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/

Steven King, CEO and co-founder of Blue Sky Robotics, joins me to talk about building a computer vision company that has pivoted twice in three years, from metaverse avatars to warehouse robotics to hospital automation. Steven, a longtime UNC professor, explains how a side project meant to capture realistic 3D avatars for the metaverse turned into a vision system for robotic arms, and how a client's ambitious accuracy target forced his engineering team to rebuild the company's core technology from scratch. That rebuild became the foundation for Blue Sky's current focus: helping hospitals like UNC Health and Mayo Clinic catch operational errors, from mislabeled dining trays to missing surgical instruments, before they become patient safety issues.

Along the way, we cover why the company built its early customer base on paying clients instead of venture capital, how real-world data has become Blue Sky's biggest competitive advantage over synthetic simulation, and why the team turned down deals that wouldn't scale even when it hurt short-term revenue. Steven also shares candid lessons on choosing a co-founder and staying flexible enough to let a company's direction change completely without losing its footing.

It's a grounded, detail-rich conversation about building a hard-tech company in North Carolina, with real numbers on accuracy, team growth, and what's coming next.

Timestamps
00:02 Cold open and sponsor thanks
01:34 Scot's preview: meet Steven King and Blue Sky Robotics
03:34 Welcome Steven King to the show
04:29 Life before Blue Sky Robotics
05:41 15 years at UNC: from photojournalism to computer vision
06:34 The Washington Post years and the trip to Liverpool
08:15 The spark: from innovation lab to startup
08:48 First idea: volumetric capture for the metaverse
09:45 The pivot: turning the camera outward for robots
10:25 Founding day and the first client
12:04 Bootstrapping with paying clients instead of VC
12:42 The 99.5% accuracy bet on fishing tackle
16:01 Edge inference with NVIDIA Jetson
18:18 Why fishing tackle data transfers to surgical tools
21:03 Saying no to deals that won't scale
23:07 Inside the use case: dining trays and dietary errors
24:45 Solving the 20% of surgeries that start unprepared
26:08 Building the "IoT toaster" for hospitals
27:00 UNC Health and Mayo Clinic partnerships
32:39 A 16-person team built on Triangle universities
34:00 What's next: raising capital and scaling to more hospitals
34:52 Founder lessons: pivots, pride, and picking a co-founder
35:40 Credits and sign-off

-----

Where to Find Steven King:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-king-b93885b/
Blue Sky Robotics: https://www.blueskyrobotics.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/

Ben Scruggs, CEO of Altis Biosystems, joins me to talk about building human gut models that help pharma, biotech, and nutrition companies predict how a drug or ingredient will actually behave in the body before it ever reaches a patient. The conversation covers what an epithelial barrier is and why the gut is such an overlooked bottleneck in drug development, how Altis's technology is being used for absorption studies, inflammation research, and toxicity screening, and why GLP-1 drugs make such a compelling test case for the company's platform.

Just as much of the episode is about Ben's own path: trained as a cell biologist, he spent close to a decade as a venture investor at Hatteras Venture Partners before stepping into the CEO role at Altis, a UNC spinout, about three years ago. He talks candidly about what surprised him most moving from advising founders to running a company himself, including the realization that most of the job is selling, not science.

Altis Biosystems has scaled from testing a few dozen compounds at a time to routinely screening thousands, using automation and robotics to keep pace with customer demand, and Ben shares where he sees the technology heading next, well beyond the gut.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open & sponsor thank-yous
01:40 Scot's pre-show intro: today's guest, Ben Scruggs of Altis Biosystems
03:33 Episode starts
03:49 How Scot and Ben know each other
04:25 Ben's background: PhD in cell biology, postdoc in genomics
05:28 The pivot into venture investing at Hatteras Venture Partners
06:43 How UNC connections led Ben to Altis Biosystems
09:24 Inside Hatteras Venture Partners: 25 years, 100+ investments
13:06 Making the leap from investor to CEO
15:15 What Altis Biosystems actually does
16:34 What is an epithelial barrier, and why it matters
17:32 The three markets: absorption, inflammation, and toxicity
19:58 Why GLP-1 drugs are the ultimate bioavailability test
20:25 Altis's dual business model: full-service CRO vs. self-serve kits
23:29 Defining bioavailability
24:18 Beyond pharma: nutrition and CPG customers
28:37 The UNC tech-transfer story behind Altis
30:00 Advice for investors considering the jump to operator
31:42 The most underrated founder skill: selling
33:01 What's next: expanding beyond the gut
37:30 Scaling from dozens to thousands of compounds
41:39 Where to learn more about Altis Biosystems
42:10 Thanks and credits

Where to Find Ben Scruggs:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminscruggs/
Altis Biosystems: https://www.altisbiosystems.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/

Josh Guter, founder of Elephants, joins us for a live product teardown of the AI operations assistant he built for small teams. The conversation covers the architecture behind the assistant: roughly 64 purpose-built tools, an approval-gated write system that never lets the AI act without human sign-off, and the logging system Josh built to audit a codebase that, by his own admission, has become a black box even to him.

Josh walks us through his full build process, from sketching UI mockups in Adobe Illustrator to having Claude draft implementation plans and Codex tear them apart before anything ships, plus how he red-teams his own assistant before any change touches its tools or system prompt. He also shares how Elephants evolved from a low-code personal relationship manager built on Glide Apps and Make.com into a full-stack platform now running the daily operations of NC State's Entrepreneurship Clinic.

It's a candid look at what it actually takes to ship an AI feature people trust with real operational data, including the parts that still keep a solo founder up at night.

Timestamps
00:00 Cold open: "The devil's in the details"
00:45 Welcome back to Redacted
01:20 Introducing guest Josh Guter
02:33 Josh joins and how he and David met
02:56 What Elephants is: ops software for small teams
07:03 The real product: the AI assistant
08:04 The big question: model, cost, context, trust
14:04 Behind the scenes: Anthropic's API and the Make.com origin story
15:12 64 tools and counting
16:01 Managing the internal prompt library
18:07 Rebuilding full-stack with Opus 4.8 and Codex
20:38 Auditing a black box: breadcrumb logging
21:57 Claude Code as the new Make.com
25:10 The build process, start to finish
26:23 Illustrator mockups and the Claude/Codex review loop
29:05 QA without a QA team: red-teaming the assistant
31:51 Taylor's tangent: rebuilding an interview ingestion pipeline
34:09 The founders who never read their own PRs
35:02 Why nothing ships without user approval
36:57 It's a PWA, not an app
39:00 The "AI psychosis" moment
39:37 Josh's product vision: enterprise-knowledge AI
41:48 Where to find Josh and Elephants
42:08 Sign-off

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/