Sarah Headley

Charlotte Venture Challenge was birthed 15 years ago to promote early-stage businesses out of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. During its early days, the competition was only open to those affiliated with the university and was named Five Ventures, which reflected the number of startups involved.    This year CVC was held at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis and applications came in from across the Southeast region. Nearly 100 companies entered and out of those, 27 were declared finalists in one of these four categories: General, New Energy & High Tech, Student Ventures and IT &...

The job hunt doesn’t have to be depressing, especially when there are so many great options in the area. Get excited and check out what the Triangle has to offer.  Avalara  Avalara is a Seattle-based sales tax software company hiring a bunch of new employees after raising $100 million. Many of those jobs will be at its new office in the Diamond View 1 building in the American Tobacco campus. Open positions include VP of professional services, director of CertCapture managed services, systems administrator, marketing manager, two channel development managers, manager/director in customer account management, two regional sales executives and...

Taylor Sharp embodies the spirit of giving. “To know the amount of families that are going to wake up to Christmas or holidays to presents they wouldn’t have otherwise had, that’s kinda the reason we do this,” the UNC-Chapel Hill student says. Sharp’s talking about the company he started with three friends last year. CommuniGift is an online giving service that lets non-profits upload family profiles and wish lists and donors adopt those families and choose items to purchase directly from the CommuniGift site. CommuniGift is bootstrapped and run with sweat equity, says Sharp. Founded by four UNC juniors, Sharp is majoring...

Ever wonder who makes the major decisions at a top news corporation? You aren’t the only one.    More than 300 students and faculty attended Monday’s Nelson-Benton Lecture Series and Carolina Seminar on Business Journalism and Public Policy to hear Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker talk about the history and future of business journalism. The Wall Street Journal is celebrating its 125th year of publication.   Student journalist Andy Willard and I were chosen as panelists and were joined by Daniel Gitterman, UNC’s Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy. I got the chance to ask Baker how mobile apps are affecting the...

The idea for the SECU Prizes for Innovation came out the Emerging Issues Forum, which was founded nearly 30 years ago by then North Carolina governor Jim Hunt.  The first forum focused on innovation. Now things have come full circle.  The Institute for Emerging Issues, which now plans the annual spring forum, was founded in 2002 and began offering prizes to bright and enterprising students in 2011. The mission of those prizes is for students from around the state to find creative ways to address crucial problems in North Carolina. At stake are more than $100,000 in prizes. There are two separate competitions, one...