This week I sit down with Josh Miller, CEO and co-founder of Gradient Health, one of the fastest-growing companies in the Tweener portfolio and one most people in North Carolina have never heard of. It’s a mix of company story and founder lessons, with a healthy dose of philosophy along the way. Josh drops a lot of nuggets for builders, so grab a notebook.

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Who is Josh?

Josh Miller is the CEO and co-founder of Gradient Health, a Triangle-based company that sources, de-identifies, and standardizes medical data so AI developers can train models that make healthcare cheaper and better. Josh grew up in the Fort Lauderdale area and came to North Carolina for his undergrad at Duke, where he studied computer vision. Right out of school, he founded FarmShots, which used satellite imagery to spot disease and pests in farm fields so growers could spray only where needed. Josh estimates it cut global fertilizer and pesticide use by about 1%. FarmShots was acquired by Swiss agrochemical giant Syngenta in 2018. Josh swore he’d never do another startup. Two years later he started Gradient. He’s a second-time founder with a rare mix of technical chops and sales instinct, and he credits that combination with a lot of his success.

Highlights

• The growth curve: Gradient grew from about $200K in revenue in year one to $1.2M, $3.5M, $7M, and roughly $40M this year, with $15–16M net of hospital payouts.

• Capital efficient: Gradient has raised only about $9M total, including roughly $3M rounds in 2023 and 2025, with Tweener and Venture South among its local backers.

• A million a head: Gradient just reached 40 employees, generating roughly $1M in revenue per employee. A typical SaaS company doing $40M in revenue might have around 400 employees.

• The 87% problem: Gender, ZIP code, and date of birth alone can identify about 87% of Americans, which is why true de-identification requires much more than removing names.

• Paying it back: Gradient expects to pay nearly $9M this year to partner hospital systems, helping ensure that the institutions caring for patients benefit from the data powering AI.

• Weak labels vs. strong labels: Foundation models have shifted the value of data. Pre-training relies on massive volumes of weakly labeled data, while expert labeling is increasingly valuable in post-training.

• Medicine is surprisingly subjective: Two experts can interpret the same tumor very differently. Small, carefully curated datasets reflecting expert judgment are becoming increasingly valuable.

• Picks and shovels: Josh has considered building his own AI models but sees a strong business in supplying the data without absorbing the enormous cost of training models at scale.

• Culture as the engine: “We talk about problems.” Josh credits a culture of openly confronting what’s not working, while staying committed to the larger vision, as a key driver of success.

• The 100x engineer: AI tools have made good engineers 2–3x more productive and the best engineers 10x more productive. Josh believes the gap between the best and average engineers can now reach 100x. And yes, he gets a substantial Claude bill every month.

• Founder color: Josh’s wife is a former wildlife biologist who worked in the Everglades, and the family has a ball python named Gilbert. His advice after a recent health scare: work hard, but prioritize your physical and mental health. Building a company over 7–10 years is a marathon.

Some companies grow quietly in your backyard until the numbers make everyone ask where they came from. Gradient is one of those, and Josh is generous with the lessons he picked up along the way. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

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Episode 13

This week on Redacted, we have our first guest we didn’t already know. Craig has spent about two years building a personal “software factory” on the side of his day job. One of its products is Blind Oracle, a trust and audit layer for AI agents that do business with other agents. Most of the episode is screen share, with roughly a third on the product and two-thirds on how the machine that builds it actually works.

Who the Guest Is

Craig Brown is a field engineer at Quantexa, a decision intelligence company that helps banks and financial institutions with anti-money-laundering, risk and compliance, and cross-sell detection, and that gets their data ready for AI. He has spent more than 25 years putting software in front of large banks and getting it into production. He started at Lockheed Martin, then moved to Mantas, an early player in behavior detection for banks, where he learned the technical side by running test teams in the US and India. He chose to keep his hands on the keyboard rather than move into management, which led him to solution engineering, then customer success, and now field engineering. Outside of work, he builds Blind Oracle as a solo founder, entirely on his own time and infrastructure.

What We Cover

• Selling to the robots: “I’m really not trying to sell to humans. I’m really trying to sell to the robots.” Blind Oracle’s go-to-market strategy targets AI agents, including outreach on Moltbook.

• Agent passports: Agents register for free in one click, receive a passport, and get starter sats for agent-to-agent commerce. Delegations are logged to Nostr, Base, and local storage, allowing third parties to independently verify agent activity.

• Why on-chain: Agents can modify their own logs and fabricate activity. Craig believes trustworthy records must be written outside the agent fleet at the moment of action, creating evidence that could hold up in court.

• “The baby” turned one: Craig’s system celebrated its first birthday in June, an occasion he treated like a real child’s birthday. He has been building the system for about two years.

• The governance ring: Craig tracks six North Star metrics: alignment, autonomy, durability, self-improvement, self-reliance, and organization. Autonomy alone has 10 sub-requirements, each supported by audit trails.

• Auditing the auditor: Some scorecard metrics had “nothing behind them.” A weekly audit now verifies that reported numbers are backed by real logs and expands coverage as new capabilities are built.

• Fixes, not problems: “I want the system to tell me what it did to address a problem, not what’s the problem.” Craig wants agents to resolve issues autonomously rather than simply report them.

• Deliberation skill: Craig sends plans to five to seven models with distinct personas, ranging from trailblazers to devil’s advocates. Each returns a recommendation and confidence level.

• The honest failure: Blind Oracle has no revenue yet. “I’m just way too early.” Craig believes agent-to-agent commerce will accelerate when Apple releases a capable assistant, and he wants to be positioned ahead of that shift.

• Trust is built, not bought: Craig built his own model router before OpenRouter existed. “I don’t really trust them. I trust mine.” His infrastructure runs on a GCP VM rather than a Mac Mini.

• Tested in the wild: Craig’s anti-persuasion and prompt-injection defenses were developed in response to real incidents, including attempts by other agents to trick his agent into revealing its keys.

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

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.

The Investor Relations, Communications Strategy Primer for NC Founders Series

Investor relations are critical. These investors and their LPs have invested their two most scarce resources: time and treasure into your company to support YOU the founder, in addition to building a great company, one of your top responsibilities is to keep them updated.

Who knows, down the road, you may hit a rough patch and need more capital. Also every existing investor is aligned in helping you solve problems, hiring and raise more capital. If you don’t keep them updated on the business, how are they supposed to do that? It seems like a lot of work, but over the years I’ve built a system that ‘waterfalls’ the information so you only build it once and then tweak it for each step of the waterfall.

The steps in the comms waterfall also are the article in the series:

• IR Comms waterfall step 1: Quarterly Board meetings (Part 1 was here)

  • Optional: monthly Board update email - I call these FLASHs

• IR Comms waterfall step 2: Quarterly Investor Updates (Part 2: You are HERE!)

• IR Comms waterfall step 3: Team Update and All Hands meeting (Part 3: Coming next week)

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Our Quarterly Update Philosophy

First, if all your investors are on your board, good news you can skip this because at this phase in your company, the Quarterly Update and the board meeting are one and the same.

However this is rare, so most of the founders out there are going to need to do quarterly updates.

A second part of that rule is - no surprises. I’ve learned over the decades doing this that it’s best to commit to aggressive transparency. If something goes wrong in the business (e.g. you lose your biggest customer, big M+A deal falls through, funding issue) , you should short-circuit all of this and get the bad news out ASAP. You don’t want to get 2-3yrs into the relationship with the investor and send an urgent:

That’s all, and if you follow our waterfall framework, all the work for the update has already been done for the board meeting package. What we’re doing is just distilling that information into a one page update - have an AI help you with it if you need, but always give it a personal touch.

9 Quarterly Update Best Practices

As we just announced with our Q3 2026 portfolio (here), at NC Tweener Fund with our ‘NC Tweener early-stage startup index fund strategy’ we have 189 portfolio and we read a LOT of updates. We collated through thee last years hundreds and hundreds of updates to come up with 9 best practices and 4 worst practices to help guide you in your quarterly report.

QUBP1: Send a !@#%!@ Quarterly Update

As mentioned, we have 189 portfolio companies and we only get quarterly updates from 65% of them. As a founder, that just blows my mind. Do we have formal information rights? Nope. Does this violate the terms of the agreement? Nope. Is this the right thing for the founder to do? Nope. If you follow the model we’re outlining in this series, the perfect quarterly update should take 1hr to make. That’s it out of a 520 hours in the quarter. You spend more time getting coffee.

Founders: Send those quarterly updates!!

QUBP2: KISS: Keep it Short and Simple

A perfect awesome quarterly update is short and sweet - 3mins, one page. Boom, that’s it.

Many of the best updates go longer which is great, but add a TL;DR. When we get to BP9, we’ll cover the top topics -put those in the TL;DR.

QUBP3: Format: Do what fits you best

Format doesn’t really matter. We get great updates from founders that send a one pager, some send a long form with TL;DR and some send a video. Some

What I personally do is a combo - I do a short-form written TL;DR that is, this will be a surprise, basically BP9 with my own fun twist. Then because I’m just set up for it due to the constant podcasting I do, I cut a < 30min video that goes through more detail. My thinking is to ‘meet the audience where they are’ - if they are on their phone and have time to ‘snack’ on the update- here’s the TL;DR. If they are more involved and want to really dig in, the video is where they can get into all the details behind the TL;DR - and hopefully if I’ve done my job, I’ve anticipated their questions and answered them.

Format-wise, I use Zoom to do a cloud recording with a password and send that. Some founders prefer Looma - those are all great formats.

QUBP4: Deliver the Payload🚀

This is a simple one - put your update in the email. That’s it. Don’t do an encrypted PDF, don’t make me login to Notion, don’t put it in Carta, don’t put it in your vibe-coded Claude artifact that requires me to be on the local network, etc.

Deliver the update. Investors know not to forward these or post them on X. Feel free to put ‘confidential do not forward’ as a reminder if that makes you feel better.

QUBP5: Timing

If you go back to our board meeting post, by day 14 - 2-3 business weeks from the end of the Q, you should have your Board deck ready and meeting in the rearview and that’s the best time to go ahead and send out your shareholder update.

I also like doing it after the board meeting because let’s say in the board meeting all of your directors have questions around one topic - that’s a signal that you blew the comms on that topic and the shareholder update is an opportunity to fix that.

That gives us this timing:

• EOQ+14 - Board Meeting

• EOQ+15 to 18 - Shareholder Update

QUBP6: Make an Ask, make it specific and easy

One thing in the mind of the investor is - we are super-aligned to be helpful. We want to make customer and investor intros. You should leverage the QUBP to have an ask, but make it specific.

Good: “We really need to speak to someone at SAS in their datacenter group, our LinkedIn research has found these 2 names - if you are connected, let me know and I’ll send you a forwardable intro.”

Bad: “We’re always looking for new customers -send us people that work with datacenters.”

QUBP7: Lay fundraising groundwork

Another aspect of my mindset: I may need to raise capital from this group of people again, when I project forward to that day, I want them to be:

• Aware of all the tailwinds and headwinds in the business

• Understand all the basics: ICP, business model, KPIs, KPI directions

• ARR, upcoming fundraising events, etc.

When the time comes to raise a new round, a bridge, they should have known it’s coming for 6 months.

QUBP8: Answer Investor questions and feedback

Anecdotally when we receive updates at Tweener Fund, we’ll review them and then about 10% of the time we’ll have a quick question. Many times these will go unanswered.

An engaged investor is an investor that wants to help and potentially invest more - answer their questions. That’s it.

QUBP9: 9 ‘Must have’ Quarterly Update Topics

Here’s our recommended ‘must have’ topics to cover in your update. We’ve put them in preferred order (most to least) with a little commentary where it makes sense:

• TL;DR - Only if over a page

• KPIs - Make sure to include ARR and MRR and m/m, q/q, y/y changes to these Revenue, burn are important. In 2026, churn is a huge metric

• Cash and runway - Every investor needs this for their internal planning. Pre-answer the question: “When could we potentially need to write a follow-on check into this investment?”

• Fundraising status - If you are within 6mos of fundraising, this is a must have until closed.

• Highlights

• Lowlights

• Goals - Look forward to the next Q, update on Yr if Q2/Q4.

• Team - Any adds/churn/etc.

• Asks - see QUBP6 for dets.

4 Quarterly Updates: What Not To Do!

QUWNTD1: Focus on the Vibes

As depicted at the top of the article, we’ve noticed an increase in founders sending out updates that are long on ‘activities and excitement’ but short on KPIs, cash/runway status, customer closes, etc. If you don’t have those yet, that’s fine, just say it. Not saying it creates the impression in the investor’s mind that you are either not being transparent, maybe not focused on it, or not tracking it. None of those are good places for the investor’s mind to wander.

QUWNTD2: Bury the bad news

As depicted in this image from the board update piece, there is a very human “lead up to the bad news - tell the why and then bang the ‘what’ “ trap many founders fall into. We’ve seen the same thing in quarterly updates. 3 pages in and the last paragraph will be something like:

• Personal update - I’ve decided to leave the startup and start a farm!

• Burn update - We’re out of cash and have a meeting tomorrow to raise $500k bridge.

• Customer update - As I was hitting send, we heard from our two biggest customers that represent 50% of revenue they are churning. Sit tight, I’m going to check into this and let you know next quarter what happened and what we’re doing - next update in March 2027, have a great holiday!

Those are exaggerations, but that’s how they land. First, all of that news should be delivered ASAP with a phone call. Second, please lead with the bad news - always get it out early and fast, it always is best.

QUWNTD3: Omit the big TWO metrics every investor cares about

Many of the updates we get are excellent but they omit any revenue, bookings, ARR/MRR growth type metrics. For our fund, tracking that is essential and I can assure you it is the one group of metrics everyone else needs in their internal tracking and funding decision process. The second is fundraising status.

QUWNTD4: NOT Sending Quarterly Updates

Just to harp on this, end out your updates founders!

Up Next

Next week we’ll wrap up the series by sharing some best (and worst!) practices on company/team updates and communications. Until then, remember to tell all your friends to…

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This week we go to space. Extellis is the Tweener Fund’s first space investment, and founder Michael Boyarsky spent more than a decade at Duke building the metamaterial antenna technology that powers it. This one leans heavily into the tech and the company: what metamaterials are, why satellites overheat, and how you get a satellite into orbit without building a spaceship factory. Along the way, there are some great lessons for any researcher thinking about spinning a company out of the lab.

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Who is Michael?

Michael Boyarsky is the CEO and co-founder of Extellis, a Durham-based satellite imaging company building synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites around a patented metamaterial antenna. Michael studied physics at Boston College, where he got hooked on metamaterials doing three years of undergraduate research. He then took a short detour into robotics for a master’s in mechanical engineering at Marquette University. In 2014, he came to Duke for a PhD in electrical engineering in David’s metamaterials lab, which is arguably the best in the world. He planned to be in and out in five years. Twelve years later, he’s still in North Carolina, and the research he started in his first year at Duke is now a venture-backed company headed for orbit. David is his co-founder.

How We Met

I have been a space nerd since Star Wars, and the Tweener Fund had wanted to make a space investment for a long time. About three years ago, I got a call from someone at Duke. They had a scientist with a meta material that was great for satellites, and he wanted advice on fundraising. That scientist was Michael. The Tweener Fund is now an investor, and I will admit that every time we talk, I learn about 50 new things and I hope you do too!

Highlights

• The 2% moment: As a third-year graduate student presenting at a SAR conference, Michael heard a competitor boast that its satellite could operate 2% of the time. His reaction, “You’re launching things into space for 2%?”, sparked the idea behind Extellis.

• Space is cold, but heat is the problem: Satellites struggle to dissipate the heat they generate because space offers no surrounding material to conduct it away. Today’s SAR satellites typically run out of power and overheat around the same time, severely limiting uptime.

• The company started in a spreadsheet: Michael used measured results from his DARPA-funded ground prototype to model spacecraft design, solar power, launch costs, operations, and ultimately price per image. That analysis convinced him the technology could become a business.

• Metamaterials 101: Metamaterials derive their properties from the geometry of their structures rather than their chemical composition. Extellis makes structures roughly one-tenth of an inch in size using printed circuit boards, sometimes puzzling PCB manufacturers with their unusual designs.

• The invisibility cloak is real: David’s lab demonstrated a working invisibility cloak at microwave frequencies using metamaterials to steer electromagnetic waves around an object and reconstruct them on the other side.

• A 12-year overnight success: Michael arrived at Duke in June 2014, focused his qualifying exam on satellite imaging just 15 months later, and spun out Extellis in 2024.

• The seed round: Extellis closed an oversubscribed $6.8 million seed round in fall 2025, led by Triangle-based Oval Park Capital, followed by a 2026 extension headlined by Shell Ventures.

• The world is not uniformly interesting: Limited satellite imaging capacity forces commercial customers to compete with government buyers for images. Extellis aims to dramatically increase image volume, serving defense alongside agriculture, energy, insurance, shipping, and disaster response.

• Don’t become a spaceship factory: Extellis contracted Colorado-based Astro Digital to build its satellite using flight-proven, modular components. Astro Digital will also manage testing and mission operations.

• The pathfinder by the numbers: Extellis’s first satellite is expected to weigh 150 to 250 pounds, unfold to roughly the size of a large desk, and orbit 350 to 400 miles above Earth. The company is targeting a five-year operational life and an early 2028 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket.

• Market pull beats technology push: Michael advises researchers to build companies around genuine market problems rather than searching for applications for technologies developed in the lab.

Where to Watch/Listen:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

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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.

In this post, we detail the new portfolio companies, what they are building and give updates on what else we’re seeing in the NC startup ecosystem as we meet founders from all around North Carolina.

“It’s a really strange time, and we started feeling this a little bit in Q2, but Q3 is kind of where it’s come home to roost. I’m kind of calling it a K-shaped startup economy.”

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Thank You, LPs 🙌

Before we jump into the recap: thank you to our investors! None of this happens without you. With your support, we’ve now made 262 investments across 189 companies, for $12.7M invested in NC founders. None of this would be possible if accredited investors didn’t commit their capital to NC Tweener Fund.

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!

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NC Tweener Fund Q3 'Read’ on the NC Startup Ecosystem

At Tweener Fund we are in a unique position. We’re on over 180 NC startup cap tables and we’re having hundreds of conversations with founders for potential investments each quarter. This gives us a unique perspective on what’s going on in the NC’s startup economy each Q. What we saw in Q3 was a lot of change happening quickly, all driven by AI.

The startup economy is K-shaped

Early and growth stage capital is flowing almost entirely to AI, and companies founded before 2022 are largely shut out of new funding. Even inside AI there’s a split. The strongest AI-native companies are growing fast and profitably, and some aren’t raising at all. At the other end, there’s a flood of very early ideas. At one recent pitch competition we counted four or more “AI CFO” pitches.

GTM: Outbound is broken, and in-person is back

AI-generated outreach has flipped the signal-to-noise ratio. We’d estimate about 90-95% of what lands in an inbox is now AI slop noise. Cold email, cold calls, and LinkedIn outreach have mostly stopped working. Founders are moving that budget to inbound content, trade shows, and showing up in person. We are seeing this firsthand at ReFiBuy: trade shows cost more, but the share of budget going to sales and marketing as an overall % hasn’t really changed. It has just moved between buckets (outbound→tradeshow). We’re seeing the same thing in Tweener-land, which is a big reason we were on the road so much this quarter.

Fintech is climbing, and Wilmington is rising with it

Health tech is still our #1 category, but fintech moved up to #2 this quarter, driven by deal flow from Charlotte and from the Live Oak/nCino fueled Fintech startup explosion in Wilmington. Wilmington is now our #2 market outside the Triangle for new investments in 2026.

With pre-Tweeners now outnumbering Tweeners in our deal flow by 3 to 1 or more, we’re staying selective. We’re looking for clear moats and enough runway to reach the next milestone. Proprietary data is still the moat we like most. We don’t invest in ‘zero revenue/idea-stage’ pre-tweener, we’re looking for $300-800k ARR, a round that is half committed and a high-growth trajectory.

That’s our Q3 “State of the State”, here’s the specifics on our Q3 investments:

Q3 NC Tweener Fund Investment Highlights

Our Tweener Fund Q2 2026 Snapshot:

• $400K invested

• 9 total investments - 8 new, 1 follow-on

• 4 Tweener / 5 Pre-Tweener

Year to date for 2026, that’s 36 investments and roughly $1.6M deployed into NC startups.

Introducing our Q3 Fresh New Investments!

In Q3, we added 8 new companies to the portfolio, including our first-ever investment in Greenville:

• Abra (PT) - AI-powered procurement automation for mid-market organizations. (Charlotte)

• FinFuego (PT) - An AI CFO for mid-market companies, built for revenue recognition and advanced financial operations. A Live Oak spinout. (Wilmington)

• HiveTracks (PT) - Started as software for beekeepers, and now licenses its proprietary pollinator and environmental data to companies for ESG reporting. (Boone)

• LeftMain REI (T) - CRM for residential real estate investment groups. (Charlotte)

• Define AI (PT) - The Lean Product Playbook, implemented as AI. Co-founded by Pendo co-founder Eric Boduch and Dan Olsen, the book’s author. (Raleigh)

• Impact Card (PT) - A university-branded credit card that shares revenue with schools and gives athletic departments fan and alumni data. Launching with ECU. (Greenville)

• mPATH Health (T) - An AI platform that finds patients overdue for cancer screenings and guides them through getting screened. (Winston-Salem)

• Phyzify (T) - Turns AI-generated designs into physical art, from woven fabric to sculpture. (Asheville)

Existing Investment add-ons

Tweener Fund also made an additional investment in 1 portfolio company:

Details:

• Nimble Energy (T) (Carrboro) - We love how Nimble founder, Jeff Sloplop, is building and were excited to support the company again.

Q3 Tweener Events

This quarter was tradeshows season, so Robbie and Scot were all across the state, and each Q we host our founders and LPs to a happy hour… Here’s the highlights, you can read our trip reports on

If in-person is the new go-to-market, we took our own advice. Q3 had us in the Triangle, Winston-Salem, and Wilmington:

• Q3 Tweener Happy Hour - Hosted on Balentine’s sky deck, with thanks to Balentine for sponsoring. Great turnout, and the sunset stole the show.

• Converge South (Winston-Salem) - A two-day, early-stage event split between biotech and tech. We came away impressed by Winston-Salem’s city-led innovation district and the civic and private investment behind entrepreneurship there. Scot wrote a two-part recap that you can view here (Pt1) (Pt2).

• Investor Buzz-In (Wilmington, Sept 10) - Robbie represented Tweener with a reverse pitch at the 4th annual event hosted by Jim Roberts, and joined an AI panel. Robbie’s recap can be viewed here.

• Bank of America Innovation Summit (Durham) - Giulia attended. Dan Olsen, author of The Lean Product Playbook, opened the day, and it closed with a discussion of the Triangle’s infrastructure and where its tech scene is heading. Giulia’s recaps of the summit can be viewed here (Pt1) (Pt2).

Looking Ahead to Q4

We’re heading into the end of the year with a clear plan: keep the map growing, stay picky on pre-tweeners, and keep showing up in person. We’re tracking about 10 tweeners across the Triangle, Triad, Charlotte, and Wilmington, plus a few rounds that slipped from Q3 and should close this quarter. Our Q4 happy hour is in the works (location TBD), and we’ll share details as the date gets closer.

If you’re building something in NC, whether you’re in Greenville or Weaverville, we’d love to hear from you.

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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.

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🙌 Thank You!

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Episode 12

After a run of guest episodes, Redacted gets back to its roots. Today we show what it actually looks like to run a company with AI in 2026. Not just the shiny thing they built, but why they built it and how the pieces connect. It's mostly an inside look at Offline's product process, with plenty of lessons any founder can steal.

What We Cover

• The Hot List: A prototype Raleigh restaurant feed tracking what’s opening soon, newly opened, and changing daily, complete with opening-day Instagram reels and a map.

• Hiring an AI to watch the city: The backend mimics a human scanning Instagram and local news, using a $148/month RapidAPI social data API plus an LLM to determine when restaurants actually open and write the stories.

• Steal your own app’s skeleton: Rather than design a new UI, David pointed Claude at Offline’s Flutter repo and had it recreate the existing home screen with the new data, interactions, icons, and colors.

• “We don’t have lots of time and people anymore”: Offline’s old prototype, interview, meeting, repeat process took months and significant headcount, so the team is building tools to dramatically compress that loop.

• Every feature gets an LLM interface: Taylor’s rule is that anything new he builds for Offline also gets an interface an LLM can operate, including a survey API that lets Claude or Codex generate complete surveys from chat.

• The survey Typeform couldn’t do: Taylor built a survey with an intro video, embedded live prototype, direct questions, up to three AI-generated follow-ups, automatic progress saving, and a paid-interview booking link, running on Cloudflare with a Qwen open-weight model.

• Build it vs. wait for it: David checked Typeform’s new AI form product live and found it offered only a fraction of Taylor’s functionality, reinforcing the idea that waiting 12 to 18 months for a SaaS vendor can now be unnecessarily slow.

• North Star first: Offline’s key metric is members who visit a restaurant each month, and with roughly 3,600 active Triangle subscribers, the focus is whether the Hot List can get inactive members thinking about and using Offline more often.

• “Are you even going out to eat?”: Drawing on Itamar Gilad’s Evidence Guided and frameworks like RICE and ICE, David emphasized validating the fundamental behavioral link first. If customers aren’t dining out, no product feature will change the outcome.

• The product loop gets faster: A test cycle might shrink from two months to one month, then two weeks, then one week, eventually allowing five parallel experiments with different user groups while an agent monitors the results.

• Bonus, a website in an hour: Taylor used the Webflow MCP and Fable 5 to rebuild Offline’s website in Next.js with roughly 10 prompts and under an hour of his own time, while also fixing an FAQ that had been wrong for nine months.

No guests, no polish, just two people figuring out how a tiny team can run a real product process with AI. Enjoy the conversation.

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

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.

^{Cape Fear Community College’s Union Station, 502 N Front Street, Wilmington}

In February, we partnered with NC IDEA to take the Tweener Fund statewide, and it became the NC Tweener Fund. We made that announcement in Wilmington, so it felt right to head back to the coast for the next stop on our road trip.

Scot kicked things off with a two-part report from ConvergeSouth in Winston-Salem (Part 1 and Part 2). Now it’s my turn. On Thursday, September 10, I was in Wilmington for the 4th annual Investor Buzz In, where I did a reverse pitch for the NC Tweener Fund and sat on a panel about AI.

Here’s a stat that might surprise Triangle folks: since January, the coast is second only to Charlotte among the regions outside the Triangle where the Tweener Fund has invested. There’s a lot going on down there, and the ‘Buzz In’ event is the best single day to see it.

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About the Investor Buzz In

The Buzz In is put on by the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington (NEW), led by our friend Jim Roberts. Buzz In bills itself as the only venture capital conference in North Carolina east of Raleigh. This year’s event was on 9/10, and since 910 is Wilmington’s area code, it doubled as “910 Day.” Get it?

The event has grown fast:

• 2023: The first Buzz In drew 53 investors representing more than $1B in capital.

• 2025: Nearly 300 attendees from 15 states.

• 2026: 322 people registered for 300 seats. Cape Fear Community College added 30 temporary chairs to fit everyone.

The day packed in a fireside chat, six panels, a round of reverse pitches from investors, and six founder pitches. The reverse pitch lineup alone had funds from Wilmington, the Triangle, Charlotte, New York, and California.

^{Jim Roberts, founder of the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington}

The Energy

The first thing you notice at the Buzz In is the energy. The room was packed, and people came to meet people.

A lot of that comes from Jim. He moved to Wilmington in 2013 to run UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), then went on to start NEW and the Wilmington Angels for Local Entrepreneurs (WALE). He is very good at putting on these events. He gets the right people in the room and keeps things moving. I spoke at one of Jim’s events last March, and it had the same feel. If you’ve never been to one, put it on your calendar.

Nice work to Jerry Coleman and Cape Fear Community College for hosting (and finding those extra chairs), and to the event sponsors, including Kymanox, Cape Fear Ventures, Canapi Ventures, and Launchpad from Greenville, SC.

Wilmington’s Startup Ecosystem

Our friend Tom Snyder at NC IDEA wrote a great overview of the coast for WRAL TechWire the week after the event. It’s worth a read. A few things that stood out:

• The Live Oak family tree. Live Oak Bank was founded in Wilmington in 2005, and its fintech know-how produced nCino and Apiture. Those three companies have hired more than 1,000 UNCW graduates between them.

• A unicorn. Vantaca, the property management software company, took a $300M+ minority growth investment at a $1.25B valuation in October 2025.

• The community layer. NEW has more than 1,000 entrepreneurs in its network, and its monthly events average around 170 people. Heather McWhorter now runs the CIE, and Jack Fleming leads the weekly 1 Million Cups gathering.

• Local capital. Cape Fear Ventures and VentureSouth are both active, along with WALE.

Tom was also clear about the gaps. Local investors say more capital needs to get activated. The CIE’s space is at capacity. There aren’t enough incubators, accelerators, or startup-focused service providers. And state and federal economic development still leans toward recruiting existing companies instead of growing new ones. His closing point was that Wilmington has to decide whether to treat entrepreneurship as infrastructure, the same way it treats roads, broadband, and airports. Several of the panels came back to those same themes.

Time to Learn!

Like ConvergeSouth, the best part of the day was the content. Here’s my recap of each session, in order, with our usual focus on what NC founders can take away.

Riverside Chat: Mike McGuire

Mike McGuire, former CEO of Grant Thornton, opened the day with a fireside chat (billed as a “Riverside Chat”) on culture and mindset.

• Hiring is the culture decision. You can’t fix culture later if the first hires are wrong. Get the right people and the team becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

• Curiosity scales. Founders have to be curious to change anything, and the job is to make that curiosity part of how the whole company works, not just the CEO.

Panel: Programming for Entrepreneurs That Has an IMPACT

Emil Runge of Launch Chapel Hill moderated this one. On stage: Taylor McLemore (Launchpad), Tom Snyder (NC IDEA), Hal Atkins (Companah), and Lydia Thomas (UNCW CIE). The question was what separates founder programs that work from ones that don’t.

• Programs should build habits, not checklists. Entrepreneurship isn’t linear, and customer discovery isn’t something you finish. The best mentors get founders doing it every week.

• Obsess over the problem. The founders who win are the ones who care more about the problem than their first solution.

• Customers buy outcomes. Tom’s version: nobody wants your solution, they want what it does for them.

Reverse Pitches

Normally founders pitch investors. In a reverse pitch, investors pitch founders: who we are, what we invest in, and how to get on our radar. Seven of us went up:

• Abby Phillips, Wolfpack Investor Network

• Robbie Allen, NC Tweener Fund powered by NC IDEA

• Paul Quadros, Band of Angels

• Greg Brown, Charlotte Angel Fund

• Mark Friedman, RTP Angel Fund

• Virginie Raphael, Full Circle Fund

• Richard Stroupe, Cape Fear Ventures

Virginie came down from New York (she was an early investor in Uber), and Paul came from California’s Band of Angels. Out-of-state investors making the trip to Wilmington says a lot about the deal flow at the coast.

^{Pitching the NC Tweener Fund}

I gave the standard Tweener pitch. If you haven’t heard it:

• We take an index approach to venture. Instead of a few big bets, we write lots of smaller checks across the ecosystem so we don’t miss the winners.

• We focus on Tweeners: companies with 10+ employees or $1M+ in revenue that have made it past the earliest, riskiest stage.

• We’re active. PitchBook ranked us the most active investor in the Southeast in 2023 and 2024.

• We’re statewide now. With NC IDEA as our cornerstone partner, we invest across all of North Carolina, not just the Triangle. That’s why I was in Wilmington.

If you’re building a company on the coast (or anywhere in NC) and we haven’t met, reach out through tweenerfund.com.

What about LPs?

For accredited investors that are interested in investing in NC startups, we are always open for new LPs. Tweener Fund is a ‘rolling fund’, meaning ‘always open’ and there is only a one year commitment of $30k ($7,500/Q) to get started. In that year you will build a highly diversified portfolio of 40+ early-stage NC tech companies. If you want to learn more check out the site and our AngelList landing page here.

Lunch Keynote Panel: Attracting More Local Investors

^{A full house for the lunch panel on attracting more local investors}

This panel went straight at the capital gap. Richard Stroupe (Cape Fear Ventures) moderated, with Jay Bigelow (CED), Stan Parker (WSPR Fund), Mark Friedman (RTP Angel Fund), and Jeremy Turner (Appalachian Investors Alliance).

Jim shared a stat afterward that frames the problem: New Hanover County receives $1,359 per capita in philanthropic giving, compared to $7,633 in Buncombe and $19,635 in Forsyth, according to 2019 IRS data (The Assembly). Philanthropy isn’t angel investing, but it points the same direction.

• Build the investor network first. Investors want to know each other. When they do, deals get shared, and founders get more introductions.

• An ecosystem is something you do. Mark’s point was that the word only means something when people are actually doing the work.

• Traction comes in more than one form. It isn’t always sales and revenue.

If WSPR sounds familiar, Scot wrote about the Winston-Salem Partners Roundtable in Part 1.

Panel: AI Impact on All Industries

This was my panel. Wade Minter (Suggestion Ox) moderated, and I was joined by Corbin Penland (Synply), Stephen Perry (Kymanox), and Christy Swann (RCOAST). We talked about how companies are actually putting AI to work and how to pitch it inside a company as an opportunity instead of a threat.

• Start with contained use cases. Corbin’s approach is to prove value on narrow tasks where a person still reviews the output.

• Talk about efficiency, not replacement. Christy framed AI as a way to get more out of every dollar by improving processes.

• Adapt as it changes. Stephen’s advice was to keep moving with the technology instead of betting on where it is today. His version: move where the cheese is moving.

Panel: Life Sciences

Carson Jackson (NCInnovation) moderated a conversation with Dr. Morris Nguyen (Predicate), Paul Quadros (Band of Angels), and Brett Lanier (NCBiotech advisory board) about building life sciences companies in NC.

• Founders need other founders. Morris credited the CIE for connecting Predicate to other founders early and helping them build good habits.

• Support matters most early. Brett called the first stretch of building a company a trial by fire, and that’s when local programs like the CIE make the biggest difference.

Panel: Technology

Michelle Calton (NC TECH) moderated a mix of founders and investors: Tully Ryan (IQExit), Jenn Summe (Primordial Ventures), Robin Cowie (Skillmaker), and Matt Cimino (Amped Ventures).

• Keep investors updated. Jenn said regular update emails are one of the clearest signs of a founder who follows through. As someone who reads a lot of these, I’ll second that one.

• Get to revenue fast. Robin’s advice was to start selling as early as possible.

• Small can be an advantage. Robin compared Wilmington to a tinderbox: with the right product, you can get in front of the right people very quickly.

• You don’t have to move to Raleigh. Matt made the case that you can build a company from Wilmington, and pointed out that you can’t finish your day on a boat in Raleigh. Hard to argue with that.

• Own a niche. Tully suggested Wilmington brand itself as a fintech hub, which makes sense given the Live Oak family tree.

Panel: The Future of the Wilmington Ecosystem

^{NC IDEA’s Thom Ruhe (front) moderating the closing panel}

Thom Ruhe (NC IDEA) closed the day with Heather McWhorter (UNCW CIE), Richard Stroupe (Cape Fear Ventures), Scott Davis (NCInnovation’s Wilmington hub), and Dr. John Hardin (NC Department of Commerce Office of Science, Technology, and Innovation). This one picked up the same gaps Tom wrote about.

• Visible champions help. Thom talked about how much momentum comes from well-known local leaders, like Richard, putting their time and money behind startups.

• The university is an anchor. Heather described the CIE’s role in terms of jobs for graduates, research, and making Wilmington a place people want to live.

• Elected officials are missing from the conversation. Both Scott and Heather raised it, which lines up with Tom’s point about government support.

• NC has research assets to build on. John noted that North Carolina is unique in having three NSF-funded research initiatives.

Founder Pitches

Six founders pitched during the day, and five of them also sat on panels.

• RCOAST (TWEENER FUND COMPANY): Dr. Christy Swann’s company uses drone-mounted LiDAR and machine learning to map coastal erosion, a multi-billion-dollar mitigation market. It has clients from North Carolina to Texas and announced a $945K pre-seed round at the event.

• Skillmaker (TWEENER FUND COMPANY): Robin Cowie (whose resume includes The Blair Witch Project and the Madden franchise) is building AI-powered immersive training for auto repair technicians. Skillmaker has a national deal with NAPA and announced NAPA’s full autotech knowledge base is now on the platform. Jim introduced them as “the sexiest startup in North Carolina.”

• Predicate: Dr. Morris Nguyen, a former physician, runs this Wilmington-based company that analyzes wearable data with AI to help clinicians catch sepsis and other conditions sooner. It runs trials across five continents and was named NC TECH’s Data Innovation Company of the Year.

• Synply: Corbin Penland’s cloud platform for bank loan syndication. It was incubated inside Live Oak Bank and spun out in 2024, another branch on the Live Oak family tree.

• IQExit: Tully Ryan’s company helps business owners understand how ready they are for an exit, and on what timeline, using bank assessment and banking relationship data.

• Nuream: Sleepwear with built-in sensors that capture brain and heart signals, aimed at better sleep and earlier detection of conditions like Alzheimer’s, MS, and depression.

Congrats to Christy and the RCOAST team on closing the round. Pitching and panel duty on the same day is a lot.

That’s a Wrap! What’s Next?

If the Buzz In made you want to spend more time at the coast, Jim shared what’s coming up:

• Sept 29: UNCW CIE Ocean Innovation Conference

• October: Cape Fear ELEVATE CEO Retreat, hosted by Richard Stroupe

• Nov 12-13: NC IDEA Ecosystem Summit, in Wilmington

• Nov 16: NC TECH Annual Awards, in the Triangle

If you’re building something near Wilmington and we haven’t met yet, reach out.

Bank of America’s Triangle Innovation Summit at Apella in Durham brought together founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders from across North Carolina for an afternoon on how AI is reshaping the way companies build, raise, and grow.

Part 1 (here if you missed it) covered Dan Olsen’s keynote on product judgment, his fireside chat with Eric Boduch, and Bank of America’s economic and capital markets outlook.

Part 2 (You are HERE!) covers how three of the Triangle’s leading software CEOs are rebuilding their companies for AI, what bankers are seeing in live deals, and how regional leaders are planning for the next decade of growth.

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The Great Reinvention: Rebuilding Platforms for an AI-Native World

Phil Ianniello (Bank of America) moderated a conversation with Todd Olson (Pendo), Derek Holt (Digital.ai) and Zach Maurides (Teamworks) on what it takes to turn a scaled software company into an AI-native one.

The hardest part is people

“People love progress, but they hate change.” — Derek Holt

• Todd: Pendo has about 750 employees, from people who are “AI-pilled” to people saying, “I’m 50 years old, I don’t want to learn a new thing.” Those are as he puts it, “uncomfortable conversations.”

• Derek: Digital.ai can take on only about three big business-process changes at a time before “the organization… rejects the change.” Recent ones were legal and closing the books at quarter-end.

• Zach: The resistance is external too. College and pro coaches are “the least tech-savvy human beings,” so Teamworks has to get them to “taste the value” first.

Customers want different things

Digital.ai counts half the Fortune 100 as customers, and many operate in regulated industries that don’t reward “move fast and break things.” Todd described the range he sees. One enterprise customer fired a developer for putting Claude-generated code into production, while other customers are building entire products with Claude.

Todd is also saying no to big customers who ask for features “in UIs that I just don’t think are going to exist in a few years.” Pricing is shifting toward usage and outcomes, and Pendo will likely reprice its entire product in the next six months.

Investors want returns, and their playbook is thin

Zach said investors now want AI to show up in growth or margins, not just in feature launches. Todd was blunter. There are only four or five examples of a scaled SaaS company becoming AI-native, with Intercom’s Fin as the favorite. “None of these investors have any idea what the hell’s going on. They have pattern matching of a very small N.”

Making an incumbent AI-native

• Derek: Review every recurring business process with internal forward-deployed teams: “Not can we just give everybody Claude, but can we rethink the business process.”

• Zach: Teamworks works with 100% of the NFL, D1 and the Premier League and has $200M on its balance sheet. “Shame on me if we aren’t the ones that figure out how to use this technology to solve problems for this industry.”

• Todd: Pendo’s new AI-native product, Novus, connects to a customer’s codebase, installs and configures itself, and fixes issues on its own. The goal is “a more magical experience.”

Where the moat is now

• Own your data inputs. Teamworks bought SportLogic and PFF so it controls the data behind its player models. Zach’s analogy: “I don’t want to be buying my rare earth minerals from China.”

• Solve an urgent, unique problem. Derek said more vulnerabilities were found in the first half of this year than in all of last year. About 90% of them are now exploited, compared with about 15% before, and in about a day instead of a year. “We’re actually using AI to now protect the applications from the AI.”

• Product sense, speed and brand. Todd cited Lovable’s rise and Legora’s lead over Claude for legal work. Customer intimacy still matters: “Try to sell to Bank of America. Good luck.”

Hiring is changing

Todd is “incredibly bullish on young people” and is expanding campus hiring. “I don’t want your experience.” Pendo also made headlines by hiring a 23-year-old Chief AI Officer. Zach has heard of CEOs asking candidates to pull up Claude during the interview and show how they use it. Everyone agreed it feels like being back in startup mode, even at scale.

Breakout: BofA Capital Markets Deep Dive with Q&A

Attendees then split between two breakout sessions: “Navigating the New VC & PE Landscape” with Pappas Capital, Cofounders Capital, and Tech Square Ventures, and a capital markets Q&A with Bank of America’s Phil Ianniello and Shawn Liu. I sat in on the BofA session, which went straight to what’s happening in live deals.

Have an AI story, and back it with data. “If you don’t have an AI story when you’re trying to sell your business, that’s definitely a problem.” Even when a deal team is convinced, sponsors’ investment committees have killed deals at the definitive-documents stage because of AI headlines. Buyers expect AI-driven efficiency in operations. What sets a company apart is AI in the product, backed by KPIs such as margin gains or faster growth.

Deals take longer now. Processes that used to take 4–5 months now often take 8–12 months, with early “fireside chats” to test the story with buyers first. That means the company has to hit its numbers for two or three quarters in a row, but it also leads to smoother integrations after the deal.

Durability over defensibility. Patents and “proprietary” data are losing value as moats because AI makes copying so easy. Buyers look at customer cohorts and usage instead. “I’ve never seen so much attention on customer logins.” If a customer spent $3M on your product but their team logged in only 100 times, you will get churned.

The IPO math has changed.

• The average SaaS IPO in 2021 priced at 11x revenue. Public SaaS companies now trade at about 5x.

• A $200M-revenue company at 7x is a $1.4B company with only about $300M of stock trading publicly, which makes the stock illiquid and volatile.

• Almost every IPO mandate is now dual-track, except SpaceX: “There’s no way you can afford it.”

• Expect a wave of PE-owned IPOs around Q1, priced at a discount.

Secondaries are cleaning up cap tables. Continuation vehicles have peaked, and LPs are “getting a little bit tired of the CV pitch.” Secondary and late-stage investors are buying out early shareholders who have been stuck for years, in some cases at a 10–15% premium.

Is geography still a disadvantage? For early-stage capital, yes, and more than ever. The firms moving fastest are “probably within 10 miles of each other” in the Bay Area. Growth equity, though, is “truly global,” with investors from New York, Dubai and Singapore all at the table.

Closing Keynote: Reenvisioning the Triangle

Bank of America’s Triangle market president moderated a conversation with Brian Fork (Carolina Hurricanes), Scott Levitan (Research Triangle Foundation) and Tommy Sowers (UNC-Chapel Hill) on how the region can keep up with its own growth.

Growth is the opportunity and the challenge

Scott laid out the numbers:

• The region has 300,000 more residents than 10 years ago, and another 1 million are expected over the next 20 years, a 50% increase.

• That means about 20,000 new homes a year, compared with about 9,800 being built today.

Scott also recalled Amazon’s HQ2 search. Amazon told the region its site visitors “only had to come one time” because every stakeholder was in the same room. In DC, it took four trips.

RTP 3.0 and Hub RTP

When RTP was founded there were three research parks in North America. Today there are 450. RTP spans 7,000 acres, about half the size of Manhattan, with ~400 companies and 55,000 jobs. It just finished a five-year rezoning with Wake and Durham counties, which Scott calls “a 50-year plan.”

• Hub RTP: a 100-acre, ~$6B mixed-use downtown. It already has 440 homes, whose residents are “the first people who have slept legally in RTP in 65 years.”

• Frontier Campus: a converted IBM building that now houses about a third of RTP’s companies. Its Boxyard venue hosts 400+ events a year.

• Transit: 10 planned bus rapid transit routes will meet in RTP.

UNC’s “N of 1” opportunity

Tommy said UNC conducts about $1.5B of research each year, and the companies it has launched generate about $8B of economic impact annually. The next big move is Carolina North, a 230-acre site near campus that is “not to build a new industrial park and not to build a new campus, but something in between.” Asked how many RTP companies UNC has visited, Tommy answered, “Not enough.” His new pitch to corporate partners is four words: “How can we help?”

What the Hurricanes teach

Brian passed along what one analyst told him: “Every team in the NHL has an analytics department… there’s only about 3 teams that listen to their analytics department, and then there’s this team which only has an analytics department.”

“Every team in the NHL has an analytics department… there’s only about 3 teams that listen to their analytics department, and then there’s this team which only has an analytics department.”

Off the ice, the Canes are putting their 80-acre, state-owned site to use 365 days a year:

• A $300M publicly funded renovation of the Lenovo Center

• A private mixed-use district with at least $800M of required investment, likely $1.5–2B

• A 5,300-seat music venue with Live Nation

Tommy’s lesson from the Canes: “Success in the past isn’t going to take you into the future.”

What comes next: The panel agreed the Triangle needs to plan now for transportation, housing, schools, and water and sewer. “We’ve got to be thinking 7 to 12 years from now.”

Closing Reflections

Across all three sessions, the message was the same. Incumbents rebuilding for AI, dealmakers selling through AI headlines, and a region adding a million people are all being asked to change faster than they're used to.

The Triangle's advantage is what surprised Amazon and was in evidence at the event: everyone who matters shows up in the same room!

Last week, Bank of America hosted its annual Triangle Innovation Summit at Apella in Durham. Founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem leaders from across North Carolina came together for an afternoon on how AI is changing the way companies build, hire, raise, and exit.

Last year the big theme was capital discipline. This year it moved from “should we use AI?” to “now that everyone has it, how do we use it well?”

In Part 1, we cover the opening keynote from Dan Olsen, author of The Lean Product Playbook, his fireside chat with Eric Boduch of 24 and Up Venture Studios, and Bank of America’s outlook on the economy, IPOs, and M&A.

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Opening Keynote: Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook

Dan went from designing nuclear submarines for the Navy to learning product management at Intuit, and then to startups, writing and speaking. His framing: product development has gone through four eras, Waterfall → Agile → Lean → AI. When he polled the room, almost everyone said they use AI multiple times a day.

The bottleneck has moved upstream

• Engineers are far more productive, so building is easier than ever. The catch: “It’s easier to build something that nobody wants than it ever was before.”

• The hard part is now deciding what to build. The classic ratio of one PM to 5–8 engineers is breaking down, and teams need more product judgment, which Dan believes can be learned.

Dan’s four parts of product sense: a strong mental model of customer needs, smart prioritization, coming up with compelling solutions, and predicting which ideas will maximize customer value and ROI.

AI prototyping closes the “design gap”

Fewer than 5% of teams have enough design resources to prototype their ideas. Now anyone can turn a PRD into a working prototype. Dan mapped the tools from least to most technical: browser-based tools (Figma Make, Claude Design, Lovable, Bolt, v0), then IDE extensions, desktop apps (Cursor, Claude, Codex) and the command line (Claude Code). His advice for non-technical builders: “Why are you doing prototypes in Claude Code, bro?”

Type 1 vs. Type 2 work: Tools like Claude Cowork automate “Type 1” work such as status updates and decks. That frees up time for “Type 2” thinking: strategy, prioritization, and customer discovery.

Fireside Chat: Eric Boduch & Dan Olsen

Eric Boduch, founder of 24 and Up Venture Studios, joined Dan to talk about what AI means for teams.

Roles are blurring. PM, design, and engineering now overlap into a “product builder” role. PMs can prototype in Lovable in an afternoon, and Dan describes forward-deployed engineers as “PM-enabled engineers.” Stay-in-your-lane teams are falling behind.

The prototype-to-production gap. About half the room had designed a prototype since AI arrived, and many non-coders had shipped code for the first time. Eric told the story of a non-engineer who wrote a million lines of code in a few months: “Their company thought it was amazing. I thought it was an absolute nightmare.” Leading teams prototype on top of their existing design systems and use MCP to find “the minimum diff to implement this in our code base.”

Dan repeated advice he heard from an audience member at one of his early AI meetups: “Whatever you’re using AI for, you better be a pretty good expert in that area. Because otherwise it’s really good at BSing you.”

The junior talent problem. AI already outperforms a 10th-percentile developer but is nowhere near the 90th. So senior people are getting more leverage, and junior roles are being cut. Eric asked: “Where do the seniors come from?”

The next wave: shared context. Most companies rolled out Claude Enterprise in just the last few months.

“They just gave all their employees a Ferrari, but none of them know how to drive a Ferrari.”

The next challenge is shared skills and shared context across teams. As Eric put it: “We all need a shared harness. We all need shared context, memory, decisions.”

On utopia vs. extinction, Dan said it depends on what humans do: “If Dario’s worried about it, then I’m worried about it.”

Economic & Capital Markets Outlook: Phil Ianniello & Shawn Liu, Bank of America

Macro snapshot (Phil)

• Still a growth economy: US GDP is expected to grow 3.1%, with ~60 basis points coming from AI investment. CEO confidence is well above historical norms.

• Headwinds: geopolitical tension, $104 oil and inflation that is falling but still elevated. Consumer spending is strong even though consumer sentiment is negative.

• Rates and volatility: The Fed made its first rate move the day before the summit, and a second is expected. The VIX is around 15, a healthy level for capital markets.

IPOs: record year, narrow window

• 2026 is on pace to be the best IPO year ever, driven almost entirely by mega-deals. A possible Anthropic IPO is the big Q4 question mark.

• The median software IPO market cap is ~$6B, compared with ~$2B historically. The next window should open for companies with $200–400M in revenue.

M&A: record dollars, fewer deals (Shawn)

• Total M&A dollar volume is the highest in a decade, nearly double pre-COVID levels. But mega-deals carry the total, and small deals have been quiet.

• Software’s share has fallen more than 40%. AI and semiconductors now drive deal flow, with chipmakers buying software to become “more relevant and more durable.”

• Dual-track pitches have doubled, and private equity firms are starting to sell. Creative structures like reverse mergers are “topic du jour.”

• 2027 outlook: CEO confidence is high and private equity capital is plentiful. Shawn is hopeful that smaller deals pick up.

Key Takeaway from Part 1

The first half of the summit had one clear message. AI has made building easy, so judgment is now the scarce resource. That applies to product teams deciding what to build, organizations moving from individual AI use to shared context, and investors choosing where the next dollar goes.

For Triangle founders, the edge will come from customer insight, strong teams and capital efficiency, not just from shipping faster.

Next up in Part 2: the BofA Capital Markets Deep Dive, “Navigating the New VC & PE Landscape”, Cofounders Capital and Tech Square Ventures, and the closing keynote on reimagining the Triangle.

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Episode 11

This week on Redacted, we bring on our fourth guest: Ben Eckerson, founder of Agentcy, an AI-enabled consultancy helping small-to-mid-market companies find the gaps between the software they already pay for. It's a heavy demo episode where Ben walks through the internal CRM he built from a single meeting transcript into a full client-proposal engine and bookended by a real conversation about whether to build your own tools or buy them, and what's left for humans once the AI does the rest.

Who the Guest Is

Ben Eckerson is the founder of Agentcy, an AI-enabled consultancy for small-to-mid-market companies, launched in earnest in February 2026 alongside business partner Eric out of 24 and Up, a venture studio in downtown Raleigh. Before Agentcy, Ben spent roughly 20 years in client services, starting on the ad-agency side at McKinney (2006–2012), then running Viget's Durham office, then co-founding Savas Labs, a web and platform shop. Agentcy is his bet on something leaner: fewer licenses, fewer gaps between tools, and, in his words, getting humans to stop doing the robot work.

What We Cover

• 20 years of agency scars, one clean pivot: Ben spent two decades in client services, McKinney (2006–2012), running Viget’s Durham office, then co-founding Savas Labs, before breaking off in late 2025 to build something leaner.

• “Get the humans to stop doing the robot work.” It’s on Agentcy’s homepage, and it’s the same idea behind the CRM Ben built to run his own shop.

• Stealth to full launch in under a year: Agentcy started quietly in late 2025 and went full-time in February 2026, built alongside business partner Eric out of 24 and Up in downtown Raleigh.

• The demo, start to finish: Drop in a Fathom call transcript, and the tool pulls out pain points and quotes, maps them against a JSON file of Agentcy’s service offerings, estimates hours and pricing, and outputs a one-click, client-ready proposal deck.

• “We’ve just AI-ified it.” David and Taylor’s own company, Offline, a consumer subscription business doing roughly $1M in ARR, gets a quick mid-episode update: two people working on it full-time, two part-time.

• The AI-CRM question: Ben’s tried the off-the-shelf options (“very impressive”) but keeps building his own anyway, dogfooding what Agentcy sells clients and learning what’s actually valuable versus commodity.

• Going headless: The group’s read on where AI tooling is heading: the UI becomes a “commodity bolt-on,” and the real value moves into the data layer.

• The counter-argument: Less UI can mean sloppier AI without a human checkpoint forcing structure, a risk David pushes Ben on directly.

• Prototypes beat decks: Ben’s biggest process change in recent months is showing clients a working prototype instead of a slide, because a deck “doesn’t necessarily show them what it looks like.”

• Most clients don’t have a CTO: Just someone managing software licenses, which is why Ben opens every engagement by asking what people spend time on that they’d like to do less of.

• Human judgment as the “last mile”: For all the automation on display, the group lands on reading a room and making a judgment call as the thing that stays human, the note they close the episode on.

Ben brings it back to Offline right at the buzzer. More automation, he argues, just means more time to go touch grass. Enjoy the conversation.

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

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.

Welcome to part 2 of our 2-part Converge South Trip report:

In part 1 we went through the conference’s history, the Winston Salem innovation district and the three primary locations that held the Converge South 2026 and are ‘anchors’ for the Winston Salem startup ecosystem. You can read it here.

Here in part 2, we’re going to recap 4 of the keynotes we at…

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This week I sit down with Will Duckett, co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, an NC Tweener Fund portfolio company building the infrastructure behind private market secondaries. It's a good mix of both worlds with real company detail (broker-dealer licensing, cap table complexity, go-to-market) alongside the founder lessons that come with seven years of building through two economic shocks. If you've ever wondered what actually happens when a private equity firm buys a company out from under 8,000 employees, this one's for you.

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Who is Will?

Will Duckett is co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, a Raleigh-based fintech building the technology and regulatory infrastructure for secondary liquidity in private markets. Will grew up in North Carolina and studied entrepreneurship and ancient Roman history at UNC Chapel Hill, then spent about four years in the back office of a fund of hedge funds in New York before earning his MBA at Columbia Business School. He moved home to North Carolina to start a family and work in private-business operations, including a stint at menswear brand Peter Millar, before co-founding Equity Shift with Tom in 2019. Today he’s also co-Chief Compliance Officer for the company’s FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and leads customer success, operations, and, in the early days a lot of the marketing too.

Highlights

• The origin story: Will met co-founder Tom Gordon at a blockchain working group in 2018; Tom previously built the online hotel reservation technology behind modern travel booking and sold it to Travelocity.

• 41 patents: Equity Shift holds roughly 41 U.S. patents describing how blockchain, or as Will prefers, “immutable ledger technology,” can underpin digital private markets.

• The pitch in one line: “Think of it as almost a digital operating system for a private business or a private entity.”

• The Carta line: On how Equity Shift differs from cap table incumbents: “This is Carta that keeps itself as you use it to actually do the work.”

• The SpaceX cautionary tale: SpaceX reportedly went public without knowing all of its own shareholders after secondary shares were resold through daisy-chained SPVs, the kind of regulatory risk Will says Equity Shift is designed to prevent.

• The market math: Secondaries account for roughly 2% of total AUM in private markets, compared with about 95% secondary trading volume in public markets, a massive gap Equity Shift is chasing.

• Finding the bigger space: After realizing Carta had already saturated the roughly 60,000 to 100,000 VC-backed companies, Will and Tom targeted what they estimate is a market of 15 million private U.S. businesses, ultimately focusing on private-equity-backed buyout companies.

• The taxi medallion analogy: Mentor Bill Spruell told Will to think of FINRA broker-dealer registration “like a New York City taxi cab medallion,” painful to obtain, but a durable asset once you have it.

• Team and traction: Equity Shift has grown from a two-person founding team to 26 people, became a registered broker-dealer in 2021, and now works with some of the world’s largest private equity firms and asset managers.

• Founder advice: “Just think of it being at least 2 times harder than you think it will be.” After seven years, Will’s biggest lessons include relentlessness and the value of having a co-founder to share the load.

• Building in North Carolina: Will sees the state as a great place to build a company and hire talent, but says raising local capital for a big, ambitious idea has been harder, something he hopes changes as more successful NC outcomes recycle wealth back into the ecosystem.

Seven years, two economic shocks, and 41 patents later, Will’s still convinced private markets are headed digital. 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!)

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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.

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Episode 10

This week on Redacted, we bring back longtime friend Parker Mayes, founder of Signify, for a guest episode that's almost entirely a live demo. It's a company-talk-heavy conversation where Parker walks through the actual agents running his sales pipeline in real time, but the founder lessons land just as hard: where AI should live versus where a human has to step in, and why a non-technical founder with the right AI sidekick might not need a technical co-founder at all.

Who the Guest Is

Parker Mayes is the founder of Signify, an AI sales intelligence platform that sits between a prospect database (Apollo, ZoomInfo, or your own list) and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies every day based on real buying signals. Signify launched a few months ago and already counts 25–30 companies as a mix of beta testers and paying customers. Before Signify, Parker spent four years running a go-to-market agency built around high-volume cold email, calls, and LinkedIn outreach for B2B clients and the frustration with low-trust, low-response outbound at scale is what pushed him to build Signify in the first place. Before that, about five years ago, he co-founded LetsGo!, a startup focused on date nights for couples, living with four other founders in a Raleigh startup house. He also runs the Triangle Startup Collective's monthly AI meetup, where Taylor spoke earlier this week, which is also the reason this episode came together.

What We Cover

• From agency to product: Parker spent four years running a high-volume cold-outreach agency, doing around 5,000 touches a month for B2B clients, before realizing the real value was the targeting engine underneath it, which became Signify.

• What Signify does: It sits between a prospect database like Apollo, ZoomInfo, or a scraped list and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies daily based on custom buying signals like new hires, company news, job postings, and website changes, so reps know who to reach out to today, not just who exists.

• Real numbers: Signify launched a few months ago with 25–30 companies already using it, a mix of beta testers and paying customers. Pricing is flat at $200/month per seat, including 100 company scans and roughly 10 phone/email unlocks a day.

• Why the incumbents haven’t built this: Parker says it costs “a couple dollars a day” to scan 100 companies given how much scraping and searching is involved, which works at his scale but would be “completely unreasonable” for a database with 300 million prospects.

• Four daily automations: Every rep on Parker’s team runs the same pipeline each day: run the scan, send roughly 30 LinkedIn connection requests, add newly connected people to the sequence and send message one, and advance everyone else already in the pipeline to message two or three.

• “Interested is a human activity”: Parker never lets AI touch a warm lead. Cold outreach is automated end-to-end, voice-matched to his own texting style, down to lowercase openers and “LMK,” but the moment someone replies, a human takes over, including scripted, personalized selfie-video follow-ups.

• The screenshot build: His newest automation runs a live custom demo for a prospect, screenshots the exact signals pulled for them, and sends it as a personalized LinkedIn message, with three concurrent browser tabs running in parallel so it can message three people at once. It took about a week and a half to get working end to end.

• On not needing a technical co-founder: Pushing back on a VC who told him he needed one to raise, Parker’s take is, “I’m just a sales co-founder... there’s now no reason that you can’t have that as one person as long as you have a sidekick that’s your developer, who’s just cracked and never wants to talk to anyone and just grind.” He uses Claude Code himself for small features, saying recoloring pipeline badges took “6 lines of code” and “5 seconds.”

• The restaurant tangent: David and Taylor compare notes from Offline. Expanding an existing restaurant account into its other locations takes far more context, including open support tickets, contract status, and staff turnover, than cold outreach, and the industry itself is “so incestuous” that true cold leads are rare.

• The stack: Signify runs almost entirely on Anthropic’s API. Claude Sonnet is the workhorse model, with a GPT fallback, and the live pipeline automations ran on Claude in Cowork with browser automation through Claude and Chrome.

• Origin story: Parker and David’s first real conversation happened roughly five years ago through a mutual NC State connection, a memory Parker still brings up of David cutting the call short to go be with his kids.

As Parker puts it, the biggest thing holding most people back isn’t the build time; it’s the assumption that it’ll take months when it might take an afternoon. Enjoy the conversation.

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

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.

This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Steven King, the UNC professor and CEO of Blue Sky Robotics, a computer vision company that's pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robots to hospital automation. It's a company-heavy episode: Steven walks through the technical bets, the client-funded path to product-market fit, and the specific numbers behind a 99.5% accuracy commitment that forced his team to rebuild their system from scratch. He also shares hard-won lessons on co-founder relationships and knowing when to let go of a name, a market, or an idea that isn't working.

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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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NC Tweener Times is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Who is Steven?

Steven King is CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, a Chapel Hill-based computer vision company that helps hospitals automate operational tasks like surgical tray prep and dining tray verification. Steven has spent about 15 years as a professor at UNC, where he runs an innovation lab focused on emerging technologies, and he's currently a distinguished tenured professor there despite not holding a PhD. His graduate work, a master's in computer science focused on computer vision, came through an executive program at the University of Liverpool. Before UNC, he was director of innovations at The Washington Post, leading designers, developers, and data scientists on the future of digital media, and before that he studied photojournalism at Western Kentucky University. He co-founded Blue Sky Robotics three years ago.

Highlights

• The pivot, twice over: Blue Sky Robotics started as a volumetric capture system for metaverse avatars, using 4–5 cameras to do what once took 100–200, before pivoting to robotic vision when the metaverse market never materialized, and later pivoting again from warehouses into healthcare.

• 99.5% accuracy over 10,000 picks: An early warehouse client selling fishing tackle through Bass Pro Shops and Mystery Tackle Box demanded 99.5% accuracy across 10,000 picks, with 10,000 SKUs rotating every four hours. Steven’s team rebuilt its vision system from scratch to hit the target, a number robotics conference audiences still ask him to repeat: “Point?”

• The “IoT toaster”: Steven describes the ideal product as an appliance that plugs into a hospital’s network, solves one operational problem exceptionally well, and can scale across roughly 6,100 U.S. hospitals instead of requiring a custom build for every client.

• Real numbers from the healthcare pivot: At Blue Sky’s hospital clients, 20,000 dining trays go out each day, with 12% containing errors and 3% violating dietary restrictions. Separately, 20% of U.S. surgeries begin without the correct instrumentation on the tray, causing delays and keeping patients under anesthesia longer.

• Cascading models: Blue Sky trains on large vision-language models, distills them into local models running on NVIDIA Jetson edge cards for real-time on-site inference, and escalates unfamiliar objects to the cloud. What the cloud learns is then folded back into the local model.

• Real data is the moat: “Synthetic simulation data gets you 80, 85% there,” Steven says, but Blue Sky’s advantage comes from real action data generated by robot picks in the field, experience that can transfer from handling floppy, reflective fishing tackle to surgical instruments.

• Built on clients, not VC: Blue Sky bootstrapped through paying customers rather than raising venture capital first. Steven says the approach slowed early progress but forced the team to build products with immediate business value. The company now plans to raise capital this fall to fund its healthcare expansion.

• Discipline over revenue: The team has walked away from one-off projects that couldn’t scale, even when doing so caused a visible drop in sales. Steven’s rule: “If you don’t need 100 robots, then we’re not gonna do it.”

• UNC Health and Mayo Clinic: UNC Health CEO Christy Page greenlit a pilot almost immediately, saying “Pilot tomorrow.” This gave Blue Sky’s engineers a deployment just a five-minute walk away where they could observe the work and iterate in real time. Mayo Clinic followed as a second deployment and potential investor.

• A 16-person team built on Triangle talent: Blue Sky now has 16 employees and draws heavily from UNC for computer vision, NC State for mechanical engineering, and Duke’s Fuqua School for business talent. Several interns and fellows stayed with the company after successful summer experiences.

• On co-founders: “Co-founder selection is massively, massively important,” Steven says, comparing the relationship to a marriage built on a commitment to work through both financial and personal challenges together.

As Steven puts it, pride is the enemy of a good pivot, and Blue Sky Robotics has proof that listening to your clients can take you somewhere you never planned to go. 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.

In Feb 2026, we partnered with NC IDEA to take Tweener Fund state-wide and it became the NC Tweener Fund. We announced in Wilmington, we live in the Triangle and now we’re starting to roam the various regions of the state to meet the other startup ecosystems. In today’s post, we’re going to report on our roadtrip to the Triad region’s Winston Salem, w…

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This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, a Durham-based company developing human stem-cell-derived models of the gut. Pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies use Altis’s technology to better predict how a drug or ingredient will behave in the human body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation is split pretty evenly between the company and the person behind it. We dig into how Altis’s technology works and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, while also exploring Ben’s path from bench scientist to venture investor to first-time CEO.

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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!

Who is Ben?

Ben Scruggs is CEO of Altis Biosystems, a Durham, NC company that grows human intestinal models from donor stem cells as a more predictive alternative to animal testing and cancer-cell-line models in drug development. Ben is a cell biologist by training, with a PhD in cell biology and a postdoc in RNA biology and genomics at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); the postdoc that first brought him to the Research Triangle. He spent close to a decade as a venture investor with Hatteras Venture Partners, where he worked across drug development, medical devices, and healthcare IT, before stepping into operational roles inside the portfolio, including a Duke-spinout epigenetic editing company now in clinical trials for hepatitis B. He became CEO of Altis, a UNC spinout, about three years ago, and still maintains his relationship with Hatteras today.

Highlights

• Ben’s pivot from scientist to investor to CEO: He trained as a cell biologist, earning a PhD in cell biology and completing a postdoc in RNA biology and genomics at NIEHS before spending nearly a decade as a venture investor at Hatteras Venture Partners and, about three years ago, stepping into the CEO role at Altis Biosystems while maintaining his Hatteras relationship.

• Hatteras Venture Partners, by the numbers: More than 25 years old, 100+ healthcare investments, investing from its seventh fund, and, according to Scot, roughly $900 million under management, split about evenly between biotech and health-tech software.

• Altis builds human intestinal models: Using real donor stem cells, the company recreates the gut’s epithelial barrier, the interface anything taken orally must cross to enter the body. Unwound, the human gut lining is roughly the size of a tennis court.

• Three markets, one biological barrier: Altis serves absorption and metabolism studies, inflammation research such as inflammatory bowel disease, and toxicity screening. GI side effects are among the most common reasons drugs are discontinued during development.

• GLP-1s are a timely stress test: Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are working to get notoriously difficult-to-absorb GLP-1 peptides into pill form, making bioavailability exactly the kind of question Altis’s models are designed to answer.

• Altis has a dual business model: It operates as a full-service CRO, with in-house PhD scientists designing and running studies, while also selling self-serve kits in familiar 12-, 24-, and 96-well plate formats.

• Altis has scaled from dozens to thousands of compounds: The company now routinely screens hundreds or thousands at once, requiring investment in automation and robotics rather than simply adding headcount.

• The name “Altis” means “all tissues”: It reflects the company’s long-term vision to expand beyond the gut into other epithelial barriers, including the skin and lungs.

• Altis is a UNC tech-transfer story: The company was founded by UNC scientists, its technology is exclusively licensed from the university, and its first investment came through a Hatteras-affiliated fund that manages capital for UNC.

• “Advice is easy. Accountable operations is a whole other ball of wax.” Ben’s description of the difference between advising founders as a venture investor and actually running a company.

• Ben’s unexpected CEO lesson is that the job is mostly selling: Persuading investors, recruiting talent, winning and retaining customers, and keeping employees engaged are all core parts of the role, skills scientists rarely receive formal training for.

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.

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Episode 9

This episode is almost entirely a product teardown. On this episode we bring on Josh Guter, founder of Elephants, for a live demo of the AI assistant running his ops platform, and then spend the back half grilling him on the stuff every founder building an AI chat feature actually loses sleep over: which model, what it can touch, how you stop it from doing something dumb, and how you audit a system that's too complex to fully read anymore.

Who the Guest Is

Josh Guter is the founder of Elephants, operations software built for small teams (think one to five people) who are managing big networks of relationships and projects without the bandwidth to set up (or maintain) a proper Notion or Airtable system. Elephants ships ready to go out of the box, with an AI assistant at the center that acts as a thought partner and de facto ops person for teams that can't afford to hire one. Josh studied graphic communications, not computer science, and taught himself to write software along the way. His first startup built embedded firmware for wearable devices that let hikers in remote areas signal for help with the press of a button. He's also the program manager for NC State's Entrepreneurship Clinic, which has been running on Elephants for about six months.

What We Cover

• 64 tools, one job each: Elephants’ assistant works through roughly 64 discrete backend tools: search relationships, search projects, stage a card, and so on. Each has tight instructions for when the model should reach for it. It’s the same architecture Josh first built as Make.com scenarios wired to OpenAI, just ported into full-stack code.

• Nothing writes without a click: By default, the assistant can’t touch the database directly. Ask it to “create 10 catering tasks” and it comes back as a batch of cards you have to review and hit “add” on. Even in auto mode, deletions and archives always require human approval. No exceptions.

• Breadcrumbs instead of a black box: Every tool call, error, and decision path gets logged to a table Josh can pull up when a customer says the assistant did something weird. It’s his stand-in for the old Make.com flow he used to watch run step by step in real time.

• “That’s kind of scary”: Josh’s own words about how much of the current codebase has become genuinely opaque to him. His fix is opening a fresh Claude Code session and asking it to explain the system to him “like I’m 5” before he goes digging himself.

• Illustrator mockup → Claude plan → Codex teardown: His build loop starts with sketching the UI in Adobe Illustrator, a holdover from his graphic communications degree. Then he has Claude draft an implementation plan and gets Codex to “tear it apart” for broken conventions and repeated logic before a line of code ships.

• Red-teaming himself: Before any change touches the assistant’s tools or system prompt, Josh tries to break it in a dedicated “assistant stress test space,” including trying to get it to mass-delete every note in a workspace just to confirm it gets rejected.

• From Glide + Make.com to full-stack: Elephants started as a low-code app on Glide Apps with an AI “brain” wired through Make.com automation scenarios. The full rebuild ran on Opus 4.8 with Codex reviewing, using the old Make scenarios as the literal spec for what to replicate.

• Six months running a real entrepreneurial clinic: Elephants has managed NC State’s Entrepreneurship Clinic for about half a year. Josh’s proof point: he asked the assistant which program contacts to check in with ahead of a leadership transition, and it correctly surfaced four or five based on past conversation history.

• A PWA on purpose: Elephants skipped the App Store entirely. It’s a progressive web app that works identically on desktop, mobile browser, or installed to a phone home screen.

• The honest solo-founder moment: Josh admits to sometimes wondering if he’s “neck deep in AI psychosis” building something this consequential alone. He says hearing other founders describe the exact same workflow is what keeps him grounded.

Josh's closing line sums up why this one's worth a listen: the more teams trust these systems with their real operational knowledge, the more useful they get, and the harder it becomes to know exactly what's happening under the hood. Enjoy the conversation.

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

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.

Three things happened recently that inspired the idea for this one:

First, at ReFiBuy, we completed our Seed round on May 5th. With the completion of this round we had a board and thus, recently had our first board meeting. I haven’t had a first meeting since 2014 and it was fun to think about how to start out fresh, how to streamline the process, etc.…

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This episode leans heavily into the company. I sit down with Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, a Morrisville-based additive manufacturing company that 3D prints super-small, complex metal parts for medical devices. This episode is part of my ongoing series on North Carolina companies building in the physical world, and Trio Labs might be the most literal example yet, since they build the printers that print the other physical things. Along the way, Adam shares real founder lessons on failure, focus, and how a mechanical engineer talked himself into running a company.

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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

NC Tweener Times is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And special thanks to our friends at Walk West for partnering with us to produce this pod!

Who is Adam?

Adam Steege is the founder and CEO of Trio Labs, a Morrisville, NC company that does micro-scale metal 3D printing for medical devices. He grew up in North Carolina, left for six years to study math, physics, and mechanical engineering across a dual program at Carleton College and Columbia University, then came back home. Trio Labs is Adam's second company; his first was a med-tech startup building laparoscopic surgical devices, which grew directly out of his undergraduate senior design project. He ran that company for five to six years, getting through early animal trials before it stalled out on a classic med-tech problem: the people with the need weren't the people with the buying power. He founded Trio Labs in 2015, spent roughly five years getting the core technology to proof of concept, raised a Series A in 2021, and launched commercially in early 2023.

Highlights

• Second time’s the build: Trio Labs is Adam’s second startup. His first, a laparoscopic surgical device company born from his college senior design project, ran for five to six years and reached early animal trials before stalling.

• The failure that taught him the lesson: Adam calls it a “stakeholder visibility mismatch”: the people who felt the problem most weren’t the people with the power to buy, acquire, or partner. Now, he pressure-tests stakeholder alignment early in every venture.

• The tech he wished he’d had: Trio Labs came directly out of Adam’s first startup. He wanted to 3D print metal components for medical devices, but the existing technology simply couldn’t deliver the performance he needed.

• The timeline: Founded in 2015. Roughly five years to bench-scale proof of concept. Series A in 2021. Commercial launch in early 2023. Now rolling out the “Gen 3” industrial printer.

• “Half ASML, half TSMC”: That’s Adam’s description of Trio Labs. The company builds ultra-precision printing equipment and operates it, selling finished parts as a service rather than selling the machines themselves.

• The HP analogy: A Trio advisor, formerly president of HP’s 3D printing division and previously head of its ~$24 billion inkjet business, taught Adam that “the third dimension is nonlinear.” Moving from 2D to 3D printing introduces layers of complexity you don’t see coming.

• Why metal, not plastic: Plastics already have cheap, mature manufacturing methods like injection molding and micro-molding. Metal doesn’t scale as easily with legacy processes, creating a “blue ocean” opportunity, especially when devices require mechanical strength or electrical conductivity.

• A wafer fab in a box: Trio’s printers are roughly the size of a large refrigerator. Adam points out the same irony seen in advanced semiconductor equipment: the smaller the part you’re trying to make, the bigger and more sophisticated the machine becomes.

• Two core markets: Robotics and endovascular devices, particularly flexible guidance systems for dexterous control through the body and the “business end” tools that perform procedures, such as biopsy instruments.

• The go-to-market bet: Trio Labs sells parts, not printers. Additive manufacturing systems can cost $100K to $500K and sometimes seven figures, making them a tough sell for an unproven application. Selling parts lets engineers test the value immediately for a few thousand dollars instead.

• Staying in the lane: Adam is deliberate about focus. He’s watched additive manufacturing companies spread themselves across oil and gas, aerospace, defense, and consumer markets, only to become mediocre everywhere. Trio Labs is staying focused on med tech.

Eleven years, one failed company, and a printer the size of a refrigerator later, Adam's build is finally reaching real patients, proof that in hardware, the founders who last are the ones who stay stubbornly focused. Enjoy the conversation.

Where to Watch/Listen:

Visit Tweener Talks to listen for all audio podcast players

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📌 What’s Next

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This week on NC Tweener Talks, I sit down with Nick Genty, co-founder and CEO of AgEye Technologies, a Raleigh company building robotics and AI software for indoor farms. It's the latest in my series on North Carolina companies working at the intersection of hardware and software, following Lucid Bots, Plantd, and Natrx. Nick brings a founder's-eye view of what it actually takes to turn an idea about light and plant biology into a business selling to growers from Nebraska to Qatar. Expect a solid mix of company specifics, how the robotics work, what the data moat looks like, and hard-won go-to-market lessons on finding customers nobody else was looking for.

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Who is Nick?

Nick Genty is the co-founder and CEO of AgEye Technologies, a Raleigh, North Carolina company building robotics and AI software for indoor farms. A Raleigh native, Nick studied general business at East Carolina University before starting his career in IT project management for the North Carolina court system, where he met his longtime collaborator John, a connection that would carry through several ventures over the next two decades. He later joined RPath, an early Triangle startup (later acquired by SAS) that gave him his first real exposure to venture-backed software companies. From there, he co-founded Iconic Solutions, a B2B professional services firm that helped enterprises like Carfax, Harris Teeter, and Live Nation port their businesses to mobile, before steering the company into regulated markets like medical devices and pharma. That work in building IoT and embedded systems for a red-light-therapy hair and skin device is what led Nick and his team to discover the link between hardware, software, and biology that eventually became AgEye.

How We Met

My introduction to AgEye was pure serendipity. On the way to Korean barbecue with a friend, I passed a modest storefront in a Raleigh strip mall and noticed robots and plants through the window. Curious, I walked in, and while Nick wasn't there, a team member explained they were doing indoor farming with AI. Without a business card in hand, I tracked the company down online and reached out cold. I like to call it "invest by walking around," and it's become a running bit on the show: the AgEye team has since moved out of that original space, though Nick notes the old storefront regularly drew confused visitors hoping to get their cell phones repaired.

Highlights

• Two ventures with the same co-founder: Nick met his eventual AgEye co-founder while doing IT project management for the North Carolina court system in 2006–2007. The pair have since launched multiple companies together, including Iconic Solutions and AgEye.

• From services to product: Iconic Solutions began as a mobile-development shop serving companies like Carfax, Harris Teeter, and Live Nation before moving into regulated industries such as medical devices and pharma, including IoT development for an FDA-track red-light-therapy hair and skin device.

• The pivot to agriculture: The red-light-therapy work showed the team how environmental variables like light could influence biology. Faced with a long and expensive FDA pathway, they searched for a non-regulated biological system where they could apply the same thinking and landed on indoor farming.

• Ahead of the market, twice: AgEye’s early customers were still running farms on spreadsheets, pushing the company to build a full stack of sensors and software instead of just a data layer. A few years later, edge AI hardware like the NVIDIA Jetson, alongside AgEye joining the NVIDIA Inception program in 2019, made it possible to run AI models directly on low-power devices in the field.

• Reddit as a sales channel: Because head growers and farm owner-operators had little presence on LinkedIn, AgEye found some of its earliest customers by actively participating in grower discussions on Reddit.

• The cannabis pivot, twice: AgEye initially expected to focus entirely on cannabis and still holds a full North Carolina hemp-growing license. But state-by-state licensing chaos undermined that market, pushing the company toward leafy greens, tomatoes, and strawberries. Nick credits cannabis growers’ early investment in LED lighting and sensors with helping make today’s indoor-ag hardware affordable.

• Why indoor farms exist even in “good” growing regions: Roughly 80–85% of U.S. leafy greens come from Salinas Valley or Arizona, regions vulnerable to drought and water restrictions. At the same time, food deserts for produce like basil can persist even in agricultural states such as North Carolina.

• The moat is built linearly: Nick sees AgEye’s combination of hardware and proprietary plant data as a moat competitors can’t simply reverse-engineer: “someone couldn’t just look at what you’ve done and really ascertain how you got there and decode it.”

• $5M raised, mostly through corporate VCs: After struggling to excite RTP’s SaaS- and pharma-heavy investor base, AgEye found its fundraising breakthrough through corporate venture arms, including Dutch agricultural giant Nurion and German filtration company Mann+Hummel, whose businesses had direct strategic ties to indoor farming. Nick estimates 95% of AgEye’s investors and customers came through warm introductions.

• What’s next: AgEye has signed two large-scale distributor contracts and a new Middle East partnership in Qatar, opening a hospitality and food-and-beverage segment centered on compact, self-contained farms for restaurants and resorts.

As I like to put it, this is the kind of company sitting right in your own backyard, so keep your eyes open on your next lunch walk. Enjoy the conversation.

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📌 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.