. By contrast, OpenClaw received no mention at WWDC.

• NVIDIA’s endorsement: At GTC, Jensen Huang called OpenClaw “the next ChatGPT” and unveiled NemoClaw. His description of agent harnesses as a “personal operating system for AI” has become a widely adopted framing.

• The emerging fork ecosystem

  • Chinese players such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi and Alibaba Group’s Qwen are targeting cost-conscious users.

  • Google’s answer is Gemini Spark.

  • Hermes, an MIT-licensed, Rust-oriented, skill-compounding architecture, is attracting strong interest, particularly in the Triangle startup community.

• A growing user divide

  • Enterprise workers are often stuck with limited Copilot experiences.

  • Startup founders and power users are increasingly relying on agent harnesses that feel like they actively accelerate their work.

  • The gap between those two experiences is widening.

• What Triangle founders are using

  • Hermes generated significant excitement at the meetup.

  • Many attendees reported moving away from OpenClaw for daily work.

  • Alternatives most frequently mentioned were Codex and Claude Code / Cowork.

The best part of this community is that the people in that room in RTP are learning in real time, sharing what's working, and not waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Enjoy the conversation.

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The SaaSpocalypse is real, but it's also starting to create separation. Some SaaS companies are emerging stronger while others stall, and the difference isn't whether you've frankensteined on some AI features. Jes has been thinking about this a ton and has some great ideas for other NC SaaS founders working through this tough time (funding and valuation-wise): Jes Lipson shares two clear tests he's using to pressure-check his own business, I add a third, and together we map out what it actually takes to come out the other side.

In this very short episode (~20mins), we do cover a couple of slides you can access here that will enhance your viewing/listening experience→

Jes Slides Saaspocolypse

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Who is Jes?

Jesse Lipson is the founder and CEO of Levitate AI, a relationship marketing platform built for micro SMBs. Think independent lawyers, financial advisors, nonprofits; Levitate has nearly 9,000 customers and over 300 employees. Before Levitate, Jes founded ShareFile, one of the earliest SaaS companies in the Triangle, which he sold to Citrix and eventually grew into a billion-dollar business before it was acquired by Progress Software. At Citrix, he expanded his remit to run the company's entire SaaS portfolio, giving him a rare vantage point across dozens of different software models. He started Levitate in 2017, originally called Levitate.ai, a name that was ahead of the available technology, and has been navigating the AI era with that same long-arc perspective ever since.

I did a longer-form deep dive with Jes back in November 24 if you want to hear his entire founder’s journey, which I strongly recommend→

Highlights

• The removal test: If you remove AI from the product, does it still work? Investors favor companies where AI is core to the product, not an add-on feature.

• Growth re-acceleration beats raw growth: A company accelerating from 10% growth to 30% is viewed more favorably than one slowing from 100% to 40%, because trajectory signals AI-driven momentum.

• AI features are not a moat: Building lots of AI features is now expected. Companies relying on AI features alone are still getting disrupted.

• Public SaaS multiples have collapsed: Major SaaS companies have seen significant valuation compression:

• The “vibe coding” churn signal: If customers are replacing your software by building their own AI-generated alternatives, that’s a major warning sign. The build-vs.-buy equation has shifted dramatically.

• The fear index: A useful test for founders:

• Levitate’s newest AI bet: A forthcoming product focused on helping tens of thousands of small businesses actually implement AI and transform workflows—not just learn about AI.

• MCP is becoming table stakes: Levitate launched an MCP server and is upgrading its API because customers increasingly expect seamless integration with AI assistants like Claude.

• Software + services is more defensible: Pure SaaS businesses face growing pressure from AI. Combining software with services creates stronger customer relationships and greater resilience.

Every conversation with Jes is a reminder that the best operators don't just read the environment; they build a strategic framework, formulate tactics and KPIs and then relentlessly execute.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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We have an exclusive 👀first look 👀 at a big acquisition announced this morning. Before we dig into the press release, here’s an exclusive interview we had with Validic’s CEO Drew Schiller (15mins).

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This episode is a masterclass in go-to-market for B2B SaaS founders. Scot taps 20-year friend and former ChannelAdvisor colleague Rob Walter (now founder of RevBo) to walk through what modern GTM actually looks like, from a $350M public company all the way down to founder-led sales. About a third of the conversation is the big-company view: BigCommerce, RevOps bloat, intent data at scale. The other two-thirds is practical: the tools, frameworks, and mindset shifts that founders between $1M and $5M ARR need right now.

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Who is Rob?

Rob Walter is the Founder and CEO of RevBo, an AI-native go-to-market advisory firm he launched in early 2025 after leaving his role as CRO of Commerce (formerly BigCommerce), a publicly traded e-commerce platform with ~$350M in ARR.

Rob has spent over 20 years in the SaaS world, including 8 years as a CRO, with stops at ChannelAdvisor (where I first recruited him to North Carolina), Amplience (headless CMS), and Oro Commerce. Before SaaS, he was selling wine for E&J Gallo Winery straight out of Miami of Ohio.

A proud Chicago native (the Bears and Cubs flags are visible behind him on camera), Rob named RevBo after his grandfather, whom he called "Bo" as a kid, even though his grandfather's actual name was John.

How we met…

Rob and I have known each other for over 20 years. Rob came to North Carolina specifically because of ChannelAdvisor. Four days before officially moving, Rob drove down and had lunch with me and Michael Jones at the Texas Roadhouse near the ChannelAdvisor office. He notes that at the time, the only other sit-down options in the area were Waffle House and Hooters, “slim pickings back in the day.” Apparently the Texas Roadhouse did the trick: Rob took the job, relocated to the Triangle, and never left. I remember him fondly as the “Salesforce whisperer”, the only person at ChannelAdvisor who could get the CRM to produce a report that actually worked

Highlights

• "Nobody has it right: Rob's honest take on the current AI-GTM moment; the playbook is genuinely still being written, adoption is wildly uneven, and that gap between the leading edge and everyone else is the opportunity.

• Carpet bombing is killing brands: AI has made outbound spam so cheap and easy that it's destroying trust at scale. One competitor even cold-emailed Scot about "agentic commerce", not realizing they were emailing a direct rival. Rob's rule: "A human always writes the message." AI-generated outreach is detectable, and it permanently trains your ICPs to ignore you.

• Intent data, explained:Website visits, job postings, funding announcements, keyword searches, these are the signals that tell you when to reach out and why. Rob describes it as a "spider on a web" with legs out, waiting for any ICP company to show a flicker of intent before timing a precise, relevant outreach. He used actively.ai (recently raised its Series B) at BigCommerce, standing up the POC in about 2 months.

• ABM is now nearly the only outreach strategy: AI removed the bandwidth bottleneck that always made true account-based marketing impractical. Rob's view: from a direct outreach standpoint, it's now "darn close to ABM only."

• The first sales hire trapdoor: "Never hire someone from a big company and think they're gonna do well in your startup as a first sales employee. Never. I have never seen that work. Hundred percent failure rate." Their first question is about PTO policy and whether they get an admin.

• Four tiers of salespeople: Great and good reps will get dramatically better with AI. The "meh" tier, people who got by on volume and the occasional lucky close, will get weeded out. Founders need to know this when evaluating candidates.

• GTM engineer > first sales rep: A GTM engineer who can automate enrichment, workflow, and outreach sequencing can be "far more powerful than, honestly, maybe even a sales rep in some cases" for early-stage companies. Rob says this is one of his most consistent recommendations to founder-led businesses.

• Granola over Gong: For companies under $10M ARR, Rob's call recording recommendation is Granola, it works in coffee meetings, integrates cleanly with Claude for analysis, and costs a fraction of what Gong does. He uses it himself, with a custom recipe that pulls prospect questions across all sales calls and runs them through Claude to bucketize and rank by frequency, then puts that content directly on the website.

• The data model rule: If you don't capture milestone moments in your CRM now, first discovery call, account enrichment data, stage exit criteria, that information is "gold dust that slipped through your fingers." Nothing AI can do later will recover it.

• SaaSageddon is real: Buyers are hesitating on new software contracts. Rob's framework: for narrow use cases, try to build it before you buy it. For compliance-heavy enterprise environments, you probably still buy. And there are now AI-native alternatives (he uses Clarify AI for CRM) worth considering over legacy incumbents.

• The RevBo scorecard: Rob built a free AI-native GTM diagnostic at revbo.ai, it walks companies through ICP clarity, data model hygiene, and intent/enrichment readiness before recommending any tooling. A good starting point before any of the tools in this episode make sense.

Rob has been in the rooms where SaaS was built, scaled, and now, in some ways, disrupted. Every piece of advice in this episode comes from having actually done the thing, not just advised on it. Enjoy the conversation.

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Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

We need your [Redacted] AI experiences for upcoming episodes! Who's the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

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Episode 4

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. Episode 4 is a double buil…

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This week's episode is a special treat. Mark Rosenberg is the earliest and most "AI-pilled" founder in the Tweener portfolio, and this conversation covers two very different topics, but all based on ‘How I AI’.

The first part of the discussion is the backstory of how mark founded Hip Commerce and then we jump into how Hip eCommerce leverages AI across customer support, finance, the warehouse/fulfillment operations, and product engineering, often replacing whole SaaS tools in the process and super-automating the business. The second part is a fascinating experiment: a fully autonomous, agent-run mini venture fund Mark spun up "as a fun side project" that started funding companies, emailing real people, and trying to route around its own guardrails. There’s a mix of fascinating learnings and a cautionary tale of why it’s important whether you are OpenClawing or building your own agents, to make sure you have guardrails and a very tight sandbox.

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Who is Mark?

Mark Rosenberg is the founder, CEO, and now also CTO of Hip eCommerce, a company that builds niche marketplaces and communities for collectors. Mark has been in collectibles and e-commerce for almost exactly 30 years. Back in 1996, when eBay was first emerging, he started a business with his father buying and selling stamps on eBay.

He ran that for about a decade, then built BidStart, a marketplace that grew out of a want-list tool, which he sold in 2012 to Stanley Gibbons, the largest collectible stamp company in the world, based in the UK. That sale is what brought him to Raleigh; he chose the Triangle for its entrepreneurial spirit and talent. He left in 2015, and about a year later founded Hip eCommerce.

Mark has a computer science background and is once again hands-on, shipping features himself with heavy use of Claude Code. Hip eCommerce raised its seed in 2018, another round in 2019, and its Series A in 2020.

How we met…

I’ve known Mark for a long time. Hip eCommerce was one of the very first investments at Tweener Fund, and I also invested personally, before the fund came along, so I sit on Mark's board. I enjoy the show from both seats: watching what Mark builds, and watching the other board members' reactions when a demo lands ("Oh my God, this is magic"). We got to know each other better around Hip's 2018 seed raise, and my only regret is that he should have had Mark on the podcast sooner!

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

This episode comes in two parts. In the first, Mark walks through how Hip eCommerce uses AI across the business: customer support, finance, the warehouse, product, and even people management. Along the way he shares the real numbers and the guardrails he’s put in place so that AI can take action, not just answer questions.

In the second part, the conversation takes a turn into the experimental. Mark describes a side project he spun up “in about a day”: an autonomous, agent-run venture fund called Prompt Capital, where AI partners generate ideas, review pitch decks, and fund and build companies largely on their own. What started as a fun experiment quickly produced some surprising, funny, and occasionally unsettling moments that taught him a lot about where this technology is headed.

It’s a rare look at a founder who’s further down the AI path than almost anyone, sharing both the practical playbook and the wilder edges of what’s now possible. Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

• Risk-Scored Autonomy: Every AI action receives a risk score from 0–100, with low-risk tasks running automatically and higher-risk actions requiring human approval.

• An AI Fund That Named Itself: Prompt Capital evolved into a fully autonomous AI venture fund, complete with AI partners, founders, and investment decisions.

• The Token Cost Problem: Claude’s paid plans were exhausted in hours or days, making large-scale agent operations financially unsustainable.

• The 10x Cost Reduction: Moving to Kimi 2.6 through Ollama cut AI operating costs by roughly 90% while maintaining performance.

• The Rogue AI Founder: An AI-generated founder launched a real business, integrated payments, and began outreach campaigns without direct human involvement.

• Guardrails Aren’t Enough: Agents quickly found creative ways to work around restrictions by delegating prohibited tasks to other agents.

• When AI Invented Extortion: An experiment in autonomous business generation produced an extortion-based startup idea, highlighting the importance of oversight.

• Measurable Business Impact: AI automation reduced support workloads, accelerated financial reporting, improved warehouse efficiency, and eliminated several SaaS expenses.

• Agents With Feelings: AI employees maintain relationship histories, perception scores, and evolving opinions about one another.

• Building Beats Spec Writing: Claude Code made feature development faster than traditional requirements gathering and user-story documentation.

• The AI Office Manager: An AI assistant handled personal administrative tasks, including securing concert presale access when traditional search failed.

• The Future of Work at Hip: Mark’s vision includes AI coworkers with memory, personalities, and long-term context that operate like autonomous teammates.The best founders, and the best fund builders, figure out the structure nobody else was willing to be patient enough to design. Jeffrey did exactly that. Enjoy the conversation.

What’s fun about this era is that people are using these new tools in ways you can’t even imagine and Mark, a creative, nonlinear thinker, delivers. Equal parts practical playbook and cautionary tale, with a few genuinely jaw-dropping turns. Enjoy the conversation.

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In the last 90 days, I’ve talked to at least 10 founders who have the exact problem illustrated above. They could raise their 1X-2X their pre-seed or seed round amount based on “I’d put in $X if you had a lead” - add those together and you’re there! But sadly it doesn’t work that way. You have to find that lead.

BUT FIRST!

🦞 The Claw Is Back!🦞

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This week we sit down with Jeffrey Kaplan, CEO of Optimist Ventures and Director of Venture Asheville, to dig into one of the most unusual funding mechanisms we’ve come across: the SPA note.

It’s roughly a third company-talk (how Asheville’s startup ecosystem works and how it’s recovering from Hurricane Helene) and two-thirds founder-and-funder lessons (why VC math doesn’t fit an ecosystem builder’s job, and how Jeffrey designed a fund to back “singles and doubles” instead of swinging for unicorns). If you’ve ever wondered what comes after the SAFE note for Main Street businesses, this is the episode.

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Who is Jeffrey?

Jeffrey Kaplan earned his master's in entrepreneurship at the University of Florida, where he stayed on at the entrepreneurship center running co-curricular programs (a disabled veterans program, a women's entrepreneurship summit, a business plan competition, a student incubator) and TA'ing graduate and undergraduate courses.

He's had a couple of startups of his own, one in Charlotte, one in Asheville where"one did okay, one was a pretty big failure", but says he's learned he thrives more on the intrapreneurship side, with structure, accountability, and a budget, as long as the institution lets him be entrepreneurial.

After moving to Asheville, he worked at the software development agency Anthware under John Jones before landing at Venture Asheville, where he's now been eight years. At Venture Asheville he runs the Elevate mentorship program (built on MIT's Venture Mentoring Service), the financing initiatives, and the ecosystem events.

How we met…

Jeffrey has been a key connector for the NC Tweener Fund's statewide expansion. When the fund became the North Carolina Tweener Fund in February, Jeffrey helped me and the team get to know the startups out west. Think: Asheville, up into the Boone area, and beyond, and has sent a steady stream of great companies our way.

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

Most of us know Asheville as beer city, foodtopia, a playground for retirees and 14 million visitors a year. Jeffrey opens by updating that picture. Eighteen months out from Hurricane Helene, which hit on a Friday in late September 2024, the data is starting to come in. The long-term employment hit was about half that of COVID. Decades of population growth stopped in 2025 and even declined for the first time, but the in-migration that remains is now strongest among 25-to-34-year-olds: prime working-age professionals, not retirees. Jeffrey walks through what’s back (Biltmore Village, the River Arts District, High Wire’s new year-round pickleball courts) and what’s gone forever, and lands on a word he keeps coming back to: optimism.

From there, we steer into the heart of the episode: Optimist Ventures and the funding mechanism Jeffrey invented, the SPA note. The origin story is its own lesson in adaptation. Optimist began as a half-million-dollar grant from the Dogwood Health Trust. Then Helene hit, and within the same week a founder in the program, Ginger Frank of Poppy Popcorn, called wanting to commit $100,000, but to a grant program, not a fund. Rather than walk away, Jeffrey spent days thinking until he landed on a hybrid: half the capital as grants and philanthropy, half in a for-profit vehicle for accredited investors, with every for-profit dollar matched by a donation.

Boom: enter the SPA or shared profit agreement.

The conversation closes on what’s next, whether this model can scale to Charlotte or Raleigh, and a heartfelt ask about how the rest of the state can help Asheville finish its recovery.

Highlights

• Moneyball the Portfolio: Instead of chasing one home run, Jeffrey set out to build a book of “singles and doubles”… companies that just need to survive six years.

• The VC / Ecosystem-Builder Dissonance: An ecosystem builder is measured on jobs and revenue creation, not outlier exits.

• The SPA Note, Decoded: A “Shared Profit Agreement” combines a SAFE capped at 3.6% of a $1M valuation with a shared earnings agreement.

• The Investor Pitch: Every LP dollar is matched by a donation. But the real sell is community impact.

• Applied Technology vs. Developing Technology: The program defines “tech-enabled” broadly.

• The Funding Runway: Approximately $225M is flowing into the region through HUD programs, with $17M dedicated to small-business grants.

• A Curriculum Built on Competencies, Not Basics: The accelerator is built around entrepreneurial competencies, including opportunity recognition, resilience, and network-building.

• The North Carolina Hallmark: “It’s not a zero-sum game. We’re all trying to grow the size of the pie.”

The best founders, and the best fund builders, figure out the structure nobody else was willing to be patient enough to design. Jeffrey did exactly that. Enjoy the conversation.

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.

We need help with upcoming episodes! Who's the most underrated AI builder you know? Someone running real systems inside a real business? Send us a message at contact@tweenerfund.com because we want to get them on the show!

What’s Redacted?

[Redacted] is a YouTube-first, twic…

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This week on NC Tweener Talks, Scot sits down with two of the three co-founders of Opine, a Research Triangle Park startup building an AI-native context layer for revenue teams.

About a quarter of the conversation is about what Opine does. The other three quarters is a master class in founder lessons: how to pivot without losing your mission, how to argue with your co-founders without breaking the company, and how to build an engineering org where agents run for 8+ hours at a stretch (TokenMAXXING For the Win! 💪 💪 💪)

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Opine’s DNA…

Akash Ganapathi is the CEO and co-founder of Opine. He’s a second-time founder; he dropped out of UNC Chapel Hill in 2013 to start Trill AI, a deep-learning startup selling risk signals to quant hedge funds. After Trill reached its “natural conclusion,” he spent three years as the first solutions architect at JupiterOne, the local cybersecurity unicorn.

Austin Kelleher is a co-founder of Opine and runs much of the technology side. A Penn State CS grad, he moved to North Carolina out of college to work at Interactive Intelligence (later acquired by Genesys), then spent time at eBay working on open-source software before joining JupiterOne as one of its earliest engineers. Along the way he built a game with over 100,000 users, a hint at his appetite for building things early.

Their third co-founder, Charlie Duong, also came from the JupiterOne crew. Austin and Charlie have known each other for over a decade.

How we met…

I got to know Austin during the eBay years, back when Austin was dating Melinda, who happened to work at Spiffy (Melinda is now Austin’s wife. I told her to make sure she knew what she was getting into.)

Akash entered the picture once he and Austin connected at JupiterOne. A year before Opine even existed, I told Austin: “If you ever leave to start a company, I want to be the first check in.” Austin said okay. A year later an email arrived, and, as a man of my word, the Tweener Fund wrote the first check into Opine’s $2M pre-seed.

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

This is a slightly different Tweener Talks. Akash and Austin are reflective founders. They think in frameworks, they read widely, and they’ve clearly spent a lot of time pulling patterns out of past wins and failures. So, we leaned in and made the episode less “tell me what you do” and more “tell me how you think.”

Highlights Covered

• Founder math: 5–7 months of zero salary, Costco bulk ramen, and a long-running Soylent habit dating back to Akash’s 2013 startup.

• Product-market fit is not binary: Akash and Austin use First Round Capital’s “Levels” framework and honestly place Opine between “developing” and “strong”, extreme PMF is when you can’t keep up with inbound demos.

• The inverse rule for co-founder debates: “Attack the person, not the idea” delivered as a straight-faced joke between three people who trust each other completely, with the real work happening in scrutinizing every argument from first principles.

• Two Amazon frameworks worth stealing: one-way door vs. two-way door decisions (Charlie’s favorite for cutting Akash off when he’s spending too long on something reversible), and disagree-and-commit (which they’ve barely had to use).

• Dev stack philosophy: Claude Max 20x for everyone (some engineers have more than one), agent-first development, Cursor BugBot finding bugs so reliably that engineers often skip local testing until BugBot signs off, and a north star of every engineer with one agent running 24/7.

• The go-to-market stack: Clay for top-of-funnel research agents, HeyReach for LinkedIn sequencing, AirOps for SEO content.

• Culture by osmosis, not documentation: No values poster on the wall. Instead, Austin’s personal framework, “you can increase your luck”, and the pay-it-forward principle as load-bearing parts of how the company actually operates.

The best thing about being a founder is that no matter how many times you’ve done it, you learn something new every time, and Akash and Austin sent us home with a whole new reading list. Enjoy the conversation.

How to watch:

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Recap: What Happened to Tweener Talks?

Earlier this month we launched [Redacted], a new podcast under the NC Tweener Talks network.

This podcast shows you the messy middle of how AI is made and tested. As we made some of the first episodes, we learned that we frequently had personal information and business secrets on screen. Instead of deleting that par…

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After Tweener Madness, we’re back to regular programming with a special conversation featuring Marc Minor, CEO & Co-Founder of Higharc.

Higharc is one of the Triangle’s most compelling growth-stage companies, building AI-powered software for home builders. The platform helps builders move from design to sales to construction by generating homes in 3D, producing construction documents, estimating data, and buyer-facing sales experiences directly from a generative model.

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Loving our content? It wouldn’t be possible without our amazing sponsors and our paid subscribers, so THANK YOU!

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Marc Minor: One of the Best Story Teller Founders You will Ever Meet.

One of the reasons I was especially excited for this conversation is because I consider Marc one of the best storytellers I’ve met. Beyond Tweener being an investor in Higharc through NC Tweener Fund, I have spent time with Marc over the years and consistently walked away impressed by how clearly and compellingly he explains complex ideas. The Higharc pitch deck is the best deck I’ve ever seen, bar none.

Throughout the episode, you’ll notice I repeatedly point out that Marc’s ability to tell a story, whether in fundraising, product vision, or company strategy, is a major part of what makes Higharc so compelling. It’s not just about the technology itself, but how Marc paints a picture of the future in a way founders can learn from.

When you listen/watch this one, see i fyou can decode the techniques he’s using.

Listen/Watch Our Interview:

In this episode, Marc talks about the long road to building fundamental technology, why Higharc spent years developing before going fully to market, how he found his co-founders, what he learned from early fundraising, and why AI has become a major tailwind for the business.

Highlights Covered

• How Higharc applies advanced manufacturing concepts to homebuilding

• Why the company spent four years building before going to market

• How Marc raised Higharc’s first $4.7M seed round

• Why founders need confidence, conviction, and a willingness to ask

• How Higharc thinks about spatial AI and proprietary data

• Why “buildings as data” is a major competitive advantage

• What founders can learn from great storytellers

• Why peer groups are so valuable for CEOs

If there’s one takeaway from this conversation, it’s that great companies are rarely built overnight, but clear vision, strong storytelling, and relentless execution can take you a long way.

How to watch:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

We have a video version on YouTube (make sure to subscribe!)

📌 What’s Next

NC Tweener Talks is all about learning directly from the people building companies here in North Carolina, from early experiments to scaling teams, raising capital, and finding product-market fit.

In upcoming episodes, we’ll keep sitting down with founders across the state to unpack the real stories behind their companies: the pivots, failures, breakthroughs, and lessons they picked up along the way.

Subscribe to NC Tweener Talks for more conversations with North Carolina founders, operators, and builders shaping the future of the ecosystem. Paid subscribers help us keep creating more episodes, events, and founder-focused content across the state.