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From November 9 to 13, the present and future of North Carolina business mingled in downtown Wilmington during Cucalorus Connect.  Keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, pitch competitions, and social events were held at Ironclad Brewery, The Blind Elephant speakeasy, Bourgie Nights, and Expo 216 specialty museum.  The business conference originally began in Asheville in 2002 as Carolina Connect, then moved to Wilmington in 2014 as UNCW’s Coastal Connect conference. Last year, the conference was rechristened Cucalorus Connect as a partnership between UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), tekMountain, and the Cucalorus Film Festival, which celebrated its 22nd anniversary this past week.  Since...

A series profiling North Carolina women in investing would be incomplete without a conversation with one of the leaders of the angel group in our own backyard, Jan Davis.  Davis took a break from her role as Entrepreneur in Residence and “professor of the practice” for Minor in Entrepreneurship at UNC, where she was preparing for a series of lectures on entrepreneurial finance and capital formation.  While that topic may be beneficial to many of our readers (maybe another piece, another time), we focused this interview on her role as angel investor with Triangle Angel Partners (also known as...

Each month in this column, I ask a different question to you, the ExitEvent Entrepreneur. Thought provoking questions that are meant to get you to sit back and think. Each month I offer insight into the question, along with common mistakes made by (us) entrepreneurs, and a key take-away for you to think more about. My goal – to increase your self-awareness as an entrepreneur and a leader.  Insight: Jim Collins has written some of the best-selling business books ever, to include Built to Last, Good to Great and Great by Choice. I know many entrepreneurs who have benefitted from his work...

One might say that things have come full circle for Kimberly Campbell.  After earning her MBA from the University of Virginia’s the Darden School of Business in 2004, she spent three years with Johnson & Johnson. There, one of her roles included re-engineering an internal venture program, to better facilitate what she calls “corporate venturing” for the $70 billion company.  Today, she is back in North Carolina creating value for large organizations through her investments. She holds a leadership position at Mosaic Health Solutions, the direct investment arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC (BCBSNC), as their head of...

When we first reported on Mimijumi almost a year ago, the baby bottle maker had recently undertaken a vast expansion of production capabilities. Though not yet ready to go public with partnership specifics, the company is looking to make its leap into the mainstream market.  Since investing in Mimijumi in mid-2014, Seahawk Innovation, LLC, an early stage investor and incubator based in UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, has taken control of the bottle maker’s daily operations and moved assembly and distribution to Wilmington. Online sales quadrupled in 2015.  That upward trend could very well continue as the global baby...

Pakistan faces a 6 gigawatt energy supply gap, meaning the electrical grid falls short of demand by 40 percent on a regular basis. That’s the equivalent of 3 Hoover Dams of energy production.  Power shortages can lead to increased death tolls during heat waves, darkness in large portions of a major city like Karachi and factory closings, ending thousands of jobs.   EnMass, a green biomass start-up based in Durham has announced that they will begin their first large-scale 50 megawatt biomass project in Pakistan next spring, with plans for another 200 MW in 2018. Their projects could power the...

We’re keeping an eye on cool career opportunities in the Triangle’s startup community, and publishing them every so often on ExitEvent. To submit a job opening, email shannon@exitevent.com.  This month’s job list includes a mix of companies from around the Triangle, from herbal supplements to spreadsheet processing software to Internet of Things technology. The types of positions range from sales and marketing to finance, engineering and product development. Check out the full list below. (And here’s last month’s edition.)  Investors’ Circle With a membership base of hundreds of venture capitalists, angels, foundations and family offices, this organization is committed to advancing...

For the second installment in our Women on the Other Side of the Table, we sit down with Natalie Blacher, a member of Asheville Angels ventureasheville.com/angel-investors/ and an active early-stage investor.  When Asheville, NC, was recently named one of the top 25 best places for women entrepreneurs (along with Durham-Chapel Hill), Blacher wasn’t the least bit surprised. She says Asheville is a good place to be a female investor, too.  After more than three decades leading marketing and strategic initiatives in the restaurant industry, she decided to add “angel” to her resume. She is the sole woman in the 25-member Asheville...

First-time pitches to investors are rightly famous for inducing jitters. These pitches usually take place early in the startup journey, but that wasn’t the case for Tal Frankfurt, an Asheville founder presenting his latest startup at the 2016 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco earlier this month. The new venture, called CRM Market, is a spin-off from Frankfurt’s Cloud for Good, a six-year-old, bootstrapped Salesforce implementation platform for nonprofits. When Frankfurt pitched his second startup to investors at Dreampitch, he was literally entering uncharted waters complete with a panel of notable “sharks” and thousands of attendees watching both at the event and through a live...