Robin Cowie, CEO and founder of Skillmaker, went from co-creating The Blair Witch Project to building AI and extended reality tools for auto repair technicians, and he did it from Carolina Beach.

Robin tells me how his father's "point of view learning," first developed to train South African gold miners, shaped his films, his work on Madden, and now Skillmaker. We talk about how NAPA paid him to spend two months listening to repair shops before he built anything. That research turned into a platform that assesses technicians, cuts entry-level training from two years to a few months, and uses smart glasses to put verified repair data in front of techs mid-job.

Robin also shares hard-won founder lessons. He explains why distribution is the hardest part of any startup and how partnerships with NAPA and Solera solved it early. He walks through how more than 460 shops paid for a beta product and generated about a million dollars in revenue before launch. And he explains why his goal is for Skillmaker to become boring.

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks
00:23 Thanks to our sponsors
01:32 Scot's intro: from Blair Witch to auto AR/VR
03:08 Meet Robin Cowie, CEO & founder of Skillmaker
03:42 Gold mines and "point of view learning"
04:58 Film school and The Blair Witch Project
06:25 Selling at Sundance and crashing the van
09:25 Madden Longshot
10:35 George Lucas, Skywalker Ranch, and Star Wars on a bedsheet
12:00 From London to Carolina Beach
13:50 Finding the problem: healthcare, then NAPA
18:40 Cutting training from 2 years to 30 days
20:20 Smart glasses and shop productivity
22:50 Assess, accelerate, assist
23:35 Quest 3, Unreal, and "teach 5, test 5"
25:50 148 hours of VR content and the pipeline behind it
29:05 Expanding into transportation
30:20 Smart safety glasses and the Pareto principle
33:05 Verified data: NAPA, Identifix, AutoVitals, ASE
35:45 Robin's prior companies and his leadership team
39:05 An agentic company and why distribution is key
40:45 Fundraising: $4.5M on a SAFE
41:20 The paid beta and the Champions Circle
45:00 Becoming "just another tool in the kit"
45:55 Scot's founder takeaways
47:20 Robin on the NC ecosystem
49:15 Wrap and credits

-----

Where to Find Robin Cowie:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robincowie/
Skillmaker: https://skillmaker.ai/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

---

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Josh Miller, CEO and co-founder of Gradient Health, joins me to share how a Durham-area startup became the go-to source of medical data for AI developers around the world.

Josh traces the path from his first company, FarmShots, a satellite imaging startup acquired by Syngenta, to Gradient, which began as an attempt to build cancer-detection AI and turned into something bigger once the team saw how hard it was to get the data. The conversation covers why de-identifying medical data is so much harder than removing a name, how foundation models changed the value of labeled data, and why expert-curated datasets are becoming the next frontier.

Gradient's numbers are remarkable: roughly 40 million dollars in revenue this year with about 40 people, on only about 9 million dollars raised. Josh credits a culture that is willing to talk openly about what isn't working, along with AI-native engineering that has made his best engineers dramatically more productive. He also talks about go-to-market when customers are racing a 20 million dollar training run, his company's moat, and a personal reminder for founders to take care of themselves on the long road.

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks
00:25 Thanks to our sponsors
01:35 Scot's intro: portfolio wins you can't talk about
02:30 Why Tweener invested in Gradient Health
04:55 Welcome Josh Miller
05:55 FarmShots: satellite imagery for farms
07:45 A lever through time
08:30 The Syngenta exit and Duke roots
09:25 Never again… then startup #2
10:40 Founding Gradient before ChatGPT
11:30 From building cancer AI to supplying the data
13:30 De-identification and the 87% problem
14:30 Paying hospitals back
15:20 Weak labels vs. strong labels
16:55 First contract and the revenue curve
19:20 Fundraising: $9M raised in total
20:35 Getting pulled by the market
21:55 Atlas 2 and multimodal data
23:00 Picks and shovels vs. building the model
23:55 40 people, $1M per head
25:30 Post-training and expert-curated data
27:35 Culture: talking about problems
28:55 AI-native engineering and the 100x engineer
30:15 Go-to-market in the AI data space
32:10 Gradient's competitive moat
33:10 Founder lesson: take care of yourself
34:15 Wrap and credits
---
Where to Find Josh Miller:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshmichaelmiller/
Gradient Health: https://gradienthealth.io/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

---

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Craig Brown, a field engineer at Quantexa and the solo builder behind Blind Oracle, joins us as Redacted's first inbound guest.

Blind Oracle is a trust and audit layer for AI agents doing business with other agents. It issues agent passports and records delegated work to public ledgers, so anyone can verify what an agent did without having to trust the people who run it. Craig screen-shares the software factory he built to develop it over the past two years. Signals from email, voice notes, social media, and research papers feed planning models, and a governance layer scores the system on alignment, autonomy, durability, and more.

We dig into the questions every serious builder eventually hits. How do you evaluate a system once you've stopped reading its code? How do you build real trust in agents when the underlying models keep changing? And what should true north be when the product is early, and revenue hasn't arrived yet?

Craig is candid about all of it, including his bet that agent-to-agent commerce is coming and that the agents themselves will decide who they trust.

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold open: selling to the robots
00:44 Welcome to Redacted
01:00 Our first inbound guest
02:40 Craig's background: Quantexa and decision intelligence
04:05 From Lockheed Martin to Mantas
05:30 Solution engineering vs. forward deployed engineering
06:15 Building on the side: "the baby" turns one
07:40 Three ways to demo
11:10 What Blind Oracle does: agent counterparty risk
12:15 Agent passports and inter-agent commerce
12:55 Proof on-chain: Nostr and Base
14:40 Inside the software factory: signals, plans, builds
17:05 Feeding an article into the harness
23:35 How do you eval the factory?
24:15 Multi-agent deliberation
25:50 The governance scorecard
29:00 The honest failure: no revenue yet
29:50 Go-to-market for agents
31:00 How "decision confidence" gets measured
33:40 Building trust in an agent system
37:20 True north: the factory or the product?
39:50 The bet on agent-to-agent commerce
42:35 Research papers as signals
44:15 Model benchmarks and routing
46:30 Where to find Craig

---

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

---

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Michael Boyarsky, CEO and co-founder of Extellis, joins me to talk about turning more than a decade of Duke metamaterials research into a satellite imaging company.

Michael explains what metamaterials are and why heat, not cold, is the real challenge for satellites in orbit. He also describes the conference moment when a competitor bragged about 2 percent uptime, and he thought the industry could do far better. He walks through the path from a DARPA-funded ground prototype to a spreadsheet that made the business case clear, and from there to spinning out of Duke with help from Duke New Ventures.

The conversation also covers how Extellis is getting to orbit without building its own satellites. The company is partnering with Astro Digital and riding on the ecosystem SpaceX made possible. Michael shares the details of its oversubscribed 6.8 million dollar seed round led by Oval Park Capital and the upcoming Pathfinder satellite. He closes with advice for researchers who are thinking about starting a company: begin with a real market need, not a technology looking for a home.

This is the Tweener Fund's first space investment, and it's a great listen for anyone curious about deep tech, university spinouts, or the new space economy.

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks
00:25 Thanks to our sponsors
01:35 Scot's intro: the Tweener Fund's first space investment
03:30 Welcome Michael Boyarsky
04:00 From Boston College physics to Duke's metamaterials lab
06:35 What is a metamaterial?
08:05 Negative refraction and the invisibility cloak
10:45 From lab demos to satellite imaging
11:45 Why heat is a problem in space
13:45 The 2% uptime moment
15:35 DARPA prototype: could we hit 20-25%?
17:00 How you build a metamaterial
20:10 "The company started in a spreadsheet"
21:55 Duke New Ventures and learning to run a company
24:00 Customer discovery in deep tech
26:45 Target markets beyond defense
29:30 Why Extellis needs its own satellite, but not its own factory
32:25 SpaceX and the space ecosystem
36:40 Fundraising: Oval Park Capital and Shell Ventures
38:55 The pathfinder: Astro Digital and a ride on a Falcon
41:05 Pathfinder goals, size, and orbit
46:00 Advice for deep tech founders and wrap
-----

Where to Find Michael Boyarsky:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelboyarsky/
Extellis: https://www.extellis.com/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

---

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

On this episode of Redacted, we skip the guests and get back to the heart of the show: what it really looks like to build and run Offline with AI in 2026.

David walks through the Hot List, a prototype feed of restaurants opening around Raleigh. An AI monitors Instagram and local news the way a person would, and David built the front end by having Claude recreate Offline's existing app with the new data. Taylor then shows the other half of the loop: a homegrown survey tool that embeds the live prototype, plays an intro video, and asks AI-generated follow-up questions based on each person's answers.

From there, the conversation turns to strategy. We cover Offline's North Star metric, the inactive members they most want to reach, and the evidence-guided approach that starts with the most basic question of all: are people even going out to eat?

The episode closes with a bonus segment on rebuilding the company website in roughly an hour of human time, and what that says about how small teams can multiply their output with agents.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open
00:45 Welcome back: just the two of us
01:55 Showing how it came together, not just what we built
02:40 The old prototype → interview → meeting loop
03:50 Introducing the Hot List
05:40 The Updates tab and opening-day reels
07:20 Back end: hiring an AI to watch the city
09:10 RapidAPI and monitoring Instagram
11:50 Borrowing the Offline app's skeleton
13:20 How do we put this in front of users?
14:15 Taylor's AI-powered survey tool
16:45 Survey requirements off-the-shelf tools can't hit
19:45 AI follow-up questions on Cloudflare
21:20 Checking Typeform's AI forms
23:50 North Star metric and the inactive cohort
26:35 An agent to watch the numbers
27:25 If you hired a head of product
30:45 Evidence Guided, RICE and ICE
32:05 Are they even going out to eat?
34:15 Packaging the show into chapters & wrap
35:55 Bonus: rebuilding the website in an hour
41:30 SEO, AI search, and Webflow's MCP

---
Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

---

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

This week on Redacted, we bring on our fourth guest: Ben Eckerson, founder of Agentcy, an AI-enabled consultancy helping small-to-mid-market companies close the gaps between the software they already pay for. Ben spent roughly 20 years in client services, including time at the ad agency McKinney, running Viget's Durham office, and co-founding Savas Labs, before launching Agentcy in early 2026 alongside business partner Eric out of the 24 and Up venture studio in downtown Raleigh.

Most of the episode is a live demo: Ben walks through the internal tool he built from scratch, which turns a raw meeting transcript into extracted pain points, pricing and staffing estimates, and a styled, client-ready proposal deck. From there, the conversation turns into a real debate about whether it's worth building your own AI-native tools instead of buying an off-the-shelf AI CRM, what gets lost when you strip away the UI and go headless, and how much of client work still comes down to a human reading the room.

It's a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how one small agency is actually using AI to run its business day-to-day, ending on a genuinely optimistic note about what all that automation is supposed to free people up to do.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open
00:43 What Redacted is about
01:09 Meet guest #4: Ben Eckerson, founder of Agentcy
01:44 Housekeeping + an Offline update
02:52 Ben joins the show
03:34 20 years in the agency trenches: McKinney, Viget, Savas Labs
04:58 What Agentcy does and "humans doing the robot work"
05:29 The real problem: tool sprawl at client companies
07:59 From stealth to launch: Agentcy's first year, with partner Eric at 24 and Up
08:33 Demo time: inside Agentcy's homegrown CRM
10:01 Where the tool started: turning Fathom transcripts into next steps
12:11 Building a new lead: the WellCare walkthrough
14:27 Adding a call transcript and hitting "Analyze"
18:58 The internal TLDR: stage, stakeholders, pricing
22:15 One click to a client-ready proposal deck
24:41 Exporting to Claude, Manus, or GPT for design polish
26:32 What's next: living inside Claude Projects
28:15 Why build your own AI CRM instead of buying one
33:45 Going headless: is the UI just a commodity now?
38:41 Meeting clients where their AI maturity actually is
41:35 The future of human work and the last-mile problem
44:27 Where to find Ben and Agentcy

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

---

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Will Duckett, co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, joins me to talk about building the infrastructure behind secondary liquidity in private markets. The conversation covers Will's path from a hedge fund back office in New York to co-founding a regulated broker-dealer in Raleigh, what it actually takes to get licensed with FINRA and the SEC, and why Equity Shift describes its platform as a digital operating system for private companies rather than just cap table software.

Will and I dig into the mechanics that most founders never see up close: tender offers, the daisy-chained SPV structures that made SpaceX famous for not knowing all of its own shareholders, and how Equity Shift built a system meant to prevent that. We also trace the company's growth from small business customers up into some of the largest private equity firms in the world, and the underlying blockchain patent portfolio that powers it all.

Will offers a candid look at what it's like building a capital-intensive fintech company in North Carolina, plus hard-won founder lessons from seven years and two economic shocks: expect everything to take twice as long as planned, and don't underestimate the value of a strong co-founder.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open & sponsors
01:36 Welcome & meet Will Duckett of Equity Shift
02:16 From Chapel Hill (and ancient Roman history) to Wall Street
02:40 Hedge fund back office to a Columbia MBA
03:06 Moving home and meeting co-founder Tom at a blockchain meetup
04:41 Why a blockchain meetup, in 2018
07:21 Founding Equity Shift with Tom Gordon
08:24 First customer and becoming a broker-dealer
09:53 Secondaries 101: SpaceX, Pendo, and tender offers
10:41 What Equity Shift actually does
13:17 The SpaceX SPV daisy-chain problem
14:45 How Equity Shift compares to Carta
16:19 Life as a regulated FINRA broker-dealer
18:14 The taxi medallion analogy
19:07 Splitting CEO/COO responsibilities
22:39 Fundraising milestones and the NC Tweener Fund seed round
25:07 Climbing from startups to private equity customers
30:30 Finding the bigger market beyond Carta
35:59 Go-to-market: enterprise sales, not self-serve
39:17 Founder lessons: it's always harder than you think
44:35 Coming home to North Carolina
47:13 What's next for Equity Shift
51:07 Wrap-up and credits

-----

Where to Find Will Duckett:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wduckett/
Equity Shift: https://equityshift.com/

Where to Find Scot Wingo:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thescotwingo/
Tweener Times: https://www.tweenertimes.com/
X: https://x.com/scotwingo

---

This episode of Triangle Tweener Talks is hosted by Scot Wingo, presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund, with creative assets and design support from Walk West.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/

Parker Mayes, founder of Signify, joins us on Redacted for a guest episode built around a live demo of his actual sales pipeline. Parker built Signify after spending four years running a go-to-market agency doing high-volume cold email, calls, and LinkedIn outreach for B2B clients, and getting frustrated with the low-trust, low-response nature of outbound at scale. Signify sits between a prospect database like Apollo or ZoomInfo and your CRM, scoring and enriching companies every day based on real buying signals like new hires, company news, and job postings, so reps know exactly who to reach out to and why. The conversation walks through the four daily automations running Parker's pipeline, the hard line he draws between automated cold outreach and human-run warm conversations, and how he's teaching an AI agent to write in his own voice. Parker also makes the case that a non-technical founder no longer needs a technical co-founder, as long as they have an AI sidekick that can write code. Along the way, David and Taylor pull in their own experience running Offline to compare notes on why the restaurant industry might be uniquely hard to sell into. Find Redacted wherever you listen to podcasts, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open
00:46 Welcome to Redacted
01:17 What Offline is
01:24 Meet this week's guest: Parker
01:49 Taylor recaps speaking at Parker's meetup
03:16 Bringing Parker into the conversation
04:05 How David and Parker first met
05:46 From go-to-market agency to building Signify
08:12 What Signify actually does
09:47 Getting leads in: imports and the "generate list" feature
11:05 Under the hood: signals, scraping, and daily scans
13:04 Why doesn't ZoomInfo already do this?
15:16 Parker as sales rep #1: results, then scaling with branded reps
17:06 The four daily automations in Parker's pipeline
18:55 How Cowork connects into Signify
20:04 Where should the AI live vs. the human in the loop?
22:29 Point tools vs. platform: Signify's acquisition thesis
23:36 Teaching the agent to document its own process
29:00 Live demo: the daily LinkedIn scan and connection run
30:51 Teaching the agent to write like Parker
34:09 Templates, guardrails, and how the agent learns his voice
38:00 Tangent: the tangled world of restaurant sales
43:11 Enrichment, credits, and Signify's pricing
44:27 The stack: Anthropic, Claude Sonnet, and building with Claude Code
47:02 Curiosity about Anthropic's "watch and skillify" feature
48:05 Keeping cold outreach human: screenshots and selfie videos
52:34 Closing thoughts for builders
52:40 Where to find Signify, Redacted, and Offline

Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcast

Where to Find David:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/

Where to Find Taylor:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/

More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/

---

This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.

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 Group: https://automated.co
- Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html

------
Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:

• Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/