NC Tweener Talks

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...

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 mov...

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,...

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. N...

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...

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

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....

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

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...

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...

This is a slightly different Tweener Talks. Akash and Austin are reflective founders. They think in frameworks, they read widely, and they’ve clearly spent a lot of time pulling patterns out of past wins and failures. So, we leaned in and made the episode less “tell me what you do” and more “tell me how you think.” Highlights Covered Founder math: 5–7 months of zero salary, Costco bulk ramen, and...

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...

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 fo...

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: Why AI isn’t just auto...

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 hard...

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,...

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: His setup Channel strategy Config patterns that mattered Two products he’s bui...

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 mo...

In this episode of NC Tweener Talks , Scot Wingo shares a talk from the first OpenClaw meetup in the Triangle, featuring Corey Nida’s experiment in autonomous business creation. Corey explores a bold idea: what if AI agents could identify opportunities, build products, launch them, and optimize for revenue—without human intervention? From scraping Reddit for ideas to deploying MVPs and tracking re...

We’ve made it to the final. After dozens of applicants, weeks of competition, and some tough calls along the way, it all comes down to this: Two startups. One decision. One $25K investment from the NC Tweener Fund. This year’s final is a contrast in almost every way. HAM is building for the future of software. Druid AgTech is building for the backbone of the physical world. One is pure AI infrastr...

The second matchup of the Fabulous 4 is here This is where things shift. The ideas are sharper. The stakes are higher. And every decision starts to look a lot more like a real investment call. Druid Agriculture is building technology to modernize farming and food production, while Marla Amplification is building handcrafted, American-made music equipment. One is tackling a global systems problem....

We’re down to the Fabulous 4 . Four startups. Two matchups. One step closer to the $25K investment from the NC Tweener Fund . This is where things shift. The ideas are sharper. The stakes are higher. And every decision starts to look a lot more like a real investment call. Utilyst is building deep infrastructure software for utilities. HAM is building lightweight AI tooling for developers. One is...

Round 4 of Tweener Madness is here and it’s the final matchup of the Exceptional 8. Marla Amplification vs. Build-A-Bookie One is building American-made hardware for musicians. The other is building a social platform that reimagines betting without money. Both are consumer-focused. Both are founder-driven. But only one moves forward. 🧠 What you’ll see in this episode:  A consumer hardware company...

Round 3 of Tweener Madness is here. With a spot in the next round on the line, Druid Agriculture and HuVia Technologies go head-to-head in a high-stakes pitch battle. One is building real-time infrastructure to help farmers monitor and manage crops remotely. The other is creating an AI-powered coaching platform to improve how interpreters (and eventually other professions) develop skills over time...

Round 2 of Tweener Madness is here. With a spot in the next round on the line, Iguana Cyber and HAM (Hierarchical Agent Memory) go head-to-head in a high-stakes pitch battle. One is building next-gen cybersecurity to stop AI-driven exploits. The other is helping engineering teams cut AI costs and improve performance. Both are technical. Both are ambitious.   But only one moves forward. 🧠 What you...