The Friday Nooner

The  Friday Nooner  returned this week for one final episode. While more podcast/show content is coming in 2025, the  Nooner  as you’ve come to know it has now wrapped up its run. And what better way to celebrate said run than with some holiday cheer, old friends, and (as often comes with one such old friend) trivia?! Check out this final installment to test your knowledge of  Nooners  past, muse...

The  Friday Nooner  returned today after a one-week break for Thanksgiving. GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy was joined by co-hosts Melissa Crosby and Kaitlyn Dang and the trio discussed Christmas decoration timing. More specifically, Joe revealed that his distaste for pre-Thanksgiving Christmas trees is… um… fiercer than we realized. The main event was an interview with Victoria Fritz , who beamed i...

Today’s episode of the  Friday Nooner  was triple-hosted by GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy, Kaitlyn Dang, and––making his  Nooner  debut, kind of—Cesar Romero. They opened the show with a few words on what they were all bringing to our midday “Grepsgiving” lunch. (We feasted immediately after the show.) Today’s main course was  American Underground  Executive Director Tim Scales. Tim spoke about th...

Today on the  Friday Nooner , co-hosting trio Joe Colopy, Melissa Crosby, and Kaitlyn Dang got us started with some conversation about CED’s GRO Demo Day, which took place Thursday evening (and which you can read more about  here ). Somehow this led to the revelations that Joe believes he’s going to die at 86 and Kaitlyn was a talented viola…ist… in high school. Evidently there’s now potential for...

On today’s episode of the  Friday Nooner , GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy was back in the hosting chair alongside Melissa Crosby and new co-hosting addition Kaitlyn Dang —both of whom, to be clear, were in their own chairs. They started off with a bit of banter about Joe’s brush with death (he nearly crashed his new “GrepBeat red” vespa). Then, our trio of co-hosts welcomed this week’s guest, Annie...

On today’s edition of the  Friday Nooner , GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and Co-Host Extraordinaire Melissa Crosby started off with a bit of conversation about the goings-on at HQ. Specifically, this meant a brief recap of the latest  GrepBeat Book Club  meeting and a look ahead to some pumpkin painting. Swing by in the coming days (I guess) to see Joe’s rendition of ‘80s Melissa on a pumpkin. Las...

On today’s  Friday Nooner , GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and his co-host Melissa Crosby (who was good enough to beam in remotely despite being on the tail end of a bout with Covid) started off by chatting a bit about the tragic vespa heist that took place outside GrepBeat HQ earlier this week. They also discussed the State Fair and the bizarrely accepted practice of spending more money to win a g...

On today’s  Friday Nooner , GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and his sidekick Melissa Crosby recapped the GrepBeat and Primordial teams’ Thursday excursion to Wilmington. The teams headed down to The Wine Sampler for a kickoff event where we enjoyed some networking, intros, and delicious refreshments with folks from the Wilmington ecosystem. Joe and Melissa also talked a bit about North Carolina join...

For today’s episode of the  Friday Nooner , the GrepBeat Godfather and co-hosting maestra Melissa Colopy started off with some talk about storm-ravaged Western North Carolina, and some of the  ongoing relief efforts  we’ve seen in the community (special shout-outs to the folks at Raleigh Founded and Greenplaces). They also spent a few moments recapping the GrepBeat Happy Hour that took place this...

On today’s  Friday Nooner , GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and “Survivor” Melissa Crosby opened with a few words about Hurricane Helene and the storms pelting the Southeast (and the very nice but occasionally porous GrepBeat HQ). Then Melissa recapped this week’s  Ladies Investing/Local Angels  (LILA) meetup and Joe offered a few words on some of the latest with OpenAI. Joe and Melissa then welcome...

On today’s Friday nooner , the GrepBeat Godfather and Melissa Crosby opened things up with some discussion about a few miscellaneous goings-on around the Triangle. They also touched on a yoga studio sliding into some former Bronto space at the Tobacco Campus. (Joe seemed to have some thoughts.) Once all that was done, they got to the heart of the episode and welcomed in Mark Littlewood, the Founde...

Today’s Friday Nooner opened with the GrepBeat Godfather and Melissa Crosby discussing fond memories of video stores, short-versus-longer book chapters, and more. Then your friendly neighborhood editor popped in with a temperamental green-screen background and a brief update on all things GrepBeat.com . We covered the Monday Mix , our first Book Club recap, In The Soup, and, naturally, our (viral?...

Welcome back! Today’s  Friday Nooner  effectively marked a season premiere, as well as the beginning of a new chapter for the show sans longtime co-host Pete McEntegart . GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy and Melissa Crosby of Colopy Ventures brought the show back on air, comfortably seated in front of the awesome new mural at HQ (special thanks to summer artist-in-residence Xiomara Colopy !). Joe and...

Today’s season finale episode of the  Friday Nooner  was a mini-celebration of Pete on his final day with GrepBeat. The GrepBeat Godfather beamed in from the Costa Rican mist, video tributes were shown, and multiple fun rounds of trivia taught us a bit more about both Pete himself and the standup comedy world he’s diving into. For those who may not have heard, there will be a more extensive farewe...

Today’s  Friday Nooner  had a little bit of a different vibe. With the GrepBeat Godfather on vacation with the GrepBeat First Family in Costa Rica, Pete was joined by first (only?)-time guest co-host, Not Joe (Kaitlyn). After a vague tease of special material on next week’s  Nooner  season finale (tune in!), the pair provided a rundown of new Colopy Ventures employees’ annual gifts—which, despite...

It was a busy first segment on this week’s  Friday Nooner . We heard from The Super Real Version Of GrepBeat Pete Who Has Lovely Things To Say About Joe; we got an update on Durham’s resident Vespa “gang”; and we found out that one of the chickens you may have heard about on a past episode several past episodes is, in fact, a rooster. Sadly, this means it will need to be re-homed (any takers outsi...

On this week’s  Friday Nooner , Joe and Pete spent a bit of time recapping Grep-a-palooza 3 (with special acknowledgment of all our volunteers) before delving into breakfast routines. In the end it was established that despite a regular regimen of plant-based breakfast smoothies and Saturday-morning Eggo waffles, Pete is  not , in fact, a professional athlete. Once that was determined, Charles Dou...

It was a well-caffeinated crew on today’s  Friday Nooner , which made for a bit of a roller-coaster intro. Pete tapped into his glory years as a “ celebrity juror ” to lend us some perspective on jury procedures, and then the GrepBeat Godfather took us through various stages and sub-stages of investment (proving that he is not, in fact, “just a pretty face riding a Vespa”). Then they welcomed Dr....

Today’s  Friday Nooner  guest was Rob Cotter, the Founder, CEO, Re-Acquirer, and CEO again of Raleigh-based  Organic Transit —and the inventor of solar-powered pedal hybrid vehicle, the “ELF.” We  covered  Cotter as part of a “Where Are They Now” series back in 2022, and more recently  highlighted  his triumphant rescue of the previously shelved ELF. Once Joe got stretched out and he and Pete refl...

We learned several things about today’s  Friday Nooner  guest, Akash Ganapathi, the Co-Founder and CEO of Durham-based Opine . He met his wife when they were both students at the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics. He met his two Opine co-founders—Charlie Duong and Austin Kelleher—when they were all early employees at Morrisville-based unicorn JupiterOne. He and the other Opine-rs...

Following a few GrepBeat updates and reminders, this week’s episode of  The Friday Nooner  really got going with a “reintroduction” to GrepBeat Pete—who is both definitely real and definitely the actual Pete. Please feel free to reach out to him if you’d like to learn more about the native recipes and general lore of the remote island from which he hails. Which is Long Island, by the way. Followin...

It was a big episode of  The Friday Nooner  sponsored by  Whitley Recruiting  for those who had “Joe talking about his chickens” on your  Friday Nooner  bingo card. Surprisingly, the chicken talk made our guest feel nostalgic rather than run for the hills. It turned out that today’s guest—Ardis Kadiu, the Founder and CEO of Raleigh-based Element451—grew up on a farm in Albania that included some c...

Pete’s on vacation in Myrtle Beach this week, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t join the GrepBeat Godfather for this regularly scheduled episode of  The Friday Nooner , sponsored by  Whitley Recruiting . Pete’s mom even made a late cameo. This week’s guest was Dr. Jared Pelo , a, ER doc by training and a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit under his belt from his previous startup, iScribes,...

Grammar nerds will especially enjoy this week’s episode of  The Friday Nooner —sponsored by  Whitley Recruiting —with its discussion of the difference between farther/further. (Pro tip: Think of the “far” in “farther” as indicating distance, as in “to run far.” That leaves “further” when you mean a difference of degree, not of literal distance.) After the break, Joe and Pete welcomed guest Will Bo...

It’s been a long and busy week in the Triangle tech startup ecosystem that we capped—as usual—with an episode of  The Friday Nooner  sponsored by  Whitley Recruiting . This week’s guest was Zakiya Alta Lee-Hill, a Senior Associate at Chapel Hill-based IDEA Fund Partners . We talked about how her varied background—everything from dancing for the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks to running a business to train as...