Scot Wingo

When you start a new company, one of the last things you worry about is scale. You’re thinking about the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), product/market fit, getting that first customer, adding features, getting the second customer, when you need an accounting person, etc. These are what the first year(s) of your startup life as CEO are concerned with.    If you are fortunate and you do the legwork in that early phase, suddenly you are on to something. Now you have 100 customers, 10 team members and $1 million in revenue (what I call a Tweener). Maybe you meet...

Earlier this year, we released the 2016 Triangle “Tweeners”, a list that has mushroomed to ~100 middle-stage companies here in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.  With a much larger list than the initial 2015 version, we’ve put the Tweeners in a database and will start to share some interesting secondary data that has come out of the effort to catalog this important segment of the Triangle’s startup community.    This is a two-part blog post that digs deeper into the Tweener list. We’ll start with the geography of the Tweeners.   Geography – where do the Tweeners live? ...

Back in June of last year, I published the first Tweener list as part of my Guide to the Triangle Startup Ecosystem. The short story (the long story can be found here in the original post) is:  We have a lot of people moving into the area (and even locally) and looking for jobs at startups.   My recommendation is if you don’t want to found a company, then looking at companies that are a bit later stage can both minimize your risk and also give you opportunities to catch a shooting star.  There are so many new companies formed in the Triangle...

This post is part of Scot Wingo’s Guide to the Triangle Startup Ecosystem. Check back for regular updates. A newer and rapidly growing component to our Triangle Startup Ecosystem is accelerators, incubators and workspaces. In this post, we look at what these have to offer startups and then detail what’s available here in the Triangle.    What are Accelerators, Incubators and Workspaces?  What is an incubator?  Back in the go-go days of the late 90s out West a new type of system for creating startups called an incubator. Bill Gross’s Idealab in Los Angeles is the classic example of an...

NEW: The guide was updated 1/14/16 with the post Scot Wingo’s 2016 List of Triangle “Tweeners”. Stay tuned for more updates! I recently wrote about Triangle Tweeners—those companies that are not early stage, but also not late stage. This was in response to an influx of new talented folks entering the Triangle and looking for a great company to join.    Well, the response to that article was a bit overwhelming. Since then, I’ve had even more inbound folks ask about other parts of the ecosystem. Even long-time local entrepreneurs and other members of the ecosystem have asked questions like: ...

This post is part of Scot’s Guide to the Triangle Startup Ecosystem. One key component of the ecosystem is ‘Community, Content and Events’ (CCE for short).    Today I’m starting coverage of the CCE at the only logical starting point—the longest-running and largest part of our ecosystem—the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, or what we all locally call the CED.    The CED was founded as a non-profit 501c3 in 1984 to support the local community of Triangle entrepreneurs. Today, CED is the nation’s largest organization of its kind with over 4,000 active members—companies which have raised a cumulative $8.5 billion...

Back on June 24th, I shared my list of Triangle Tweeners. These are Triangle-based post early-stage (10 people and/or > $1m/yr in sales) companies. Based on the success of that article, I am launching a more comprehensive look at the Triangle Startup Ecosystem.    Before adding to the ecosystem components, I wanted to first circle back and update the Tweener list. Since posting this, I have had ~15 Tweeners come out of the woodwork (I told you they are A) hard to find and B) under the radar!). I also wanted to update a couple of entries that had some errors/omissions. ...