NC Tweener Talks

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 subscription model, and why hardware companies are finding it easier to raise venture capital today than they did a decade ago. Along the way, Andrew shares lessons on hiring people who thrive on uncertainty, developing the storytelling skills that founders need to raise money and win customers, and what he learned from roughly a thousand fundraising pitches on the way to a Series B round.

Andrew is a first-time founder who graduated from Davidson a year early to run Lucid Bots full time, and the company has since raised more than $30 million, deployed over 600 units across 44 states and five countries, and grown to a team of 75. He shares where he sees the business heading over the next five years, and the much bigger bet he's making beyond that.

Timestamps: 
00:00 Welcome & sponsor thank-yous

01:31 Scot's intro: NC's physical-world startup series

02:06 Meet Andrew Ashur & Lucid Bots

04:38 How Andrew and Scot know each other

04:59 Origin story: the window washer moment

06:03 Why building maintenance is a massive market

06:42 The duct-taped DJI prototype

07:14 Winning $25K and graduating early

07:56 A broken drone, Christmas, and a book on Arduino

10:05 Why hardware iteration builds a moat

11:44 Inside the Sherpa drone

13:05 The physics of a 100-foot hose

17:05 Building an in-house power tether

18:24 Scale check: 600 units, 75 people, 44 states

19:00 The ROI: 2x to 8x faster than a boom lift

20:03 Pricing: buy it or subscribe to Lucid Refresh

23:01 Pausing the ground robot, adding paint & coatings

25:39 Scaling facilities from 23K to 45K square feet

32:43 Fundraising for a hardware company vs. software

36:39 Hiring for agency over intelligence

40:47 1,000 pitches and the road to Series B

45:03 The next 5 years: giving AI a physical body

-----

Where to Find Andrew Ashur:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewashur/
Lucid Bots: https://www.lucidbots.com/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 a modified tobacco harvester to pressing it into finished building panels, and shares the numbers behind the business: $40 to $45 million raised from seed through Series B, and a 2024 deal with national homebuilder D.R. Horton to supply 10 million panels for roughly 90,000 homes. What sets this episode apart is how directly Huade connects his engineering background at SpaceX to the problems he's solving now, including a five-step framework for building hardware that the team is still applying today. It's a grounded, technical look at what it takes to build a genuine hardware moat in an industry that hasn't seen real innovation in decades

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open 

00:23 Thank you to our sponsors: NC Idea, Ballentine, Bank of America

01:31 Welcome to the episode: introducing Huade Tan and Plantd

01:57 The pitch: two SpaceX engineers, carbon capture, and plywood-like panels

03:34 Huade joins the show

04:01 Huade's background: building life support systems for Crew Dragon at SpaceX

05:27 Education path and Nathan's aerospace background

06:39 Why North Carolina: population growth trends since 2018

07:34 From Crew Dragon's "bubble" to the idea for Plantd

10:14 The founding question: what do you build from captured carbon?

12:23 Why Plantd passed on the carbon credit market

14:14 What didn't work early on

16:03 The market gap: moisture damage in existing building materials

17:15 Simplifying it: how a plant becomes a structural panel

19:00 Finding the right fiber: hemp, wheat straw, bagasse, and more

21:15 The perennial grass: sterile, cloned, and drought-resistant

24:01 400–500 acres established in North Carolina tobacco fields

27:22 Harvesting and the strander: turning stalks into fiber

29:48 Inside the press: resin, heat, and pressure

30:37 Press specs: 15 feet wide, 70 feet long, a quarter-million panels a year

37:09 The 5-step SpaceX engineering framework

39:43 Funding: $40–45 million raised, seed through Series B

41:21 The D.R. Horton partnership and what it taught them

45:04 The 2024 deal: 10 million panels, 90,000 homes, 165,000 tons of CO2

46:04 From hand-made coffee coasters to a real house in Durham

51:36 Why North Carolina: cost, talent, and agricultural infrastructure

53:36 What's next: furniture, biochar, and other verticals

55:00 Where to find Plantd

55:20 Closing and credits

-----

Where to Find Huade Tan:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huadetan/
Plantd: https://plantdmaterials.com

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 and follow up with clients.

Along the way, the conversation turns into a practical breakdown of how to actually build with AI tools in a real business. Ben talks through why he prefers lightweight Claude skills over traditional workflow automation platforms, how he decides when a process needs to be deterministic versus handed to an LLM, and how he manages the sprawl of having built around a hundred skills over the past year, many of which he's since retired.

What makes Ben's story distinctive is the contrast between his background and his output: a marketer who taught himself to ship production web apps, and whose client consulting work is now feeding directly back into Levitate's core product roadmap.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open, welcome to Redacted
00:34 What Redacted is about
01:33 Meet Ben Pope and Levitate's pitch
02:28 Ben's five years at Levitate, from $6M to $50M ARR
03:06 Founding story: Jess, his wife Brooks Bell, and word-of-mouth software
03:58 Ben's new role: launching the AI Solutions business unit
04:40 Levitate by the numbers: 9,000 customers, 300 employees
05:06 Why Ben wanted this role (the GWC test)
08:24 Demo starts: the lead-scoring web app
09:35 Walking through a live example (Union Special bakery)
11:36 Turning a business search into an enriched lead
12:16 What Ben used to build it: Claude, Codex, pre-November 2025 tools
14:20 Hardest parts of building solo, trial and error
17:21 How the scoring tool works under the hood
18:37 Killing Webflow, migrating to a Claude-editable GitHub site
21:03 Claude Club and internal hackathons at Levitate
21:45 Example client: an LA family-law attorney's intake workflow
22:50 Product-market fit and figuring out the sales process
25:29 Building Claude skills to interview clients automatically
26:35 Ben's morning briefing skill, demoed live
29:07 Manual runs vs. cron, why Ben hasn't automated it yet
33:05 Skill bloat: ~100 skills built, many abandoned
35:57 Deterministic vs. probabilistic, when not to trust the LLM
37:24 AI Solutions as Levitate's forward-deployed engineering arm
39:17 Where to find Ben
40:08 Shoutout: Simon Willison's agentic engineering resource
42:04 Show notes, sanitized skills repo, and wrap-up

Find Redacted wherever you listen to podcasts, or on YouTube for the full screen share.
Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

Where to Find Ben:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmpope/
Levitate: https://www.levitate.ai/

--- 

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 development and M&A led him into a hands-on operating role at a manufacturing startup. The conversation covers the physical scale of what Natrx builds, from three-foot units weighing just under a ton to twelve-thousand-pound structures bound for a coral restoration project in Hawaii, along with the company's growth: more than 85 physical deployments, over 100,000 units placed, and roughly 80 percent revenue growth year over year. It's a hands-on, visual episode and the first in a new series on North Carolina's under-the-radar physical manufacturing companies.

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open and sponsor thanks

01:30 Welcome and series intro: NC's under-known manufacturing companies

03:12 Introducing Tad Schwindler, COO of Natrx

04:00 Formal welcome to the show

04:42 Tad's background: Atlanta, Duke, the Triangle

05:56 What does a COO actually do at Natrx?

07:58 Duke, Tulane, and a lifelong pull toward marine science

09:31 The founding story of Natrx

09:43 Two coastal engineers, oyster reefs, and LSU

11:13 Founded in 2018, commercializing by 2021

11:33 Nick's background: mechanical engineering meets software

12:52 What Natrx actually builds

13:13 Stopping water vs. working with it

15:44 Families of shapes: lattice, wave slope, and scaling up

19:02 How big are these things, and how deep do they go

21:12 What is "dry forming"?

22:07 The voxel: injecting moisture into dry material

22:55 The patent and the 10,000 sq ft Louisiana facility

23:37 Walking through the manufacturing process

26:01 How much does a unit weigh?

26:44 Shipping, barges, and why manufacturing stays centralized

29:13 Every unit is a little different: the voxel "snowflake" effect

30:02 How long do these structures last?

31:03 Growing live coral on the structures

32:30 How units get deployed in the water

33:56 Who's the customer?

35:50 Company scale: deployments, team size, revenue growth

37:14 What's next for Natrx, including a Series A

40:16 Why North Carolina is built for companies like this

41:40 Where to learn more: natrx.io

42:15 Credits and close

-----

Where to Find Tad Schwendler
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tadschwendler/
Natrx: https://natrx.io/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 a single extended Claude conversation to reconstruct years of relationship history from his email and texts, then turning it into a repeatable five-phase playbook that can research a brand-new target company from a cold start.

The conversation covers the practical side of running AI in production, too, why they dropped a synced database in favor of calling the HubSpot API directly with whitelisted fields, and an honest, unresolved discussion of how to evaluate dozens of different AI-run processes once they're all live.

Timestamps
 00:00 Cold open 

00:41 Welcome back to Redacted

01:53 Taylor's back from two weeks in Europe

02:15 The new "AI-ification engine" board in ClickUp

03:05 Offline's marketplace of auto-updating Claude skills

06:50 Origin story of the AI-ification engine

08:25 The 8 stages, back to back

11:30 The hiring analogy: "This is like HR for AI"

14:40 Inside the "house format" ClickUp table

16:00 Ditching the proxy database for direct HubSpot calls

18:05 Old-school SOPs vs. the new house format

20:10 Walking the company-as-lead process step by step

24:10 Why the old nested-SOP approach never got followed

29:30 Handoff: Taylor's turn

29:55 Offline's accountability chart and the visionary/integrator split

32:05 Digging up the original Claude chat that started it all

34:05 The first draft was terrible 
36:50 Timeline artifact and Claude for Chrome doing the research

37:50 The five-phase business development playbook

40:00 Slotting the BD system into the AI-ification board

45:35 The hardest open question: evaluating 50 agent processes

47:00 Show notes, GitHub repo, and where to find David and Taylor

47:50 What Redacted looks for in a guest

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

--- 

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

 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 security patches, and what to do right now: curl port 18789 on your OpenClaw and see if you get a response back. The practical framework Ryan closes with is worth listening to by itself. He calls it "staff not software" with the idea that every access decision for your OpenClaw should mirror how you'd onboard a new employee: scoped API keys with minimum permissions, a purpose-built email account, one-time credit cards for purchasing tasks, and human approval gates before any destructive action runs. If you've been meaning to lock down your setup but kept putting it off, Ryan gives you everything you need to do it in under 20 minutes.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro bumper 

00:16 Sponsor recognition 

01:22 Scot's intro 

01:56 Introducing Ryan Eade

02:05 Ryan's topic: cybersecurity for OpenClaw

02:50 Ryan Eade 

03:28 "Nobody starts with security" 

04:10 Why OpenClaw isn't just a chatbot 

05:26 The threat landscape 

06:09 Early OpenClaw exposure stats

06:40 Threat 1: The open port 

07:28 Docker's dirty secret: it bypasses your local firewall

08:07 Fix: bind to localhost and use Tailscale

09:19 What Tailscale is and why it works

09:26 Threat 2: Third-party skills 

10:18 How to vet skills: pull the GitHub and read the code

10:58 Threat 3: Prompt injection from the web

11:39 How prompt injection poisons an OpenClaw session

11:47 Real examples 

12:51 The full attack chain: README → backdoor → breach

13:52 System prompts vs. session instructions 

14:17 The upgrade reality 

15:37 Critical release windows: January, March 12, April 5

16:21 "Staff, not software"

16:44 One-time credit cards for purchasing tasks

17:19 Keep your personal email separate

17:57 Least-privilege API keys 

19:10 Build in approval gates 

19:52 Summary: vet skills, keep it on a leash, have a no-no plan

20:16 The port 18789 check 

20:32 Closing remarks

-----

Where to Find Ryan Eade
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryaneade/
PtEverywhere: https://www.pteverywhere.com/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 each other's work has become a standard part of his workflow. Each lesson comes with a real-world example: a three-skill meeting pipeline, a monitor agent that watches the others, and a Codex Opinion skill that consistently finds gaps in Claude's output.

The sharpest takeaway: AI build costs have dropped dramatically, but support and maintenance costs have not. Non-deterministic systems are inherently brittle, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn't run them in production long enough. This is a practitioner's talk for practitioners; specific, candid, and immediately actionable.

Timestamps
01:31 Scot's intro 
02:03 60 days of lessons 
02:19 Three lessons preview 
03:08 Robbie takes the stage 
03:25 About Automated Consulting Group 
04:13 Reality vs. the AI hype cycle 
05:04 The Microsoft / Copilot rant 
07:13 Lesson 1: Skills that build skills 
08:41 Skills as reusable packages 
09:21 "The sawdust of business" 
10:58 Building a skills pipeline for meetings 
11:57 Skills security risks in the enterprise 
12:47 Lesson 2: Agents watching agents 
13:44 Build costs are down
14:24 "3 to 5 of my agents fail every day" 
15:44 Log everything
17:33 What causes agents to fail in the wild 
18:02 Lesson 3: LLMs checking LLMs 
18:13 The LLM Council concept explained 
19:44 The case for a multi-LLM strategy 
20:36 The "Codex Opinion" skill 21:33 Gemini Opinion & LLM Council in action 
23:46 Wrap-up & credits

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 from existing partners in concentric circles. He also gets specific about the human-AI handoff: how a salesperson (Steve) has to trailblaze first, and why you need specific lead-by-lead feedback instead of generalizations to actually improve the system. David then demos the B2B landing page he built entirely with Claude copy from Fathom sales call transcripts, photos pulled from an AI-tagged Google Drive library, live data from the POS back end, and a review filter that's been running for four months without anyone touching it. Taylor closes with the practical bit: after a 36-hour stretch of AI frustration, he asked Claude to audit his own chat logs for recurring failures. Claude named the output a "rage log." He curated it into a "gotcha registry" and baked it into a Claude Code hook that fires during every planning step, so the same mistakes stop happening on repeat. It's a simple technique that doesn't get talked about enough.

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: the rage log preview

01:02 Welcome to Redacted, Episode 5

01:50 Offline's AI lead gen pipeline

04:10 Reducing LLM usage: when code beats prompts

05:00 Geocoding 2,000 restaurants with Google Places API in ~1 hour

07:42 Building the outreach brief

09:14 What salespeople actually need before writing an email

11:46 The information a good brief assembles

14:25 Hot, warm, and cold leads defined

15:54 The B2B Hinge: visualizing your lead network

18:24 Why context-aware outreach wins in an AI-spam world

21:00 The resource-constrained case for a trust graph

23:37 The human-AI handoff: salesperson ↔ automation loop

25:00 Specifics over generalizations: how to debug a sales AI

26:22 Taylor's turn: the AI-built B2B landing page is live

28:50 Tagging Offline's photo library with AI (2,000+ images)

30:36 LLM-filtered reviews: 4 months running, never touched

33:52 Building the events page panel by panel

35:07 The Slack bot experiment: Claude as project manager

37:44 What the agent did right

39:58 Project management in the AI era: ClickUp vs. Docs

42:47 The bad AI days 

44:04 The rage log becomes the gotcha registry

45:11 How Claude Code hooks inject the registry into every plan

46:38 Compound Engineering and the Every framework

47:50 Guests coming up, wrap

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

--- 

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 landscape: NVIDIA's NemoClaw, Microsoft's Scout, Google's Gemini Spark, Alibaba's Qwen, and Facebook's rumored $200/month Hatch
- Hermes: the MIT-licensed open-source upstart getting the most attention in the Triangle right now
- Why Satya Nadella said "OpenClaw" 28 times at Microsoft Build (and Tim Cook said it zero times at WWDC)
- What Triangle founders are actually shipping with day-to-day

Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
00:02 Welcome & Cold Open
00:23 Sponsor Thanks
01:25 Scot's Intro: The Open Claw Wave #2
04:48 Live Meetup Begins
05:17 Meetup Sponsors Recognized
05:56 Talk Order & How to Give a Future Talk
06:17 Big Picture Check-In Since April
06:29 Open Claw Stats: 300K Stars, 3.2M Users
07:38 LTS Plan, Monthly Releases & Stability Signal
08:33 What Broke in April
09:27 The Marketplace Crisis: 1,400+ Malicious Skills
10:03 Jensen Huang & NVIDIA's NemoClaw at GTC
10:50 "Personal Operating System for AI"
11:15 Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build: Scout Announced
11:43 Two Worlds: Copilot vs. Open Claw Users
13:50 Tim Cook Gets 0 OpenClaw Mentions at WWDC
14:09 Chinese Model Forks
15:05 The Clone Landscape: Gemini Spark, Hermes, Multus
16:07 Facebook's Rumored Hatch ($200/month)
16:59 Perplexity Personal Computer
18:04 Hermes Deep Dive
18:47 Comparison Chart Walkthrough
19:21 Hand-Off & Wrap

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This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

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Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

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 you actually do about the SaaSpocalypse? In this episode, Jess introduces two tests every SaaS founder should run: the Removal Test (if you strip AI out of your product, does it still function?) and the Growth Re-acceleration Test (is your growth rate going up or down, and what does that signal to investors?). Scot adds a third indicator from what he's seeing across the Tweener Fund portfolio: churn driven by customers who are now vibe-coding their own replacements. Together, they walk through how the buy-vs.-build equation has shifted 10 to 100 times, why having AI features is now table stakes rather than a competitive advantage, and what it looks like to build a business where new frontier model releases feel like tailwinds instead of threats.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold Open & Welcome

00:29 Sponsors: Robinson Bradshaw & Bank of America

01:24 Scot's Intro: The SaaSpocalypse

02:31 The February Tweener Times Piece

03:05 Why This Episode Exists

04:08 Welcome Jess Lipson

04:37 How Scot & Jess Know Each Other

05:10 Jess's SaaS Pedigree: ShareFile to Citrix

05:49 SaaS Multiples Have Collapsed

07:00 Salesforce, HubSpot & Workday Are Down Too

08:13 AI Features Are Table Stakes

09:50 Is This the Lowest SaaS Multiples Ever?

11:28 Investment Landscape: Subscale SaaS Is Struggling

12:23 Framework #1: The Removal Test

14:22 Framework #2: Growth Re-Acceleration

15:23 Scot's Third Signal: Vibe Coding Churn

17:32 The Buy-vs.-Build Equation Has Shifted 10–100X

19:29 When Claude Becomes Your "Single Pane of Glass"

19:44 MCP Servers & Levitate's API Revamp

21:50 How Levitate Is Passing Its Own Tests

22:31 New Offering: Helping SMBs Actually Implement AI

23:44 Software + Services as the Durable Model

24:11 The Fear Index: Do You Dread New AI Releases?

24:50 Raleigh Founded & Closing Thanks

25:04 Outro

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Where to Find Jesse Lipson:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-lipson-625195/
Levitate Ai: https://www.levitate.ai/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

--- 

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West. 

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 

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/