Later this morning Brian Platz will stand in front of a room and begin the first live public demonstration of his company’s latest technology platform: FlureeDB.

Brian Platz

Platz and co-founder Flip Filipowski – a veteran entrepreneur and one of the best known startup execs in the region – announced FlureeDB last month but have yet to demonstrate their technology platform to a public audience. That changes this morning—Platz, who along with Filipowski serves as Co-CEO, will hop on stage and discuss the three-year-old company’s latest technology platform at Tech Slam ‘N Eggs.

This early morning quarterly breakfast with live product demonstrations launches today after two months of planning from co-organizers Joel Bennett and Bobbi Shrivastav. They’ve billed the event as a totally new style of event—no PowerPoint, no BS, just technology product demonstrations and an egg breakfast—exclusively from Triad area technology companies and startups.

After Shrivastav—also co-founder and CEO of Triad-area startup Docsmore—saw fellow entrepreneurs traveling to DC or Atlanta to attend breakfast events with the goal of demonstrating a technical product to potential partners, customers, or investors, she thought that Winston-Salem could replicate that environment.

“It’s great that folks can travel and go to other places to demo their tech,” said Shrivastav, “how might we do the same for startups?”

Bobbie Shrivastav

She’d witnessed the impact that bringing startups together could have for the local community earlier in the year at 2017 New Ventures Demo Day.

“For the first time, startups in the region came to the Triad to exhibit their technology,” said Shrivastav.

At New Ventures Demo Day, she emailed community leaders, including Bennett, with the idea for a breakfast series, and a few months later, had joined the planning team.

Once-a-year not enough

“There was an overwhelming response and tremendous engagement from the regional startup community,” said Bennett of the atmosphere and experience at 2017 New Ventures Demo Day. For Bennett, once a year wasn’t enough of an opportunity to showcase local startup products.

Joel Bennett

“Our region needs more visibility into the rich pool of talented and ambitious startups,” said Bennett. That’s one of the primary objectives of Tech Slam ‘N Eggs—to encourage all technology organizations to seek local solutions, partner with each other to solve problems and to sustain the thriving technology startup community that has emerged in the Triad.

Today’s event features Platz, demonstrating FlureeDB, a scalable blockchain database that allows developers and enterprises to integrate blockchain capability and characteristics into applications in a practical way—a regular database that all applications need and use already.

Ultimately, their company is betting that businesses would absorb a low-cost solution to access a technology that enables them to take advantage of blockchain technology.

“We think blockchain will have a huge impact on technology,” said Platz, “any venue to open up that discussion is a great opportunity.” The company also plans to demonstrate their product at other events, though today’s product demo at Tech Slam ‘N Eggs is their first.

AgencyKey, Logistimatics also on stage

The second company demonstrating their technology product is AgencyKey, a cloud-based agency management system that helps insurance agencies manage and grow their business with a CRM, commissions management and processing, and integrated digital documentation and storage platform. The company is still pre-launch and is showcasing their technology for the first time.

Matt Hannam, a software developer at logistics startup Logistimatics, will wrap up the event, showcasing the company’s cloud-based GPS tracking application designed for freight companies.

Can’t make it to Flywheel, the host for the event? Organizers will be live-tweeting the event using #Slamneggs.