NC Tweener Talks

Doug Neumann, co-founder and CEO of Arpio, joins me to share a founder story full of ups and downs, a true rocket coaster.

Doug spent nine years at Microsoft and six years running software at Bandwidth through its IPO before starting Arpio, which provides disaster recovery and resilience for cloud workloads on AWS and Azure. He explains how a famous AWS outage, caused by a single typo, showed him the cloud hadn't solved disaster recovery. He also covers pivoting away from his first idea in two weeks, launching right as COVID hit, and going through a fully...

Brian Handly, founder and CEO of Reveal Mobile, joins me for a story-driven look at more than 25 years of building advertising technology in the Triangle.

Brian started as a level one support engineer at Accipiter in 1997, became VP of operations within two years, and sold his stock just before the dot-com crash. When the company was about to be shut down, he bought it back, and the parent company paid him half a million dollars to take it. He rebuilt it, sold it to aQuantive, and spent three years at Microsoft after its $6 billion acquisition.

...

Robin Cowie, CEO and founder of Skillmaker, went from co-creating The Blair Witch Project to building AI and extended reality tools for auto repair technicians, and he did it from Carolina Beach.

Robin tells me how his father's "point of view learning," first developed to train South African gold miners, shaped his films, his work on Madden, and now Skillmaker. We talk about how NAPA paid him to spend two months listening to repair shops before he built anything. That research turned into a platform that assesses technicians, cuts entry-level training from two years to a few...

Josh Miller, CEO and co-founder of Gradient Health, joins me to share how a Durham-area startup became the go-to source of medical data for AI developers around the world.

Josh traces the path from his first company, FarmShots, a satellite imaging startup acquired by Syngenta, to Gradient, which began as an attempt to build cancer-detection AI and turned into something bigger once the team saw how hard it was to get the data. The conversation covers why de-identifying medical data is so much harder than removing a name, how foundation models changed the value of labeled data...

Craig Brown, a field engineer at Quantexa and the solo builder behind Blind Oracle, joins us as Redacted's first inbound guest.

Blind Oracle is a trust and audit layer for AI agents doing business with other agents. It issues agent passports and records delegated work to public ledgers, so anyone can verify what an agent did without having to trust the people who run it. Craig screen-shares the software factory he built to develop it over the past two years. Signals from email, voice notes, social media, and research papers feed planning models, and a governance layer...

Michael Boyarsky, CEO and co-founder of Extellis, joins me to talk about turning more than a decade of Duke metamaterials research into a satellite imaging company.

Michael explains what metamaterials are and why heat, not cold, is the real challenge for satellites in orbit. He also describes the conference moment when a competitor bragged about 2 percent uptime, and he thought the industry could do far better. He walks through the path from a DARPA-funded ground prototype to a spreadsheet that made the business case clear, and from there to spinning out of Duke with help from Duke...

On this episode of Redacted, we skip the guests and get back to the heart of the show: what it really looks like to build and run Offline with AI in 2026.

David walks through the Hot List, a prototype feed of restaurants opening around Raleigh. An AI monitors Instagram and local news the way a person would, and David built the front end by having Claude recreate Offline's existing app with the new data. Taylor then shows the other half of the loop: a homegrown survey tool that embeds the live prototype, plays an intro video, and...

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 close the gaps between the software they already pay for. Ben spent roughly 20 years in client services, including time at the ad agency McKinney, running Viget's Durham office, and co-founding Savas Labs, before launching Agentcy in early 2026 alongside business partner Eric out of the 24 and Up venture studio in downtown Raleigh.

Most of the episode is a live demo: Ben walks through the internal tool he built from scratch, which turns a raw meeting transcript into...

Will Duckett, co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, joins me to talk about building the infrastructure behind secondary liquidity in private markets. The conversation covers Will's path from a hedge fund back office in New York to co-founding a regulated broker-dealer in Raleigh, what it actually takes to get licensed with FINRA and the SEC, and why Equity Shift describes its platform as a digital operating system for private companies rather than just cap table software.

Will and I dig into the mechanics that most founders never see up close: tender offers, the daisy-chained SPV structures that...

Parker Mayes, founder of Signify, joins us on Redacted for a guest episode built around a live demo of his actual sales pipeline. Parker built Signify after spending four years running a go-to-market agency doing high-volume cold email, calls, and LinkedIn outreach for B2B clients, and getting frustrated with the low-trust, low-response nature of outbound at scale. Signify sits between a prospect database like Apollo or ZoomInfo and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies every day based on real buying signals like new hires, company news, and job postings, so reps know exactly who to reach out to...

Steven King, CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, joins me to talk about building a computer vision company that has pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robotics to hospital automation. Steven, a longtime UNC professor, explains how a side project meant to capture realistic 3D avatars for the metaverse turned into a vision system for robotic arms, and how a client's ambitious accuracy target forced his engineering team to rebuild the company's core technology from scratch. That rebuild became the foundation for Blue Sky's current focus: helping hospitals like UNC Health and Mayo Clinic...

Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, joins me to talk about building human gut models that help pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies predict how a drug or ingredient will actually behave in the body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation covers what an epithelial barrier is and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, how Altis's technology is being used for absorption studies, inflammation research, and toxicity screening, and why GLP-1 drugs make such a compelling test case for the company's platform.

Just as much of the episode is about Ben's...

Josh Guter, founder of Elephants, joins us for a live product teardown of the AI operations assistant he built for small teams. The conversation covers the architecture behind the assistant: roughly 64 purpose-built tools, an approval-gated write system that never lets the AI act without human sign-off, and the logging system Josh built to audit a codebase that, by his own admission, has become a black box even to him.

Josh walks us through his full build process, from sketching UI mockups in Adobe Illustrator to having Claude draft implementation plans and Codex tear them apart before anything...

Adam Steege, founder and CEO of Trio Labs, joins me to talk about building a company that 3D prints tiny, complex metal parts for medical devices out of Morrisville, North Carolina. The conversation covers Adam's path from a failed first startup in laparoscopic surgical devices to founding Trio Labs in 2015, the five years it took to reach bench-scale proof of concept, and the road from Series A funding in 2021 to commercial launch in 2023. Adam explains why his first company stalled, the manufacturing gap between traditional machining and semiconductor-style nanofabrication that Trio Labs fills, and why the company chose to...

Nick Genty, co-founder and CEO of AgEye Technologies, joins me to talk about building robotics and AI software for indoor farms right here in North Carolina. The conversation traces Nick's path from state government IT work to an early Triangle startup acquired by SAS, into a mobile development agency serving national retailers, and eventually to a regulated medical device project that revealed the science behind AgEye: using environmental variables like light to influence plant biology.

They cover how AgEye found its first customers in a channel with almost no LinkedIn presence, why the company nearly built its...

Today, on Episode 8 of Redacted, we use this episode to show exactly what running a company with AI looks like day-to-day. Taylor walks through the agent system now handling Offline's lead generation and CRM cleanup, including a daily process that scans market signals, reconciles HubSpot data, and writes sales outreach briefs automatically. David then demos a redesigned mobile app and email system, and shares a candid breakdown of how many hours a recent landing page redesign actually took with AI assistance compared to how long the same project would have taken the old way.

What sets this...

Andrew Ashur, co-founder and CEO of Lucid Bots, joins Scot Wingo for the third episode in our series on North Carolina startups solving hard physical-world problems. Lucid Bots builds drones and robots that clean, paint, and coat buildings, and Andrew walks through how the company got here, starting from a duct-taped DJI drone he built as a Davidson College student after watching window washers struggle against high winds.

The conversation covers the mechanical and business realities of building hardware: the physics of flying a drone tethered to a hundred feet of hose, the economics of a robots-as-a-service...

Huade Tan, co-founder and CTO of Plantd, joins me to explain how two former SpaceX engineers ended up building carbon-capturing structural panels out of a North Carolina tobacco field. The conversation covers how Plantd chose its plant feedstock, why the team deliberately passed on the carbon-credit market in favor of a real product business, and what five years of hardware iteration looks like when you're building an industrial press that hasn't been attempted by a US company since the 1960s or '70s. Huade walks through the full process, from cloning a sterile perennial grass to harvesting it with...

Ben Pope, who leads the new AI Solutions business unit at Levitate, joins Redacted as its very first guest. Ben spent five years on Levitate's marketing team as the company grew from six million to roughly fifty million in annual recurring revenue, before shifting a month ago to help small businesses fold AI into their own workflows. This episode is mostly show and tell: Ben screen-shares a lead-scoring web app he built entirely on his own, despite having no formal engineering background, along with the morning briefing and post-meeting automation skills he uses every day to prep for calls...

Tad Schwendler, COO of Natrx, joins Scot Wingo to talk about manufacturing concrete structures that work with nature instead of against it. Natrx, a North Carolina company and Tweener Fund portfolio company, has developed a patented dry-forming process that injects moisture into dry material to create rough, complex structures capable of slowing water, encouraging natural sediment buildup, and even supporting live coral growth. Tad walks through the company's founding story, which traces back to coastal engineers doing oyster reef restoration at LSU and a chance meeting with NC State-connected software co-founders, and shares how his own background in corporate...

David Shaner and Taylor Cotner spend this episode of Redacted screen-sharing everything they've built since the last one, and it centers on a framework David calls the AI-ification engine, an eight-stage method for turning any proven business process into something an AI agent can reliably run. He walks through the full pipeline, from process mapping through ongoing evaluation, and demos a new ClickUp documentation format the team built to keep every automation legible to both people and models.

Taylor takes the second half to show how he rebuilt Offline's business development system from the ground up, using...

 Ryan Eade, Chief Product and Technology Officer at PtEverywhere, gave this talk at the June 10th TweenerClaw meetup, and it covers something most practitioners skip: how to actually keep your OpenClaw instance secure. Ryan walks through the three main ways OpenClaw instances get compromised: an open port that older versions left fully exposed, third-party skills that can carry malicious code (36% of early store listings had prompt injection), and prompt injection delivered through external content like X posts or README files. He also covers the upgrade windows that matter most; the March 12th and April 5th releases each contained critical s...

In this episode of Tweener Claw, Robbie Allen, the Founder and Managing Director of Automated Consulting Group and General Partner at NC Tweener Fund, shares a live talk from the June 10th Tweener Club meetup in Research Triangle Park.

Robbie has spent the last year and a half deploying AI agents inside real mid-market companies, and he brings three lessons from just the last 60 days: how to build reusable AI skills that compound over time, how to monitor agents when 3 to 5 of your 25-plus will fail on any given day, and why using multiple LLMs to check...

Redacted Episode 5 goes inside Offline, and what it actually looks like to wire AI into sales, marketing, and project management without a big engineering team behind you. Co-founders David Shaner and Taylor Cotner each take a turn. Taylor walks through Offline's AI lead gen pipeline: a Claude-assisted Google Places script that geocoded 2,000 restaurant locations in about an hour, a deliberate move away from LLMs toward deterministic code for market geography, and the "outreach brief,"  a context document the system assembles per account before any LLM writes an email. He frames the whole thing as a trust graph, working outward f...

A live recording of my talk at the June 10th NC Tweener Fund Open Claw meetup in Research Triangle Park. The second gathering of our local AI agent community.

A lot has changed since April. Here's what I cover:

- Open Claw by the numbers: 300K GitHub stars, 3.2M active users, fastest-growing project in GitHub history
- What went wrong in April; broken updates, 1,400+ malicious marketplace skills, and why the community got nervous about OpenAI's intentions
- How the project is stabilizing: monthly releases, long-term support plan, leaner core
- The fork...

Jess Lipson, founder and CEO of Levitate, joins host Scot Wingo for a focused, framework-driven conversation on how SaaS founders should think about their businesses in the age of AI. Jess has been building SaaS since before the category had a name. His first company, ShareFile, sold to Citrix and eventually became a billion-dollar business. At Citrix, he ran the company's entire SaaS portfolio. Now at Levitate, a relationship marketing platform serving nearly 9,000 small businesses,  he's spent the last year working out a clear-eyed answer to one of the most common questions Scot hears from Triangle founders: what do y...

Details->https://www.tweenertimes.com/p/breaking-validic-acquired-by-chartspan

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

Platinum:
NC IDEA: https://ncidea.org

Gold Sponsors:
- Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs
- EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com
- Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com
 
Silver Sponsors:
- Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

-----

Where to Find xxxxxx:
LinkedIn: xxxx
Front Porch Venture Par...

Rob Walter breaks down the AI-native GTM playbook: intent data, ABM-only outreach, the first sales hire trapdoor, and why "a human always writes the message." Stick around for the highlights below. 👇

Highlights

Redacted is the show that doesn't clean things up before hitting record. Episode 4 is a double build session: Taylor Cotner walks through the multi-agent HubSpot cleanup pipeline he's been iterating on for weeks, now running on the Anthropic SDK with Claude Code out of the loop, and David Shaner demos how he used Claude Design and Claude Code to rebuild Offline's partner landing page from scratch. Most of the episode is screen sharing, so pull it up on YouTube.

What We Cover

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

Highlights:

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

In episode 3 of [REDACTED], we (David and Taylor) run a live demo of an agentic CRM-cleanup pipeline (and finds out, on air, what it costs). We also walk through a landing page workflow that compresses what used to take five people and a month of meetings into something one person can do in an afternoon.

The bulk of episode 3 is a live demo, just what we wanted. Plus, the best part of Redacted is that nothing is finished. Every episode is a midstream demo of something that might break, might cost more than it should, or might...

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

Highlights Covered

In episode 2 of Redacted, David and Taylor get into the messy middle of building with AI inside a real business.

After compressing Offline from a 34-person team to a much smaller operating crew, AI stopped being a fun experiment and became a necessity. This episode is about what that actually looks like: rebuilding lead-gen workflows, trying to make HubSpot reflect reality, keeping AI agents alive like Tamagotchis, and testing whether Claude Code can help generate a real shareholder update from scattered company data.

What They Cover

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

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

Highlights Covered

On April 9th we hosted the Triangle’s first OpenClaw meetup (more info here). This week we’re featuring our final talk with Robbie Allen!

Robbie 20+ years building AI products. He ran engineering teams at Cisco, was CEO of three venture-backed AI startups that all exited, wrote multiple technical books for O’Reilly, and has over a dozen patents.

In his talk, Robbie covers:

We don’t break the NC-only rule often but when we do, there’s a good reason. Switchyards isn’t just an Atlanta story anymore. It is expanding into Raleigh and already operating in Durham, so Michael Tavani is building right here in the Triangle. That makes this one very much a local story.

In this episode, Michael unpacks the story behind Switchyards. We dive into why Michael chose one of the hardest startup paths (consumer + physical), how he built a moat through difficulty, and why investors had to physically visit a club before writing a check.

W...

Today, we’re launching something new under the NC Tweener Talks network. It’s called [Redacted]. Most AI content today is polished with clean demos, perfect workflows, and everything looks like it worked on the first try. But if you’ve actually built anything with AI, you know that’s not how it works. It’s messy. It breaks. It’s iterative - you build, then rebuild and then when you get it working, that’s what other ‘how I AI’ shows work. They never show you how the AI sausage is made. 

This show changes that. We’re going to show...

In this episode of NC Tweener Talks, we share a talk from the first OpenClaw meetup in the Triangle, featuring Ryan Eade

Ryan’s talk walks through how he runs a 4-agent AI team off a single $24/month DigitalOcean droplet using OpenClaw for personal life management, content summaries, and software building.

He goes over:

⏱️ Timestamps

Scot Wingo is a serial founder, General Partner at the NC Tweener Fund, and CEO of ReFiBuy. With decades of experience building and scaling companies in e-commerce and SaaS, he’s now focused on what it takes to win in the AI era.

In this episode, recorded live at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, Scot shares a framework he developed while fundraising: the 12 competitive moats that matter now and why most startups get this wrong. The core idea: You’re not building a product anymore, you’re building a fortress.

Highlights